Wells 1

Simeon Wells

Kade Parry

English 2010

April 29, 2019

For my final essay I was able to write a Researched Argument about student suspension

in secondary schools. The main points of my essay were about finding alternative methods to

suspending students from school. There have been too many school suspensions in recent years

and there haven’t been any notable results from those suspension. Suspending students just isn’t

effective and isn’t helping students to progress. By writing this essay about suspension I am

hoping to help motivate teachers and administrators to be more creative with their discipline

methods. If administrators are more creative, they will be able to think of ways to help students

rather than just get rid of them for a while. Especially the fact that suspension isn’t helping to

solve the problem, presents us with a prime time to talk about what we can do differently for the

students to better progress.

My first draft for this paper wasn’t very complete. It had the main points that I wanted to

make and it had all of the sources that I wanted to use, but it didn’t have enough filler. It was

lacking in transitions and there were a ton of details that were missing. In my first draft I was

basically just laying out the skeleton. As I did my second and final drafts I was able to add the

transitions and details that were giving my essay the meat that it needed. I also made the essay a

lot longer and made it clear and fixed a lot of grammatical corrections as well. I was very

grateful for the peer reviews as well because they helped me out a ton. There were a few things

that were on the rubric that I had forgotten about that I needed to add in later drafts and my peers
 Wells 2

gave me some great suggestions that helped me out a ton. I also really liked being able to read

my peers papers as well. Just reading their papers gave me a lot of ideas on how I could improve

my paper as well, so I was just overall really glad for the peer reviews.

I took English 1010 in high school and the Researched Argument reminded me of my

final project there where we had to combine other people’s words, or research, with our own

words to make a complete essay. It was fun to see the similarities between the two projects. Both

of them had a lot of assignments leading up to the final project that really helped to add to the

final project. The little assignments leading up helped me understand what little things I needed

to do for my final essay. All of these assignment also really made me think about the world and

and especially more about the education system. Being able to do so much research on

suspension really helped me to understand it better and actually reinforced my assumptions about

it. I have always thought that suspension didn’t really work at correcting rebellious behavior and

after reading what the world had to say, it just confirmed what I had thought before.

Some of the challenges that I had in doing this assignment was finding counterarguments

and addressing them. I was so bias that I had troubles looking at it from the other side, but I was

able to talk to others and get better ideas from others and that really helped me to understand the

other side of the argument better. So talking to others really helped me out a lot. I feel like I have

become a lot better at writing this semester than I was before. I am much more confident in my

writing and have learned a lot about it.

If I were to grade my own paper, I would honestly give myself anything from a B+ to an

A just because I know how much work I put into it. I tried really hard and I tried to fulfill all the

requirements. I found the sources and applied what I learned throughout the semester as well.