memoir essay reflection

Description

This final assignment is an occasion for you to step back and take stock of all the work you have done during this highly unusual school year, marked specifically by a raging pandemic and remote schooling as one of its consequences.  Perhaps the best way for you to do this assignment is by making a statement of your own about the role of reading and writing in an undergraduate education and how that was complicated this year.  You might, for example, write a document for students who will be entering the school for the first time, telling them what they should expect or should know about reading and writing if they want to make the most of their education, and, again, perhaps how best to accomplish this under varieties of duress.  Or this might be an essay written for an alumni magazine or a paper or a faculty committee charged with reviewing undergraduate education and how successful it was this year, considering.  Or you might want to think of this essay as primarily autobiographical, as a chapter of your autobiography where you think through your experiences with schooling and remote learning, considering. 

You should feel free to draw as much as you can from the work you have already completed, making your points through examples you have already examined, perhaps using your own work with your school assignments as examples of what students might be expected to do.

Nevertheless, don’t treat this assignment as a random reflection but rather a teaching tool: so what does your reader learn from you regarding this highly unusual school year?