FINAL REFLECTIVE LETTER

Dear Mr. Campbell,

The semester has come to an end and my E-portfolio is also coming to a

close. I believe that my portfolio starts out as a display of my Asian heritage,
which foreshadows my topic of research throughout the duration of the class.
I organized the homepage as an overview of what will appear and be detailed
to you as you move through my portfolio. The initial welcome briefs you
about the structure and purpose of the class. As you move down, you get a
general brief of my chosen topic and an informative blurb about me. The
artwork significantly placed within the introduction to my topic, as well as
within the intro about myself is served to reinforce the importance of my
statements about Asians and their culture, to better help orient the reader’s
thoughts when they arrive at my essay and proceed to read about the
integration of Asian and American culture.
The second tab displays my informal writings during the course of this
English class. Each one I chose to display reinforces certain aspects of my
personality and character, as well as my abilities/skills as a writer, thinker
and questioner. The first writing on the page is a letter addressed to you
specifically, but a letter to the visitors of my website generally. The content
encompasses the all of my character and describes the scope of my interests,
which basically has no boundaries. This first writing helps transition the
reader to my interest inventory at the bottom of the page, where the expanse
of my considerations as research topics is. In between these two informal
writings are my chosen daybook entries, which are everyday writings based
on a theme/topic or stimulated from a thought or situation that occurred.
These daybook entries show the start of my development in the writing,
thinking and questioning areas and speed through some of my development in
those same areas throughout the course. They basically provide the base of
what I will be working to improve: my way of thinking, writing, and
questioning at the start of the class and then proceeds to point out certain
areas that stood out in my development as a writer, thinker and questioner
through research. The ‘questioner’ is self-explanatory in the fact it shows the
snippets of questions I have and how they stream through my sub-conscious
in as instant. The ‘creative and analytical thinker’ provides a sense of how I
usually go about the designing and analytical process for situations that
require them.
 After the beginning thoughts I provided, now comes the detailed start of
my research project. The narrowing of my topic took up a lot of my time
because I am generally a person who spends the most time getting started,
dwelling in the beginning stages of a project or assignment. Once I have the
overall plan of what I plan to do thought out and recorded, the progression
and pace of my work increases exponentially. I think getting started is more
stressful and time-consuming than the changes and re-workings I know will
be made all throughout the project’s duration after the initial beginning.
Proceeding my inquiry exercise into my own interests and finding what
I would enjoy researching and recording information about, I wrote my topic
proposal with more questions than confirmations about what I already
researched and what would make a better topic. Also, I noted how my
experiences could help confirm and narrow my topic and what they would be
able to contribute to my research and final paper, documenting my findings
and providing commentary on how some of the findings are supported while
others may be disproven and may already have been. My topic proposal was
more of an extension of my ‘questioner’ daybook entry, with a more focused
topic and writing structure. This, I hope is due to my gradually improving
questioning methods, where I am able to organize my verbal curiosity into a
way they would make more sense to a reader other than me. I believe my
topic proposal also provided more insight into my way of analyzing due to the
organization of my questions and how my thoughts transitioned between each
other with obvious and implied connections. The topic proposal I ended up
turning in was only set on the most general basis of my research topic: Asian
and American cultures.
I started researching and finding sources based loosely on my topic
proposal and keeping my mind open to drastic changes to my topic and the
approach I would take to my research paper. Nothing was close to definite
yet. This shows my tendency to dwell on the analytical part of an assignment,
becoming very contemplative and thinking from a general view to a more
detailed view, as well as thinking in as many angles and perspectives,
providing as many alternate views and ways to interpret my topic as I can. My
annotated bibliography ended up being a combination of sources I would use
and sources I would not use, just to have a better transition from my
indecisions in the topic proposal to my actual research essay. I wrote the
annotated bibliography in a way that the sources I would use were not
guaranteed and explanations were given for the sources I would not use.
Those explanations hinted at my progress in arranging the structure and
organization of my research paper.
 As you can probably already tell by this time, my paper has established
itself as an exploratory essay. My final paper came to describe the factors that
would impact the integration of the Asian and American cultures, both
positively and negatively. My paper touched on the successful integration that
have occurred and possible success in the future. It also presented
possibilities of failure and what would cause those failures, which would
incorporate my exploration of how American society view Asians and our
culture. I found that my first draft focused a lot on the factors that would
impact the degree of success in integrating the two cultures, so for my final
revision I added in my personal experiences as anecdotes and response to
some of the information I found through the sources I included, which also
provided implications of successful integrations and continuous progress that
could lead to more success and co-existing of the Asian and American cultures.
This provided the conclusion of not only my research paper, but my Extended
Research Project as well.
The evidence for the development of my skills has been fully collected.
As for analytically and specifically pinpointing my improvement and
development as a critical thinker, writer and questioner, the extent of
knowledge this research essay gave me just about sums it up. I not only
learned more about my chosen topic of Asian and American cultural
integration, I also learned a lot about myself as an Asian American and also
became more conscious of the my methods of approaching research, as well as
how my thoughts are usually stimulated, organized and developed. I believe
that my random personality and therefore, tendency to randomly question
about everything, due to my diverse character and diversity in interests, has
been greatly improved to a more organized thought-by-thought induced
questioning and researching because of this assignment where I went through
a full process of inquiry and exploration. I hope you will be able to find that I
have improved by comparing my randomness in both my ‘questioner and
creative thinker’ daybook entries to the more closely located ‘analytical
thinker’ entry or the better detailed statements derived from the process of
my research and the thoughts that entailed because of my findings.
In conclusion, I believe that my daybook and informal writings can
directly relate to my final inquiry paper and completely encompass the
improvement I gained as a writer, thinker and questioner. Due to the
feedback I received and the helpful advice given each step of the way, I believe
I have taken a lot away from this semester long project that I can incorporate
later on in life, both in my intended career path, as well as just being a citizen
of society.
P.S. To Mr. Campbell specifically, I greatly enjoyed the class, both because it
was a very relaxing environment in which I could freely learn and ask
questions without inhibitions and because I greatly appreciate and find logic
and reason in the feedback both my classmates and you have given. I can
honestly say that you are one of two English teachers that I greatly respect
and genuinely love to learn from out of all my years in school so far. Thank
you for a great semester and a fun and enlightening class!!!

Always your student,

Ivy Tsai