Questions to Comments on Exploratory Essay

The best/most helpful comment that I received on my paper was the second comment. The comment says that I need to spend less time summarizing each work and more time analyzing how that work relates to my overall theme. My themes are how and why some students react to learning differently than others and why some students overcome their deficits while others can't. In the comment, Megan says that I need to spend more time explaining why. Why do some students react differently to education than others? Why do some students overcome deficits and others don't? She says to make sure to back up the whys with evidence FROM THE AUTHOR.
The least helpful comment that I received was the comment that says that I need to stick to the author's arguments and leave mine out of the paper. This was the sixth comment. I am confused about what should be in my paper. In the fifth comment, Megan says that she is interested in my ideas and analysis, but in the sixth comment says that I need to stick to the author's claims. This confuses me about what part of my input I should put in the paper. I think that if I had this confusion cleared up, it might make it easier for me to write a better paper.
Some questions that I have from Megan's comments:
-In MLA, are you supposed to do in-line citations or citations at the end of the page or at the end of the paper?
-When I have questions that I am left with from the readings, do I just state the questions in my paper or do I state them and then try to find the answers in the paper or with outside sources?
My plans for revision include general editing. I plan to fix some of my grammar issues. I am going to cut down on the summary of each reading and spend more time analyzing the reading. I am going to spend more time on the why of my themes and how my each reading relates to my overall themes. A big thing that I want to fix are my citations. I need to make them more MLA friendly.

Conference Reflection - 3/13/2013

The conference that I had today regarding my inquiry project was quite helpful. We were given some tips on researching and writing our research paper as well as feedback on our Inquiry Proposal. Megan told us that JSTOR and ERIC are good databases to use for our research. I got a lot of good feedback from my classmates and Megan. As far as my research proposal goes, I was told that I need to come up with one question to focus on throughout my research paper. The research question that I came up with at the end of the conference to focus on is:
What are the differences between a Criminal Justice degree and the Police Academy education and is a Criminal Justice degree really necessary for Police Officers? The first half of my paper is going to focus on the differences between the Criminal Justice degree and the Police Academy education and the second half is going to focus on whether or not a Criminal Justice degree is necessary for Police Officers.
My group also gave me the advice that I should also look at other law enforcement agencies and their requirements for Officers. My plan was to focus on the CMPD because I have ties to this agency, but it would help me expand my research if I looked at other agencies as well. So, I am going to focus on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and use other agencies to comapre and contrast against the CMPD. I am going to compare and contrast the CMPD with other Police Departments (NYPD, Metro PD (DC), LAPD) and some local ones (Mint Hill PD, Pineville PD, Davidson PD, UNC Charlotte PD) and some federal agencies (USSS, FBI).                                             

Police Training

Throughout this semester, I have decided to inquire into the differences between the education received from a Criminal Justice degree versus the education received in a Police Training Academy. I found some interesting information on the CMPD Website about what the training at their academy is like. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department is the largest Police Department from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, GA.
The Police training at the CMPD consists of a lot of different types of training. There is physical training, a bike patrol course, firearms training, F.A.T.S (firearms training simulator), handgun training on the handgun range, a "shoot house" that officers go through and also they go through technology training.
The CMPD provides a large amount of information on their website about the training that each officer receives and about the process for applying and joining the CMPD Police Academy.
The website is: http://charmeck.org/city/charlotte/CMPD/organization/Administrative/PoliceTrainingAcademy/Training/Pages/Home.aspx

Inquiry Research Proposal

            

Dear Readers,

            I am interested in doing an inquiry into the differences between the education received from a Criminal Justice degree and the education received at a Law Enforcement Academy. I also want to inquire whether a degree in Criminal Justice is necessary and what the education from an Academy adds to a college education. Does someone go into “the Academy” better prepared to learn because they have an educational background in Criminal Justice? I want to find out whether Police Officers who have received a degree in some type of Justice or Law Enforcement perform better or advance faster than those who have only received an education from some type of Law Enforcement Academy.  

            I want my inquiry to be a compare and contrast between college degrees in Justice and Police Academies. My interest in this inquiry comes from my interest in the field of Law Enforcement. I am currently doing an internship with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and I want to become a Police Officer after I graduate from college. I am currently pursuing a Criminal Justice degree and after college I will go straight into the Academy for about six more months of education about Law Enforcement. I am curious to know if this is too much education on one single topic, or maybe not enough.

