Free What Did You Do? Essay Example

Reflection Paper

I have spent most of this time trying to familiarize myself with the college environment. I spent quite some time walking around the college to familiarize myself with new people, new buildings, new streets in college, and other facilities such playground, library, and chapel. I met new people from different background, gender, age, and race and tried to make friends with those that we have some common interests. In the second week, we started attending classes though we never did any serious work. During that week, we spent most the lessons familiarizing ourselves with professors for different subjects. They gave us course outlines, explained more to us about the course, and gave the expectations we were expected to meet at the end of the semester. They also gave us time to socialize with each other in order to make sure that we will be able to interact freely with one another in all our academic discussions. As we progressed from week three to week five, the class work started becoming more intense as we continued to deeper details in each subject we were covering. We also started for Continuous Assessment Tests (C.A.T) that were just about to begin in the seventh week of the semester.

What surprised you? Amazed you? Thrilled you?

The transition from high school program to college program was quite unexpected. In high school, we used to follow the set school program with ease since every time was allocated a specific activity from morning to the evening. Teachers we also there to ensure that we were following that set school program. To my surprise, the college program was different in all ways. The program we had was only for lessons/lecturers, which covered less than 20 hours in a week. All the other hours were free time, with nothing specific allocated to do. In the weekends, it was even worse since there were no lessons to attend. This was quite unexpected in my case since I had to look for something to do over the weekends.

What was unexpected?

The unlimited freedom in college was unexpected to me since in high school there was no such freedom. All what I was expected to do in college is to attend lectures, which were also not compulsory since the college rule expected students to attend at least 60% of the class sessions for them to be allowed to sit for continuous assessment tests and the final exam. For example, there was no any rule to force me to wake up early to read as it was the case in high school, there were no cleaning duties to attend or even regulations to limit our relationships with members of the opposite gender. We could also participate in demonstrations and strikes without facing any disciplinary action.

What annoyed or upset you? What appalled you? Was anything horrible?

I found the teaching methods that most of the lecturers were using to be quite annoying or horrible to me. They just introduced concepts, and continued to the next one without caring whether we understood them or not. They referred us to the course books for further reading during our free time. This was upsetting because in high school, the teacher ensured every person in class understood what he or she was teaching.

What did you expect that didn’t happen?

I expected that we will be having parades where college administrators would address us as we used in high school. Unfortunately, I found there no such things and any communication is either posted on the college website or hung on the notice boards along the streets of the college.