Course Reflection: Pick Yes or No

“Constructive criticism is about finding something good and positive to soften the blow to the real critique of what really went on”. This quote was said by the singer Paula Abdul. I am writing about if I think other students should or should not take Paul Gasparo’s English class. I believe that no one can say whether or not a teacher is good for a student or not, except a student themselves; so I am going to write about what I liked and what I did not like about him and his teaching and let the students pick for themselves.

Mr. Gasparo always made his classes interesting; he did this by having class discussions about the topic of our papers, so the students could get into their topic and not just read about them. Also by doing this it kept most of the students awake and attentive in his class. He is great a keeping everyone up to date through blackboard and for important items he did so through e-mail. Sending an e-mail to Mr. Gasparo is the best way to contact him and he responds back very quickly. There are some bad parts about his e-mail system though.

When a student e-mail him, they have to do so in a format that he show the students the first day of class and that he put in the coarse outline. With e-mails, he requires that the subject line has to be in the correct format or he will delete it without even reading the e-mail; As a result I do not think he is a very approachable teacher when it comes to e-mail because most students are scared that they will accidently send the wrong information on the subject line. With saying that he does not communicate well with the instructions on his assignments; most of the time students needed to read the prompts very slowly and carefully to make sure they understood the whole assignment. Also, the student need to make sure they have a computer and printer that are in working condition or have time to spend in the library. This is because he makes the student print enough work in one semester, that will fill about a two inch binder with paper and honestly he does not go over half of it, but he might, so students should print out every item he asks them to.

I did have a couple of favorite assignments that Mr. Gasparo had assigned. My most favorite of these assignments was the argument paper. This paper took a huge amount of planning and organizing, but it was a fun paper to write; I think most students would enjoy this assignment as long as they get a topic that means something to them. The other paper I enjoyed writing was the Rhetorical Analysis essay. In this paper I got to look within my life and how the rhetorical tools were used to help make me who I am today. That paper gave me a challenge because it was hard for me to write about myself, but it did create a great challenge for me.

Of course, there were assignments that I did not like as well. One of these assignments was the blog that his classes have to do; I do not like to write papers and I really do not like the whole world being able to read those papers. The other paper that I did not enjoy writing was the Annotated Bibliography; this was because I did not really understand what I had to do and he never gave us a copy of it back nor did he show us what we did wrong. This paper was to help us with are bibliography on a research paper, but since he did not give them back, we did not know what we did wrong or what we needed to change.

Mr. Gasparo has some good and bad teaching methods, just like every teacher does. To know if he is a good teaches for a student, the student would need to ask themselves what they can live with, with a teacher and what they can get out of a teacher. I am not saying if a student should or should not take him; I am saying it is up to the student to think about what I have said and pick yes or no for themselves.



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