Noah Cochran

English 111

Professor Williams

12/12/23

Letter
Dear Mrs. Williams, the purpose of writing this letter is to explain the revisions I made to my
Education Narrative as a part of my English 111 final. My writing has changed in this course for
the better. I have learned a bunch of tricks and shortcuts to help me with writing. For example, I
learned to press control-f and you can find anything you want in the essay. I chose this essay
over the other two essays I wrote this semester because it was the first essay, I completed for
English 111. Since this was my first formal assignment, I have now learned and grown from my
previous experiences and mistakes. Now I have used all the tips and tricks I learned from this
course to edit my Education Narrative.

My writing has developed a lot since the beginning of this course. At the beginning, I had little to
no knowledge of how to write good essays. But, as I kept writing and gaining experience, I
started to develop skills that I didn't used to have. I started to instinctly change the font to Times
New Roman and have it at a 12pt font. This revised essay should show a higher level of
communication than I originally had. Also, the essay should make more sense timeline-wise.

When I first wrote this essay, I didn't really know what to do. I looked on the blackboard and saw
two examples that you posted. I read those and tried to base mine off of them. I remember you
started the essay when you were young, and you talked about your hardships as you got older
and graduated through the grades. As I read through the essay, I saw your transition from talking
about the adversities to talking about the triumphs. I tried to use your essay as a template for
mine. I started when I was kind of young. I started when I was in the 8th grade and talked about
how COVID-19 negatively affected my life. As I wrote my essay, I started to talk about the
positives like not wearing masks and joining sports in high school.

For this formal assignment, we didn't submit our essay to you to peer review it, we had to give it
to a assignment peer reviewer who is taking the course. Everybody had to rely on their assigned
partner to do a good job reviewing your essay and give good feedback. My partner didn't do a
great job. My partner didn't say much that would change my essay for the better. All my partner
said was to fix my spelling. Looking back on it I am grateful that my partner at least read over it
because I know that some people's partners didn't do anything to help their paper.

The main reason why I didn't receive a good grade for this assignment is because I didn't know
how to submit it correctly. I submitted it without downloading it as a pdf. I just copied and
pasted it in the submission text entry. When I passed it, all of the formats got messed up. The
double spacing got changes to single spacing. The font went from 12pt Times New Roman to
10pt Arial. I didn't realize that everything was wacky until after it was graded when you gave
feedback.

I didn't use the writing process when I first wrote this Education Narrative. I wrote it off of your
example and used the correct format. Like I said earlier, my only flaw with this assignment is not
submitting it correctly. When I was revising this essay yesterday, I used the writing process. I
read over it and fixed any misspellings and sections that didn't make sense. I also reorganized the
paragraphs to go in a more chronological order. I tried to make the essay feel like it is taking you
through my experiences through 8th grade and freshmen year of high school.

I feel like the strongest part of my Education Narrative is how it goes through a small portion of
my life. My essay lets other people who went through the same thing as I know that they are not
the only ones who went through a rough period. The thing I am most concerned with is that most
people won't be able to relate to this essay because they could have been too old or too young
during the time this essay talks about. The period that this essay is talking about is very small, 1-
2 years. Only people who are within 5 years of my age during 2020-2021(when this story essay
talks about) can relate.

Personally, I liked this class a decent bit. Ela is by far my least favorite subject to learn in school
and this was the most fun Ela course I can remember taking. I like how you didn't overwhelm us
with work but still gave us enough work to keep us busy. I had an unfortunate first experience
with this course because of my first informal assignment. I didn't submit it correctly and my
format and layout of the paper got messed up and I didn't realize until after I already submitted it.
However, you did say that we could re-submit the paper, and that helped my grade for that
assignment a lot. After that and the whole struggle of getting logged into Gaston and Blackboard
for the first time, this class was fun. I had a lot of fun being able to freely talk to my friends
while doing work instead of being forced to be quiet and listen in a classroom for 1 hour. I think
this class helped me realize what college classes are going to be like. Even though you have to
come into class for the lecture in college, everything else is up to you to do on your own time.
All of the assignments you get outside of the lectures are what I am going to have to get used to.
I am glad this class gave me a little experience of what college is going to be like.

The informal assignments were an amazing way to do assignments. Coming into this course, I
was afraid that I was going to get loaded up on assignments and get behind fast, but that never
happened. I thought you were going to post assignments daily, but what ended up happening
(which you already know) was you posted all the assignments at the beginning of the week and
let us do it when we wanted to. You gave us a deadline and that allowed us to do it on our own
time. If we had to catch up on work from another class, then I would do that during your period
and finish the assignments the next day. The amount of work was enough for us to work around
3 of the 5 school days. So, that gave us 2 days to work on stuff from other classes or take a
much-needed nap. Thank you, Mrs. Williams, for giving me this opportunity.

