Laying the Foundation for College-Level Study
The first college course I ever enrolled in was an English course. I took it because it was a logical choice. After all, every course in college requires some level of reading comprehension. I thought that the course would be challenging because it was a college course, but I didn’t think that there would be areas of which I was unfamiliar. I was wrong.
As my study guide and textbook arrived, I jumped right on in. At once I was pushing through essays and reading assignments. Writing has always come easy to me, so I thought I was made. Then along came a citation issue.
The issue was that I didn’t know how to cite sources, effectively paraphrase, or even productively research. I just never had to do this in high school. It certainly didn’t help that I went to prison when I was a senior in high school. Regardless, I didn’t graduate from high school and, thus, had obviously missed several of the important lessons. Instead of graduating before I went to prison, I earned a GED in prison.*1