Reflections on my writing class.

              I completed grading the final assignment and logging all the grades for my course “Writing for Academic and Professional Purposes”.   My class was only one half of the term, but it met 3.5 hours on Saturdays. I am really going to miss those morning marathon teaching sessions.  I have decided to share with you the report I submitted to the English department.  Included are two terrific essays by two of my students.  Enjoy.    It  was fun seeing how my students’ writing improved.

             

Report on Teaching “Writing for Academic and Professional Purposes” (ENGL440312)”

David Bittleman, MD

April 23, 2020

During the spring semester of 2020, I taught 37 English minors “Writing for Academic and Professional Purposes” (ENGL440312).  The course met 8 Saturday mornings for 3.5 hours.  Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used the Zoom classroom.  Teaching on-line was a new experience for me; however, the very motivated and engaged students made it easy.  All were eager to learn and signed up for a Zoom practice session with me before the class began.  We were well prepared our first day. 

              We covered fundamental approaches to essay writing, including brainstorming methods and essay organization (hook, thesis, map, body paragraph structure, conclusion).  Each week they wrote a different essay, including descriptive, process, compare and contrast, cause and effect and persuasion essays.  We had a session on writing timed essays for standardized exams, such as IELTS or TOEFL.  They also learned how to organize a professional resume and personal statement for graduate school or work.

In addition, they learned how to use peer review to assist in their writing tasks and used feedback to revise their essays.   We also addressed several difficult grammar points, including run-on sentences, correct use of articles, correct placement of modifiers (adverbs in particular) and correct usage of coordinating conjunctions.

              The final paper revision project featured a check-list self-reflection exercise.  This assignment showed me that the students truly understand the elements of essay writing and can put their knowledge into practice. 

              I would be delighted to share with the department any and all of the essays written by the students this past semester.  To give you an idea of their work, I invite you to read two examples of some of the excellent writing that the students produced:

Will  wrote this personal statement for a hypothetical application to a graduate program in English translation. 

Personal Statement for Graduate School

Although I am an engineering student right now, I have made up my mind to pursue my graduate education in the field of English, more specifically, in the field of translation and interpreting. It seems to be strange if not crazy for a “science geek” to change his field of study in such a huge manner, but honestly, it’s not. I have always been passionate about English and through my journey of learning it, I have become more and more aware of the charm and power of this language and the difference translating it can make. In this personal statement, I would like to talk about my journey learning English, how I grew fond and enthusiastic about it, how the career thought was triggered and how English has become part of my life.

I didn’t grow fond of English until 8^th grade, when English finally began to make sense to me. Before that, just like math or Chinese, English to me was just one of the subjects that popped up every day on my schedule, something I had to cope with in final exams. Things changed when I got my first original English book. That book was called Band of Brothers, and it was about the history of a company of American paratroopers and their story in WW2. I bought that book not because I wanted to learn English but because I was a military fan at that time and I was into  WW2 history. Then I started reading it. As you can imagine, it didn’t go well at first, as my vocabulary was poor and my reading ability was limited. It would take me a long time to cover a single page, but I kept reading it anyway, eager to know about the content. The first quarter of the book was almost filled with notes between the lines, most of them Chinese, with the meaning for words or phrases. By the way, that was before the age of the smartphone, and I have never used paper dictionaries that much afterwards. One thing great about reading original English materials is that you don’t have to want to learn to actually learn virtually everything about English. It happens naturally. By the end of reading that book, which was actually a year later (quite a long time indeed), my understanding of English was on another level, regarding the grammar, usage of phrase, words, tone and even the mindset of a native speaker. It was the first time that I felt that English began to make sense to me, that I was familiar with it, as if it was my friend, not an enemy. English was no longer a mere subject for me, but a foreign friend that I could understand and relate to, something that I enjoy learning and using.

Then in high school, I became not only fond of English, but somehow enthusiastic about this language. If 8^th grade was when I first met this friend, then high school was when our relationship got closer and I was actually able to benefit from the friendship. During high school time, I was lucky to be able to access foreign websites.  Those websites allowed me to expand my knowledge and horizons, and English did me a huge favor in that process. Without my English ability, I couldn’t have enjoyed surfing on foreign websites, watching videos without much problems or chatting with foreign friends with little barrier. Exploring foreign social medias, in turn, helped me practice and improve the English skills. I watched a lot of western TV series during that time, which helped enhance my understanding of English even more, allowing me to get familiar with western culture, norms, value, their sense of humor etc. That was the time when I became enthusiastic about English and was relying on it. I realized that English was a key that opened to me the door of the world, and it was joyful using this tool to see the world.

