Michael Conry's Cooking and College Portfolio

Text to Self

Connecting with Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” is fairly hard to do for me. We come from very different backgrounds, him being the son of two immigrants and me being the son of born and raised Americans for generations. He grew up in cities and very rural areas and I came from small towns and farm towns, never really moving too much. I suppose the easiest example of how I connect to him is the fact that both our names are Michael but that’s not a good example of text to self.  Though we may not have similar family trees we do have a similar love and and sense of wonder with Chemistry and other sciences. He enjoyed watching chemical reactions and seeing things that before were boring but now became a reaction that fizzes or combusts which I enjoy as well.

Text to Text

The beginning of  this story reminded me of reading journals of immigrants coming from their country to America through Ellis Island when it was still open. They talked about their family back home or their dreams of a better life but the journals I really enjoyed reading were the ones that talked about their life after the move to America. How there was such a struggle to find work and make a life for yourself and you children and the things that kept them going were dreams. That’s what I imagine Mike Rose’s parents went through.

Text to World

Possibly the easiest to connect considering that Mike Rose is American with parents from Italy and Naples. Having parents who were immigrants during this time was probably very hard because there was a lot of discrimination between Americans and immigrants. Their family came from poor background and worked hard to get everything they had and moved many times to find work. They went from their home countries to Chicago to Los Angeles and eventually to Vermont to settle down and find work. They most likely had a hard life but Rose still managed to find his place in the world like all the other people did who came to America in search of a better life.

I never liked grading myself. Probably not the first person to have said that but its not because I’m afraid to say I’m bad at writing. Its because I don’t like to say that I don’t think I’m bad at all. Matter of fact I think (personally) I am a fairly good writer. When I get interested in a subject to write about it becomes very easy to write. I will just start writing and eventually words and sentences will start to form as I think them. Its very “on-the-spot” but its the way I do it. But there is obviously things I need to get better at. I should try to expand my vocabulary better to better my sentence strength and bring more of an either intellectual or emotional aspect to my writing. Organization wise I think that I have either mastered or nearly mastered how to organize my paragraphs to effectively put my point across in an essay. To grade myself out of 100 (where 100 is master and 0 is novice with no experience) I believe I am in the range between 70-80. This says I know what I am doing well enough to be confident writing a paper but still have room to improve and expand.

To My Peers

From Mike Conry

10/2/17

Evolution of Narrative

Why did I write my essay about this memory? Because my relationship with writing has been a war. I either wanted to write a lot (when I had  freedom and creativity) and had fun doing it. Or I hated writing because I wasn’t interested in the topic or just wanted nothing to do with it. Usually it was the latter because English class was never my strong suit. But when I had an essay assignment when I could use imagination and freedom to create a short story or some kind of creativity aspect I enjoyed writing. The reason I chose this memory was because I didn’t like to write until this assignment i got. It showed me that you could have a balance between structure and freedom of a creative and imaginative mindset. This assignment I wrote about made me like to write again. Although I do enjoy how it is so far it needs work. I should use stronger word choice to describe things and I need to make it longer. I should put in more detail but not stress about it so much that I lie about certain things that happen. It has to all be true otherwise the reason I chose this topic to write about would have been for nothing.

Steven King is one of the most successful writers in the world both at the time he was publishing books and now. But he didn’t always start as a writer. He was first introduced to writing after a guidance counselor at his school wanted to get him to use his “restless pen in a more productive way.” His counselor found him a writer for a newspaper who taught him how to write a story. He taught him to write the story for yourself that you would like. Similar to a rough draft but then he taught him to go back and take out all the parts that aren’t the story similar to a final draft. I believe this to have been King’s first real writing experience, but it does not compare to Alexie’s upbringing.

