Author: Sawyer

Although the diagram does not depict the entirety of the analogy, I related our class to the Avengers. The class itself is the Avengers themselves. This is pretty self explanatory because they are the main characters, and I am a selfish teenager who is the center of my own world. That would make Nick Fury, the leader of the Avengers, David Morgen. Nick Fury is also considered an Avenger, just as David participates in class discussions as if he were a student. The villains of this story and the class are the stories that we read. The books that we read in class were all enjoyable, and if there were no villains in the Avengers, the movies would not be interesting at all. The books are also the main ‘challenge’ we have to face as a class, discussing our way through them in order to ‘defeat’ or understand their entirety. The tracing pages assignment would be the tragic backstory of each character. Each avenger has their own tragic backstory that motivated and taught them how to defeat villains, just as the tracing pages assignment helped me learn to analyze the stories we read. The Sunday Sketches were the training montages for the class. Although they were unrelated to the main assignments and novels, they were still integral parts of the class, just as training montages are in the movies.

Here is a link to the rubric!

The two Learning Outcomes that this project helped me meet for this class were writing as a process and visual thinking. For writing as a process, this project had three drafts, each with their own twists. As opposed to a normal essay, where I would go through edits, making the alphabetic text feel more like my writing, this assignment’s edits helped me change direction entirely. During my first draft, I wrote a pretty straight forward story, that just gave the plot and the lesson I learned. During the second draft (the comic itself), I knew that this strategy wouldn’t suffice. I made the story unique by adding comedy through the pictures. This made the story easier to read, not to mention more interesting. For my final draft, I knew it would be hard to transfer the comedy added through the pictures back to alphabetic text, but I tried my best. This connects to the learning outcome of visual thinking. Being able to transfer my alphabetic text to a visual comic helped me turn the original text into something more unique and interesting.

Returning to the alphabetic text after writing a visual comic was difficult. The process of turning the comedy shown solely in my pictures into text was a challenge, but I think I dealt with it properly. I ended up adding similes and analogies in my text to describe the pictures in my visual text. This hopefully lightened the mood of my text.

Honestly, I do not really see the story that I was trying to tell in different terms. I knew my story from start to finish, I just had a harder time putting that story on paper. Turning the alphabetic text into visual definitely helped me make that vision into a reality.

Here is a link to the rubric for the reflection!

Here is a link to the Literacy Narrative Itself!

I really struggled on this assignment (I am turning it in a day late). First of all, my Dad was here for all of parents weekend and I only see him a couple of weeks out of the year; because of this, I didn’t start my homework until 5 PM on Sunday, and I started this assignment at about 11 PM on Sunday Night. I went through all of the submissions and was truly blown away. Unlike the previous Sunday Sketches, it really seemed like everyone was an artist. It really stressed me out, and in a frenzy, I decided to go to bed instead of finishing the assignment. When actually making the page, I just started drawing away with Ore at Complex. When looking back on my work today, I decided to totally scrap that and start over. I then spent about 2 hours reading the pages, trying to find some sort of meaning in a somewhat random assortment of words. I ended up choosing something that I would not have written about in a million years. In my avatar post, I explained about how instead of reflecting on lows in my life, I was going to try and reflect on the highs in order to keep my mental health strong throughout the year. Instead of doing that, I dug deep to one of my lowest lows. This page is about when I was in a forced abusive relationship for about a year. I am not going to go into too much detail, but I try and make my point about how the relationship was abusive in a physical and emotional way. I tried my best to draw gravestones in the center of the page. Her gravestone is what kept me bound to the relationship and my gravestone is actually being in the relationship itself. Overall, I am pretty disappointed in my work. Not only was I a day late, but I do not think I properly expressed my story. It is moments like these when not having practice in any art field really made me feel like an outlier compared to the other students. Hopefully in the future, I am able to find my groove. I might redo this assignment before the end of the semester; even if it does not impact my grade at all, I really want to produce something that I am proud of, especially if it is about such a meaningful time in my life.

Here is a link to the rubric.