Journal Reflection

As everybody knows, I’m a student from the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus. To fulfill my college curriculum, I will take many classes that are not in my major. We must do, in order to graduate. But I'm not complaining, I think that we as future professionals, we must need to know about a lot kinds of themes and skills. I really know that its help to everybody to become successful people in society. One of those classes is an English literature.

This semester I am taking this class with Dr. Cynthia Pittmann. The class name is Journey in Literature. As part of the class assignment, we had to make a journal (notebook), in which we write our personal experiences and thoughts. We were supposed to keep a travel journal during 3 months, writing 5 entries each week, with a total of 40. The journal is not a typical diary, we had to follow some rules given to us by our professor from the book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within By Natalie Goldberg. We were meant to follow these rules, which were called "The Anti-Rules"; these are, keep your hand moving, don't cross out, don't worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar, lose control, don't think, don't get logical, go for the jugular (difficult emotions). Honestly when I first heard, I thought it was something very weird. That first day I start writing and in my mind I said, “How I start? About what topic I want to write?” I continue writing and I start cross out some misspelled words. Also I was very carefully with the spelling and punctuations. From the beginning I was failing with almost all the rules. I need to do not get logical, do not cross out, do not worry about spelling and punctuations. Honestly that first day was a totally mess. The next days I put in my mind that I can follow the rules. Through the weeks I put more and more effort to all my entries. Each day I felt that my skills with the anti rules are improving. At the finals entries honestly, I felt that I was not writing. I felt that my hand are moving apart of my mind. I think that finally I get to the jugular, the hardest part. I finally master the anti-rules.

In the same journal the professor assign to the entire class to also write a Life Compass. We were supposed to write 2 of them each week, with a total of 12 at the final. This Life Compass it's very similar to a normal compass, but instead of North, South, East and West we have S, E, M and P; each letter means spiritual, mental, emotional and physical, respectively. At each letter we need to score with a scale of 1 to 3 representing how we felt in that moment and in what place we were. Also we had to write a few sentences explaining why we took this score. I was writing the compass about for 3 months and I giving different sores for each letter. When I finish all of them, I took the time to watch them and reflect on them. I saw that my lowers scores were days that I was in college, I had a lot of work to do, or had exams. But when I was in my home, when I had took some break to chill we my friends, or simply I was doing what I like, my scores got high.

 Both exercises help me to find some thoughts or ideas that were deep inside me. Also helps me to improve my English vocabulary and my fluency. I challenge you to try it too. I hope that helps, as it did to me.

Journal