The thought of English being my career hit me when I was at 11^th grade. When I was in high school, I loved playing basketball a lot. Around that time there was as documentary series online called 10,000 hours. It was filmed by an African American basketball trainer who was not famous at all before that, and it told the story of his helping two Asian American kids pursue their basketball dream, training them, instructing them and also learning from them. The documentary was popular among basketball fans in China and really inspired a lot of kids to purse their dream. The trainer got so famous here that he was invited to hold events in China the next year. When he came to China, the first thing he did was to find the unknown person who translated the series and shared it online. That person turned out to be an ordinary young man who loved basketball and was simply moved by that documentary. When they finally met, the trainer hugged the young man gratefully and emotionally, appreciating his effort that made the whole story possible and changed so many people’s lives. The young man replied in tears that he simply did his part and didn’t expect his simple act of translating and sharing could make such a difference. That was the moment that triggered my thought of choosing English, or translation as my career. Since I was also a basketball fan, I was so moved that I could 100% relate to both the trainer and the young man, sharing that joyful feeling of being helpful and valuable through a simple act of translating, especially in the field that I was interested in. That’s when I decided that I really wanted to do something like this as my career, with full passion and sense of value.

Although I am studying engineering right now, I hold a positive vision that I will be a good translator. The studying of other fields can only add bonus to my knowledge bank after all. My passion for English has made it part of my life that I couldn’t live without. I am also fully aware that language itself is not the key factor. Instead, it is the message behind the language that matters, whether it be stories or knowledges, comfort or hope, inspiration or fascination. I am more than ready to take the duty of a translator, building bridge between countries, cultures and people hearts.

Flash wrote the following paper for the “cause and effect” essay assignment.  The prompt for the essay was,  “What are the causes for why an experiment might produce unexpected results?”

Unexpected Miracles of Science: How Are They Born?

Humans are magic beings of great intelligence. One of the reasons is that unlike other creatures, which just adapt to the environment, humans recognize, challenge and change the environment. We hold intense curiosity on things of repeated occurrence as well as mysterious phenomena, exerting ourselves to find the principles behind and making full use of the knowledge to work wonders. Some of them are achieved by meticulously-designed-and-operated experiments. However, the majority of scientific miracles were born unexpectedly, owing to reasons from irregular operation to unconventional methods and random factors.

Irregular operation has played a key role in many of the great findings. Irregular operation, usually unwanted for an experiment, is mainly human error occurred accidentally, but in rare cases it can prompt an unprecedented condition that leads to a marvelous result. In one episode of Big Bang Theory, Sheldon found how to theoretically synthesize stable super-heavy elements by mistaking Metric for US units of the data. Though humiliated, his mistake helps him get to the positive result. In real life, Dr. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist who had invented LSD for medical purpose, grew heavy interests on LSD’s functions beyond medical treatment and  performed tests on animals. A few hours after one of the tests, he started to see strange sights and vivid colors that turned out to be the result from the LSD that was absorbed through his fingers without protective gloves. The minor operational mistake assisted him to find the hallucinogenic effects and non-addictive characteristics of LSD.

Unconventional methods offer an optional path when common ways lead to a dead end. Unlike the former factor, taking an unconventional method is more of one’s active decision. It is often a logical and well-considered attempt, based on previous experience and gains. Tu You You, the first Nobel Prize winner of medicine in China, is honored for the successful extraction of artemisinin, a chemical that is able to save millions from malaria. After years of failure, she turned to an ancient Chinese medicine book and searched for inspiration. That was where she realized the right way of extraction should be done under a cool temperature to protect the integrity of the chemical structure. Another example is about Euclid, a great Greek mathematician. Thousands of years ago when he was searching for the existence of the maximum prime number, he ran into hurdles with positive proof. However, he did not stop there and tried reduction to absurdity, a method that concentrates on the fallacy of an assumption. At last, he succeeded with the conclusion that there are infinite prime numbers. When God closes a door, humans find another one way around.

Random factors, unlike the first two reasons, just cropped up and one had to be extremely sensitive to sniff the unusual and dig it deeper. Percy Spencer, an American senior engineer, was standing in front of a testing microwave model one day, and a hissing noise hummed in his pocket. His keen intuition told him to stop the experiment immediately to check the pocket, finding a melted chocolate bar inside. He tightly seized the unusual and tested a package of corn grains that were later quickly baked into popcorn. Spencer realized its application prospect in cooking, and the world's first microwave oven was born. Another famous case is the discovery of penicillin. When British bacteriologist Fleming cultured bacteria in a dish, he found that there was no bacterial growth around the colony of Penicillium that accidentally fell on the medium from the air. He believed that Penicillium produced some chemical substance and secreted it into the medium to inhibit the growth of bacteria. This chemical is the first antibiotic to be found -- penicillin. The element of luck is indispensable, but we should not overlook the enormous efforts behind the luck. If it wasn't for their working day and night, they wouldn't have caught such a tiny opportunity and we wouldn't have the developed world today.

As mentioned earlier, an unexpected wonder of science results from irregular operation, unconventional methods and random factors, yet there is more to learn other than entangling with these factors. These stories about unexpected success are merely portraits on luck and opportunity, having eliminated all the bitter and sorrow parts from the truth. What we should pay attention to is to cultivate a keen insight and get to the root of the easily-overlooked things. That is the nature of those wonders. While luck sparks the opportunity, it is just an embellishment, and only commitment and hard work bring success.

      Just as Flash says, “What we should pay attention to is to cultivate a keen insight and get to the root of the easily-overlooked things. While luck sparks the opportunity, it is just an embellishment, and only commitment and hard work bring success.”  Flash and his talented classmates already understand this life lesson and they are applying it in their diligent study of English.