            I already know some of the differences between “the Academy” and a college degree. I know, for example, that in Police Academies, students not only learn the academic side of the job, but also the physical side of the job. Students have classes on the law, driving techniques, weapons training, tactics, etc. In college there is not usually a class that teaches students how to disarm someone or what to do in a high speed car chase with a criminal. College is more academic, whereas “the Academy” seems very hands-on training.

            What about a college degree makes one person advance to Detective or Sergeant or Captain faster than someone else without a college degree? I want to explore whether it is just the “’novelty” of a degree that makes people think that someone is more qualified or if they actually have more knowledge about the job and therefore are better prepared to do the job.

            I plan to research some of the statistics for people who have successfully completed a Law Enforcement Academy course and how many of those people have a college degree. I will find statistics on how many of the people that advance through the ranks of Law Enforcement agencies have college degrees and how many agencies require college degrees for advancement. I also want to know how many agencies require a college degree for new hires.  

                                                                           Sincerely,

                                                                                Rachel Pilkington

Exploratory Essay Workshop Reflection

After writing my draft of my exploratory essay, we did a workshop in class. In the workshop, each person read their paper aloud and then we took about 15 minutes to discuss each person's essay. Each member of my inquiry group gave me feedback on my essay. They pointed out some strong spots, but they also pointed out spots that needed some work. It is nice to hear someone say that a particular part of your paper was good, but what really helps you develop a better paper is when people point out the weak spots and give you advice on how you could do better in these areas. I got some good advice. For example, I was a little too opinionated in my essay when it's not an assignment that you can be opinionated with. I also needed a works cited page, which I had left out.
In addition to getting good feedback from my group, I also gave others feedback on their essays. I noticed some of my peers' papers had things missing. Some of them didn't have correct headings, titles, or they were also missing citations. We had a lot of the same issues among all of our papers. I think that this was a good use of class time because it has really helped me improve my essay.

Exploratory Essay Self Assesment

In writing this essay, my main goal was to take risks in my writing and do things in my writing that I haven't done successfully in the past. I think that a really hard thing for me to do in this essay was to keep out my opinion. If I did throw my opinion in there somewhere, I had to hide it in something that the author of one of the readings said. This was really hard for me because I am a really opinionated person. I think that in my first draft I had a hard time reaching my goals, however, in my second draft I had a better idea of some things that needed to be changed. In the second draft, I think I did a good job of not directly putting my opinion in the essay.
When I was developing my paper, I spent the time brainstorming on paper. I made tables on my paper and I wrote a brief synopsis of each work and then I wrote a short sentence or two about how each work had a connecting theme. 
I was definitely able to see my writing changing. In my first draft I was very opinionated, I didn't have many, if any quotes or paraphrases and I didn't have a work cited page. After I revised the essay, I saw a great improvement in the quality of my writing in this paper and I also added the things above that I had left out of the first draft. My peers gave me some really good feedback in my workshop. The main thing that I learned from my peers was that my opinion had too big of a presence in my paper. When I revised the paper, I took out MY opinions. One thing that I have learned about myself as a writer is that I do have the ability for really good writing. With each time that I revise my writing, I notice that it gets better and better. From my peers' writing, I learned some things that I left out of my paper by seeing them in there papers. Also, some things I noticed that they left out of their paper, I pointed out and therefore realized I left those things out of my paper as well. For some reason, the easiest part of my paper was deciding what different readings and/or videos to use as my examples. I started thinking about my essay and the examples that I wanted to use just came to me. However, when I started writing my essay, I had to really dig for the connections between the different works. 

Exploratory Essay Revised

Exploring the Readings

            In my English class, we have had a few different reading and video assignments. Some of the readings and videos are drastically different, but others had some common themes. One of the videos that we were given to watch was a Ted Talks video, “Does School Kill Creativity?” Sir Ken Robinson is the speaker in this video. He talks about how children are born with many talents and they are not afraid to share them. As children grow older, they become afraid of sharing their talents with the world, they are afraid that they will mess up or people won’t like what they have to share. Sir Ken Robinson makes a great point that we beat talents out of children and make them afraid of the talents they were given. An underlying theme that is consistently shown in this talk is how some students get to use their talents throughout life while others don’t. A few of the readings that we were assigned in class are “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” and “Women without Class: How Working Class Chicas get Working Class Lives”. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is about a middle aged student in her 40s who decides to return to school to pursue a degree. The reading focuses on an English class where a research paper had been assigned. The student proves to be horribly unqualified for college. She doesn't know how to use a computer, do research and she writes her paper on a level that is far from college. The underlying theme presented in this reading is why some students are qualified for college and have no problem while others don’t seem to have what it takes to hack a college paper. The last reading, “Women without Class” is about a group of “underprivileged” girls in a high school class. The author studies these students, talks to them and forms a hypothesis about why they act the way they do in class and why they don’t seem to care about their future. Some themes that these readings and video have in common are how students react to learning and education differently and how some students overcome their deficits and some can’t.

