Writing Assignment 2 (Final Version)

A Student’s Place

     How do you define a student? I think everyone has different opinions; you can define a student by his or her age, school performance or maybe his or her attitudes toward study. My personal opinions on becoming a student can be divided into three processes.

     Firstly, redefine “being a student.” What is usually meant by “I am a student”? You “become a student” when you go to school on the first day. After graduating from high school, college or graduate school, you are no longer a student anymore. I believe this is the way that most people think about being a student. However, the meaning of being a student is more than that. As a student, you should do your best to embrace knowledge as well as skills which you learn from school. What’s more, apply what you learn in your daily life is also very important. This is not about the identity but the effort you made.

     The second process is “learn by yourself.” A student does not necessarily have to learn from teachers. Sometimes, learning by yourself can gain more than being taught by teachers or professors. Thanks to today’s technology, a student can use a lot of tools to acquire knowledge. By the Internet, you can search countless information to do more research on your study. By other resources, such as novels, movies or even songs, they can teach you something your teachers would never tell you in the class. Somehow, those things can give you inspiration and influence your entire life. This is about your attitude, which is related to whether you have a highly-motivated attitude toward learning new things or not.

     The last process is “enjoy learning.” For everybody, I think that enjoy what you have to do in life is the best way to do those things right. For a student, the first priority in the things-to-do list should be homework or something related to study. However, the things that a student needs to do firstly do not mean those things will be finished firstly. If a student cannot enjoy studying and learning, I think that he or she would learn nothing in the end. Therefore, enjoy and love learning is a key element of being a student.

     To sum up, “being a student” is not about the identity. It is all about how much effort you made to learn, your attitudes toward learning new things and whether you can enjoy and love learning or not.

In-class writing practice 1

     A lot of students have to leave their home and live in a dormitory when they go to college. There are several differences between students who live in a dormitory and at home.

     The first difference is the living environment. For students who live at home with their family, they know more about their living environment and have fewer problems in their daily life. However, students who leave their familiar living environment and live in a dormitory, they would have more problems in the daily life especially at the very beginning of their dormitory life. For example, they may not know where to buy food, groceries or something they need.

     The second one is the independence between these two kinds of students. Students who live in a dormitory have to be more independent to deal with many different problems that happen in their life by themselves. They cannot count on other people to solve the problems; therefore, they would gradually learn how to take care of themselves and solve problems independently. On the other hand, students who live at home are probably less independent in many aspects. They may tend to rely on their family to solve some trouble for them, instead of facing those problems by themselves.

     To sum up, students live in a dormitory and at home are quite different from each other.