Reflection Letter

Welcome to my world as seen through the eyes of English 101D. My name is Debbie McBrayer, I turned 50 this year and welcomed this rite of passage. After all, I’ve earned it. I have been married 32 of my years. I am more in love with my husband than ever before. I have a 30 year old son that proudly serves his country in the United States Air Force.

I have a 28 year old daughter, who is married and has had the dubious honor of making me a grandmother. Being Nana, by the way, is the best thing ever! I have a 21 year old daughter who is in college and works with me full time. I have a 16 year old son that is a good and creative student and will promise to be the child that makes me say, “None of my other children ever did that.” I have an Associate’s Degree in Electronic Technology and am working to finally finish a second degree in Early Childhood Education. All of this information pales in comparison to the knowledge that I am a child of God. I love and serve in the church that I call home, Northlake Christian Church.

The first of the themes introduced in this English class was identity. This theme was introduced a week after my Psychology class opened with an Identity unit as well. I felt like that gave me an advantage to looking deeper into the subject. What I have come to realize is that it barely scratched the surface of what identity is and can be. Besides race, age, gender, job or vocation, hobby, family role, religion, political views and sexual orientation, ethnicity, and culture, my identity is all mine. It is mine to be embraced and developed. As I stated in my discussion board post on identity markers, I wrote, “the text brings out gender as being a key factor in identity and I truly appreciate Queen Latifa's stand on how women are treated and how we allow someone to treat us.” There are some things about our identity that we can’t change, but what’s more exciting, is that there are things about our identity we can change and that is what has landed me in English 101D.

The second theme was community. My thoughts raced about the community that I identify with most, my church. As I read through the essays assigned, my mind was opened to the variety of communities that are available to us. A classmate, Rebecca Tarbert, wrote on the 2nd community discussion board on February 2, 2011, “I want to be a part of a community that shares the same morals and beliefs as myself, a community that does not try to twist or interfere with my integrity. Like the Amish, I have chosen to be a part of the Christian Community. Although the rules are not nearly as strict at theirs, I have chosen to devout my life to my religion and I am willing to abide by the rules whether it may be difficult or not. Because I know it pleases my God, me, and the rest of my community.” As easy as it would be to be included in Rebecca’s community, I realize now that my workplace is a community, scrapbookers are a community, and Nanas are even a community. How lucky am I? I have even found that through this class and the discussion boards and paper talks, we have become a community. We have become a community of struggling students. We have come to share a disappointment in ourselves as we come to the realization that we are not quite the writers that we thought we were. We have come to share satisfaction in working together to gain points and understanding as we continued our writing assignments and as we will soon find, our community will be solidified with completing this class, just to join the community of survivors of Andrea and Lolly’s ENGL&101D!

As we ventured into our third theme of the class, tradition, it brought me to a much deeper thought process. It forced me to think about what was considered tradition in my childhood home and what I have set before my children as tradition, and what they will take with them as they form new traditions of their own. I have realized that my parents were not driven by family traditions and we didn’t maintain any. I have found that the traditions that I have instilled in my home as a adult, were basically all “borrowed” from other family’s traditions. We have basically” tried them on for size”. We have kept the ones that we like and just brushed the others off as an experiment. I find myself hoping that as my children find themselves in reflective situations that they will have a little more to carry forward with them in life than what I brought from my childhood. “As far as the conventional sense of tradition my family, meaning my parents and my childhood, we had very few traditions especially around food. Being in a military family, we did not ever celebrate holidays with extended family. I'm sure that we had full meals, but I don't remember much about big turkeys and a table full of food. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.” My tradition blog post, February 18, 2011.

Drawing this reflection to an end, I am looking to where my writings are taking me and looking at where they have brought me from. From a place that I thought that I was quite competent at writing to a place where I doubted everything that I thought I knew and certainly what our instructors think they know. For the readers entertainment, I will be posting My Identity paper as my revision piece. I will be posting a post and 2 replies from the Identity Marker discussion board. For my awareness of voice and audience piece, I will be posting from the discussion forum for DB 1: "Traditions: Embrace Them or Attack Them?" For my Writer’s Choice piece I will be posting my Food Family Tradition Blog post

I know that going forward I will be continually reminded that we are always in a place that we can afford to learn and English 101D has been a time of rebellion and a time of submission although neither of those attributes are attractive, the best outcome is that I am still teachable! I am still flexible and I haven’t surrendered my identity to get there. I have asserted my strength and my leadership qualities and hopefully been respectful and submissive when appropriate. I believe that I will walk away with the best of qualities that I can imagine.