Sincerely, Noah R. Cochran

Noah Cochran

English 111
Professor Williams

October 5, 2023

Overall, of the time that I have been at Lincoln Charter, I feel like the time period that

most influenced me is the COVID-19 lockdown. During COVID, like others, I had zero

motivation to do anything. I was sad that I couldn’t see my friends or distant family. We had a

trip planned to go to Europe in December 2020, but sadly we didn't go because of the COVID-19

restrictions set in stone by the world. I ended up getting pretty lonely without being able to

socialize. Also, COVID made school way different and harder. You couldn’t ask questions one-

on-one because the teachers weren’t there in person, they were over a Zoom call. Early during

COVID, we didn’t go on Zoom calls. Teachers just put assignments on Canvas, and we did them.

If we didn’t understand the assignments, then we just had to either cheat or just figure it out. If

we wanted to email our teacher about the assignment it wasn't a guarantee we would get an

answer in time. Sometimes the teachers would respond after the assignment was due, leaving us

to figure it out on our own. It was rough, the only good thing was that we could get done with

schoolwork two to three hours after we started. Unlike when we went to school in person, we

had to stay in school for around 7 hours.

At the start of my eighth-grade year, the school moved on from posting assignments on

Canvas for us to do as they did during the peak of quarantine and transformed it into Zoom calls.

It was very stressful because you had to be there on time and learn. It was a very confusing set of

steps to get onto the call. Since we had all been quarantined for 6 months before we started doing

Zoom calls, we were all a little anti-social. Combine that with puberty, nobody wanted to ask or

answer questions for the entire Zoom call. So, there would be times when we were all confused
but didn’t want to ask the question and sound dumb, so we all ended up being confused. So,

when the assignment came, we all just looked up the answers. Another negative/positive of

COVID-19 is that we could cheat on any assignment we wanted to. If you failed a class during

COVID-19, you just didn’t want to do the assignment, or you were trying to fail. Another

variable that was confusing about 8th grade is that we went back to school about halfway

through the school year in different groups we were divided into. The groups were Group A and

Group B. The groups were made by dividing the last names equally. Group A came on Monday

and Wednesday. Group B came in on Tuesday and Thursday. Then we all had Friday online at

our house. When Group A was in person, Group B would get on a Zoom call with the teacher.

So, the teacher had to teach the kids on the Zoom call as well as the kids in the classroom. It was

a very confusing time, and I didn’t learn much. Another thing was we had to wear masks. We

could barely speak and hear each other, and it made communicating very difficult, especially

over Zoom. Sometimes the teachers would lag out of the Zoom call and just leave us confused

about what to do. We couldn’t get notified if the teacher rejoined so we just sat there either until

the teacher came back or until the class time ran out and we went to the next Zoom call.

In 8th grade, we had decent teachers. By far my least favorite subject that year was Ela.

Our Ela class had 3 different teachers during the course of one school year. My second least

favorite class that year was math. Our math teacher only gave us packets and didn’t teach us

much. She was by far my least favorite teacher we had. She was a good person, but not a good

teacher, at least for me. Her teaching style was to let us teach us and not her teach us. My

favorite teacher I had in the 8th grade was my science teacher. We didn’t do much because of the

limitations set by COVID. Even though COVID limited what we could do in class, it was my
favorite because it was the easiest. My Social Studies teacher in 8th grade would give us these

long WebQuests almost every day. It got to the point where I would not answer questions I

didn’t know, or I would just straight up delete the question. He didn’t even check if we had

completed the assignment. He would just give us a 100 even if we didn’t complete the

WebQuest. Some people tested his grading system out by not completing the work and they still

got a 100% in PowerSchool. The last of my 8th-grade teachers that I am going to talk about are

my real teachers. Within the first 2 weeks of ELA, our 1st teacher left because of COVID. She

said she was leaving to move to Florida to be closer to her family. Our second ELA teacher

stayed through most of the year and was a pretty good teacher. I enjoyed all of the books she

made us read. She ended up leaving sometime late in the 3rd quarter because she got pregnant

and had to tend to her baby. The 3rd Ela teacher we had felt like a substitute teacher who had to

teach full-time for a little bit. I don’t know if they found another teacher to teach 8th grade and I

really don’t care. She didn’t really give us any work and we didn’t need to do any work anyway

because we were just reviewing for the end-of-year test.

At the start of high school, I started to start playing a bunch of different sports. They were

fun and helped distract me from the stress of school. They have been purely positive in the long

run. They have got me in shape and made me a lot happier. The only part that sucked was the

workouts. They suck in the moment but are very rewarding after. For example, I have taken over

2 minutes off of my 5k time this XC season. Running has helped my fitness level more than I

could have never imagined. My stamina is up, my speed is up, and my energy level as a whole is

up. Another example is tennis. I have played tennis for as long as I can remember. I really like
the sport and the team feel it gives me. Both of these sports have had amazing teammates and

respectful coaches that genuinely care about the team.