Samantha Martyn

ENG 111: Critical Reflection

Paul Anderson
Mid Michigan Community College
11/24/2014

Critical Reflection
My synthesis essay about special education teaching was suppose to inform parents,
educators, and anybody interested about the education of special education teachers and how
much education a teacher really needs to properly teach. I chose this topic due to my own parents
having to struggle with the school board on whether or not my brother was autistic.
Unknowledgable teachers would set him off and make him angry and would ultimately blame
him because they had no knowledge on his disability. Due to my experience in this I have first
hand knowledge about how important it is for teachers to receive a proper education that would
ultimately benefit both the student and teach in the end. My sources came from colleges,
universities, and programs where teachers and specialized people in the field did experiments
and tried to come up with the best solutions to the debate.
In my synthesis I feel it was more objective rather than expressing my view mainly
because most of the sources I found all support my view point so my viewpoint blended in. I
feel that I should have put more into the conclusion and intro to further develop my point of view
so that the paper could have been better. Further relation to the audience would have also helped
my paper in showing how the paper would be relevant to them instead of just spouting out facts
and expecting them to relate the subject and their experience.
My choice of words also could have been smoother. There are some instances where I feel
like the paper is a bit choppy and could have been re-worded differently.Grammar errors also
occurred throughout the paper and could have been corrected. It also sounded like I may not
have been clear in the middle of my paper on what my original thesis was, so my thesis could
have restated more and related to the sources.

Samantha Martyn
ENG 111: Critical Reflection
Paul Anderson
Mid Michigan Community College
11/24/2014

I chose my sources based on how related they were to higher education of teachers. If the
author was a actual professor or had experience in helping to improve special education then I
considered them and whether or not they were relevant to my topic. At the beginning when I was
first starting my paper I realized that I had too many sources and even though the topic was
narrowed down to failure in the education system that the topic was still too broad. Since I was
limited in relating my paper to higher education instead of focusing on the student aspect and
how poor teachers result in students with poor life skills I focused on what should a special
education teacher have to be considered a good teacher. Going into detail on if the acts that were
made helped or hindered. If I had been able to write about the students point of view I would
have had more sources and easily have been able to relate the topic to why parents should know
about what special education teachers are teaching, being taught, and who they are having help
them.
I feel that having to relate to higher education hindered my writing because I was more
interested in the student aspect of how teachers need a proper education and there was even
more sources there than what I ended up writing and more controversy. Which in the end made it
a lot harder to write and focus when I had to relate everything to higher education. Overall my
paper needed some tweaking and would have turned out better.
Good points I liked about my paper was that even though I was limited on sources the
sources that were there to use were quite thorough and very legit. The author Westling was
especially useful in pointing out there there had been experiments on teacher knowledge and
what the results were. He compared the differences between a special education teacher and a
general teacher and showed that knowledge can be important in order to properly teach.

Samantha Martyn
ENG 111: Critical Reflection
Paul Anderson
Mid Michigan Community College
11/24/2014

I also liked how everything in my paper was interrelated. The NCLB and IDEA acts
could be related to policies and then down to teachers and disability students. It was like the
circle of life where without one part you could no longer properly complete what needed to be
done. An example being that if there were not disability students there would be no need for
teachers in that field or if there were no acts to protect the students then there would be no need
to have properly trained special education teachers because they would be overlooked.
Mentioning that the NCLB and IDEA acts should be changed to include proper
information on what to do for special education teachers is something I am glad I mentioned.
The main reason being just because an act is not working does not mean that the act should be
discontinued but rather fixed . The acts themselves were helpful when protecting disability
students rights and I have seen it with my own eyes protecting my brothers right to get a proper
education. Its just that the lawmakers werent thorough in looking at all the angles in the law
before having it put to use.
Altogether my paper could have been more focused and grammatically correct and
even had more of my own opinion in it but it still showed the facts accurately and what could be
done to solve the problem. The paper itself required lots of detail and conversation between
authors and although I love to add detail in to make a paper better I felt like I did struggle with
making a conversation between sources. I think it was because this is the first time I have written
such a thorough paper that had to have conversation between opinionated authors other than
myself so I was not sure what to expect. I did read the example and Im sure I could have written
my paper just like the example paper but where is the fun in that? I wanted to learn firsthand
what exactly made a synthesis paper tick and I found I was more comfortable not stating my

Samantha Martyn
ENG 111: Critical Reflection
Paul Anderson
Mid Michigan Community College
11/24/2014

opinion in a well researched paper due to feeling like my experiences dont quite add up to the
highly experienced authors I was using on the subject. I did find the outline for making a
synthesis paper useful though in showing me where exactly the conversations between authors
should be. I feel that as far as a grade on my paper goes if I was to give it a grade it would be a
C+ but of course I do not have any knowledge in grading synthesis papers so this is my own
opinion.