            In the Ted Talks video, Sir Ken Robinson uses a quote by Picasso, “all children are born an artist, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up” (Sir Ken Robinson (Picasso), “Ted  Talks: Does School Kill Creativity?”). Why do some children remain artists, while others “grow out of” their artistic abilities? Some students grow up in an environment and go to schools that encourage art and creativity. Most of the time it is the privileged students that go to private liberal art schools and have parents that encourage their creativity that remain artists as they grow up. The speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, uses an example of a dancer in his speech. There is a very successful, multi-millionaire dancer in England that he was talking to one day. He asked her how she became a dancer. She said that when she was in school, she could never sit still and couldn't pay attention in class. Her teachers thought that there was something wrong with her, so they told her mom to take her to a doctor. After meeting with her and her mom, the doctor took her mom out of the room to talk privately, as he left he turned on the radio. They watched through the window as the student began to dance to the music. He told her mother to take her to a dance school, she did and that student became one of the most successful dancers in England. This serves as a great example of how having teachers and parents and resources that enable creativity can help a creative student achieve great success. If these aren’t available the creativity will most likely be suppressed and the student will wander through school without any real direction.

In a slightly different assignment, we had to read “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”. In this reading, Ms. L is a middle aged woman who has returned to school for a degree. She is assigned a research paper. She will need to use her computer skills in order to do the research for the paper and to write the paper. The only problem is that Ms. L doesn't have any computer skills, she is computer illiterate. She has never even sat in front of a computer. The teacher tries to help her learn the basics of computer/internet research, but Ms. L just can’t understand. The problem here is that Ms. L didn't learn some very basic things in her earlier years of schooling. The only problem wasn't with the computer; she couldn't even write a cohesive paper or form intelligent sentences. Ms. L wasn't willing to learn, she had already put up her wall of defeat. If there had been more resources available to her, perhaps a class on internet research or basic computer skills then she would have been better off. She didn't have the skills and the people whose job it was to teach her only looked down upon her for not knowing the basics. A theme of this reading is how maybe college isn't for everyone. Based on the readings and video, to say that someone shouldn't go to college because they aren't prepared is ludicrous. The author says, “I had responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when the class ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn't go well. She wasn't absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall known to every teacher at every level.” (Professor X, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”) The teacher reached a point in which he decided it was pointless to keep trying to teach Ms. L, so he gave up and left it up to herself to learn, which didn't go well. Educators need to step up and help these people learn to succeed.

In “Women without Class” the author is a researcher that goes to a high school to study different groups of students. She observes the ways that different classrooms are constructed and how different classes are handled. She observes the over achieving, college-bound students and finds that they are engaging in intelligent, academic conversations in class and they are given assignments that really challenge them. The researcher also decides to observe the other end of the spectrum in the same high school. There are classes of under privileged teenagers that just don’t care about their education at all. She observed a group of teenage girls in this type of classroom. She found that there would rarely be a permanent teacher, mostly substitutes there to babysit these students. During class time the students would talk about anything they wanted from their nail polish to what they were going to name the baby they were pregnant with. This type of classroom consisted of mostly girls and some boys that had given up early on and in turn, no one cared about them. These students came from neighborhoods with a lot of trouble, parents that couldn't care less about them, and teachers who just wanted them gone. The researcher shows his shock with how little the teachers care. “When I told these teachers that I wanted to talk to some of their girl students about their aspirations beyond high school, teachers shook their heads and laughed together in a knowing way, one man joking that ‘They’ll all be barefoot and pregnant.’” (Anyon, “Women Without Class”) There is a big contrast with these students versus the ones in the higher level classes that come from better homes. When these two different groups of students started school, they were automatically put into categories that most of them never broke free from. Students in the lower category aren't given any resources, opportunities or help from teachers to succeed. This is a serious problem that comes up everywhere that happens in every area with every age group.

Works Cited

1.      Professor X. "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower."

2.      Anyon, Jean, comp. "Working Class Chicas Get Working Class Lives."

3.      Robinson, Ken. "Does School Kill Creativity?" Ted Talks. Speech.