Alexie must be the youngest starting writing prodigy I have read about. He taught himself how to read a little over the age of 3 by reading Superman Comics. He connected the pictures to how the words looked and taught himself to read by connecting the dots. His motivation was his father, he loved his father and his father loved to read so Alexie learned to love to read aswell.  Growing up in an Indian Reservation was hard for him. He talked about how it was dangerous for a young Indian to learn at the pace he was and they he was lucky to have been able to and that he did. His motivation changed from his father’s approval to wanting to help more Indian children. They grew up reading in school but not like Alexie. He wanted to share his knowledge with them in hopes they could teach themselves more. He wanted them to unlock their own doors in order to have a better future. His upbringing compared to King’s is like no other, in this way King does not compare to Alexie.

This is one of my annotated pages in Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction”. I annotated a couple of sentences talking about how a Discourse is a kind of “identity kit”. I think this is true in some aspects. You are your own person. You probably know how to do things that most people don’t and you can offer the world something new. But the things you learn throughout your life, maybe a sport, skill, instrument, job, etc. is a Discourse. What isn’t a Discourse is your view of life such as morals, imagination and other ideas that you and only you think of. So a Discourse isn’t an identity kit, its more of a skill kit. It doesn’t define who you are it just is something to help you make someone out of yourself.

This is just me putting down a memory into a paragraph for another idea for the Literacy Moment:

My whole life in school (well since 8th grade) my teachers have always stressed the importance of MLA Format. They always said “You have to use this in college otherwise you will fail.” and “If you don’t use this your professors will not accept any of your assignments.” So they drilled into my brain that every piece of writing or assignment I do must be done in the exact same format. But now that I’m here none of my professors require it or have asked for anything done in MLA format. It wasn’t all for nothing but the amount of stress it made me feel to have to learn it perfectly was pointless. There was always something to do and if it wasn’t done in MLA then it wasn’t accepted. In this way college is easier than high school. There was one teacher that ruined my love for writing by confusing me more and more everyday with MLA. She would tell us to use MLA in 8th grade and we wouldn’t know what that meant. And when we asked she wouldn’t tell us how to do it but expected it to be done and gave no guidance.

This is just another Idea for the rough draft of another literacy Sketch:

My whole life in school (well since 8th grade) my teachers have always stressed the importance of MLA Format. They always said “You have to use this in college otherwise you will fail.” and “If you don’t use this your professors will not accept any of your assignments.” So they drilled into my brain that every piece of writing or assignment I do must be done in the exact same format. But now that I’m here none of my professors require it or have asked for anything done in MLA format. It wasn’t all for nothing but the amount of stress it made me feel to have to learn it perfectly was pointless. There was always something to do and if it wasn’t done in MLA then it wasn’t accepted. In this way college is easier than high school. There was one teacher that ruined my love for writing by confusing me more and more everyday with MLA. She would tell us to use MLA in 8th grade and we wouldn’t know what that meant. And when we asked she wouldn’t tell us how to do it but expected it to be done and gave no guidance.

Reading long amounts of literature isn’t hard but sometimes I either get bored or I get tired of looking at one thing for a while. Last night I read “I Just Wanna Be Average”  and I did have to split it into two sessions of reading. I did one half of it, took an hour or so long break, then read the rest of it that night. I read the first half in the library and the second in my dorm before bed. I probably should have  done the rest in the library because I don’t remember it that well.

Dweck’s TED Talk was very enlightening recently in the debate of growth vs fixed mindsets. She talked about how most children liked to be challenged and that when they were challenged their brain’s activity spiked as they tried to figure out the problem. That was for the children with signs of a growth mindset. The children who showed signs of a fixed mindset showed signs of stress and no interest in the problem just because it was a challenge they didn’t know how to do. I printed the transcripts and annotated them to show my point of view of the situation.

Welcome to my site! My name is Michael Conry (big surprise), I am 18 years old from Londonderry, NH. I have done sports my whole life and this is the first year I hadn’t so far.  I played football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, baseball, ty-kwon-do, MMA, and kick boxing. Recently I have been trying to branch out more and do some more “artsy” things like taking and editing photographs and videos. As of recent I have been wanting to help people. Maybe one day I will be in law enforcement, or in a medical field.