Dear portfolio readers:

My name is Jeremy Souza and last year I finally came back to college after not wanting to continue after my first year. Once I passed English 091, English 101 introduced me to essay types that I was not familiar with such as, the memoir and the annotation essay. Working on these were challenging because having never done either of these two essay types before, I didn’t know where to begin. Essays I’ve done in the past have been about certain topics however, this year I’ve had the creative freedom to write about what I wanted. Last year, I feel that I fixed quite a few issues with my writing, with this semester, I was eager to put what I learned to the test. I hope you enjoy reading these essays.

My first submission is about persistence, which I called “Persistence Is The Key To Life”. As I began writing this essay, I had a clear Idea of how I was going to tackle this essay. First, I knew exactly how this essay was going to be structured. Secondly, persistence is about three things to me which are, motivation, positivity and failure. Motivation is a incredibly important trait to persistence. Motivation is a necessity, simply because if you’re going to be persistent, you need to have an end goal. For example, say I wanted to lift one hundred fifty pounds. Now I have motivation to get me to be persistent about my goal. I continued this pattern throughout my essay and feel that I made good points throughout it. Doing this essay was a challenging and rewarding to write.

My second submission was about a research topic, for this topic I picked “Should Immigrants Be Forced To Speak English When Moving Into the United States”. Now I picked this topic because, this to me, is truly controversial. Is it right or wrong to enforce a language on immigrants? The United States was founded by immigrants so it’s hard to say. When I wrote this essay, I was for enforcing a stricter requirement for immigrants to be able to legally move into the United States. However, I thought it was equally as important for Americans to learn a second language. Being bilingual is just too useful of a trait to not have on a local to global scale. I had fun writing and researching this essay and is by far the largest one I wrote this semester. Upon researching, I found some very interesting statistics that other might find interesting as well.

My last submission is about my memoir. This was the first essay I wrote in English 101 and I learned a ton from it. Before this class I had no idea what a memoir even was and now I have a much better understanding of it. I called this essay “Forced Persistence”. I went to Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School and that’s the event that I wrote my memoir about. It was about when Diman placed me into a shop I never even explored. This was during my eight weeks of exploring vocational shops the school offered. Not to mention, my attitude towards school at the time, which at this moment did a complete turn around for the better. Never doing this type of essay before, I went through a few rough drafts, not knowing the exact time frame when a memoir takes place.

I feel taking this course has properly prepared me for future types of writing. As mentioned above, I have never done these types of essays before and it was a challenge to complete them. Not to mention, some room to be creative for the topics, which is a very nice change of pace. The most challenging one I had to write, was definitely the memoir. I had no idea how specific it was to a moment in time. After taking English 101, I feel that I have learned quite a bit  from this class and eagerly want to learn more next semester.

I hope you enjoy reading my essays, as I found them enjoyable to write about.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Souza

Persistence is a very important trait in life. For starters, any hobbies anyone may have at one time required a lot of persistence in order for you to enjoy it. For example, I personally enjoy art but initially I was absolutely terrible at it. However with a lot of persistence over the years I managed to draw at what I believe a good level. While I don’t have this hobby anymore, I needed that persistence to succeed at into other things such as, school, sports,  and exercise. Most things in life require persistence. I didn’t think I needed to force myself to do anything that is, until I found myself going back to school, after taking a very long break. Looking back now, I see a few key things that make persistence what it is. Motivation, positivity, and even failure are what I believe are key parts to persistence.

Motivation is essential to persistence. What is your drive, your goal? As tristanridesflat stated in his blog, “I came home one sunny evening to my father putting training wheels on what was my brand new Huffy. I was ecstatic to see this, as my older brother had been able to ride a mountain bike for years“. His motivation was to keep learning that next step with biking, even going all the way to BMX. What motivation is, as stated from stateuniversity states that, “Motivation is also the study of what pushes or pulls an individual to start, direct, sustain, and finally end an activity”. A personal motivation I’ve had lately, is forcing myself going to the gym, two to three times a week. My motivation is to be healthy and gain a bit of upper body mass. I have been forcing myself to run at least 1 mile, everyday minimum, along with other exercises, such as, squats, push ups and various other ones, depending on what I’ve accomplished that week.

I believe positivity is also another factor in determining persistence. How could anyone be persistent about something while kicking your feet along the way? Persistence is about having an optimistic attitude for whatever you goal may be. Positivity can also link to another part of persistence, which is motivation as I mentioned earlier. If you cannot be motivated and maintain a positive attitude in your goals, you are doomed for failure before you even begin. As Dominic Randolph mentioned in his article about teaching good character in students. “When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that”. This could mean that without a positive outlook on things, a student could be overcome with doubt and stop their drive to be persistent about his or her career.

Another key to persistence is failure, without failure you cannot learn from your mistakes. You can only learn so much from a textbook, since part of failure is doing things with hands on experience. Such as, learning how to repair a car, you can read as much as you want, but you probably won’t be able to fix a car immediately after reading how to because you don’t have the experience. You need to go out in life and experience everything you can. As stated in tribou17’s blog post, “When I first stepped into class in college, I felt prepared and excited, ready to finally begin focusing my education towards what I wanted to do with my life. However, I nearly immediately began to struggle, sidled with difficulties in multiple courses coupled with stricter time constraints”. For example, you could be going after a job you really want and have to the essential credentials and then some on your resume. However if you can’t just “Wow” that employer you’re not going to get that job you want so badly. This is a lesson in life failure, which in turn you can force you to take a look of what happened, figure out how you could improve what you did and said during the interview and improve your chances for next time. As Jennie Rose mentioned on her blog wall, a book called How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, by author Paul Tough stated “Critics have argued that what Tough is really talking about are life skills that can’t be taught.”. These examples show that failure has an affect on persistence.

In conclusion, I believe that their is quite a few things that make persistence what is it. Again, motivation, positivity, and failure are just a few of many things that can make persistence, such a important aspect to anyone’s life. Persistence is definitely a learned trait however, because sometimes you just need to pick yourself up, from whatever is holding you back and push yourself forward to your goal. Persistence is a life skill that cannot be taught through traditional means.

Works Cited

Rose, Jennie. “Can Kids Be Taught Persistence.” Kqed.com. Kqed, Inc. 27 July  2012. Web. 2 April 2014.

Tough, Paul. “What If The Secret To Success Is Failure?” NYTimes.com . 14 September 2011. Web. 2 April 2014.

Tribou17. “Persistence Learning how to walk again” 2014. 22 February 2014. Web. 2 April 2014.

Tristanridesflat. “Memoir Final 2014”. 17 February 2014. Web. 2 April 2014.

I went to Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School. When you go to this school you have two weeks of academic classes and two weeks of shop class in a month. You can choose one of many kinds during your high school career, such as auto body, auto mechanics, drafting, culinary arts, plumbing, and many more. During your freshman year you go through eight shops the first two months you’re there. Having to pick one by the end of December. While I never actually picked the one I ended up with, in the end I didn’t mind at all. At first however, I absolutely hated House and Mill Carpentry because I never went through the shop itself so I didn’t know anything about it, not even the absolute basics. Secondly I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like it. However I stuck through it because honestly what choice did have?

I didn’t take school seriously back then, so I basically did it to myself. After the placement results came in I was in House and Mill Carpentry for the rest of High School. I still remember going into the House and Mill Carpentry shop for the first time, the smell of saw dust everywhere. Still wishing I had gotten auto body like I planned. The teacher I got for that class was just not fun to be around. I barley learned without him criticizing your every action you do, this was the same for everyone in the class. Fortunately for me though, the instructor for the freshman class got transferred to the house project of the shop almost immediately after I joined it. Right after that we got a new teacher who was actually the junior instructor at the time, and he was actually the complete opposite of my former teacher.

This new teacher always used phrases that you could remember. For example, “Righty tighty, Lefty loosey” if you ever got confused on how to tighten a bit or a clamp for example. I didn’t think or realize it at the time but this teacher is who started to get my persistence going in this trade. I didn’t have initial interest of doing the project we had to do which was make a coffee table. I wondered what I was going to do, because I was already at a disadvantage compared to everyone else. Not to mention I had no real interest in learning anything from carpentry. Except safety rules, I never want to hurt myself or anyone else due to being ignorant about the machines.

First a couple of weeks go by with this new teacher. While I actually enjoyed having him as a teacher, I was always slacking finding ways not to do work all because I didn’t want to be there. I would either purposely mess up on something I had to do or use the excuse “I’m to scared to use this machine”. While this caused me a lot of grief from the teacher and some students. I just didn’t care because I didn’t want to be in that shop, somehow hoping I could be transferred to my shop of choice, Auto Body.

A few months into the shop, I began to realize how I needed to get my rear in gear or I was going to fail. This is where my persistence began to come through. Every day I kept asking my teacher questions such as, How can you tell what a good piece of stock is good for a coffee table? Or what kind of bit do I need to get this finish? Despite my late start, I managed to catch up to everyone else all because of my persistence. My coffee table was finished and passed with a c+ with my horrible start. I was happy I stuck with it.

After freshman year, I knew I didn’t want to continue with this trade. However I was happy that I stuck through this for multiple reasons. I learned valuable experience that I wouldn’t have got if I wasn’t placed in this program. Also I will be able to fix any problems that could arise and save myself a lot of money, whenever I managed to buy my own house. My persistence gave me insight on how important and useful carpentry can be. My persistence in this situation was invaluable.