Writing Feedback / "try to live within your means" - my Cause and Effect Essay [4]

I don't know that I was swept away by greed or material possessions but I do admit that I had a long term motive. We bought a second home because we were relocating but we also thought it would be a great long-term retirement investment. Then the decline in the economy happened.

Three years ago my Family and I moved to Fort Mill, SC from Erie, PA. We had bought a home in Erie, and lived there for one year. My husband during this time was exploring other avenues of work when he came across a position in Charlotte, NC. We then had to make a snap decision on whether to buy a home or rent. We had this notion that buying a home would be cheaper than renting so we decided on a whim to purchase.

My husband ended up moving before me and he left me behind to sell the house we had in PA. My husband and I have always been good about making decisions together, but this was something he had to take on himself. He found a home within a week of looking and signed the papers. We felt as if this great burden was lifted, our house sold quickly in PA and we had a place to call home in SC. We knew that we didn't want to live in our new home forever but figured after a couple of years we would find our dream home and then rent this one out for extra income as we would hang on to this as a future retirement investment. Well we couldn't have been more wrong.

Our first down fall was the new mortgage with an arm that lenders were offering to homebuyers; they had a way of making it sound so appealing. The major seller was you didn't need any money down. This was a great option for us seeing as we had no money, we had just relocated and we had a baby on the way. The thing that should have raised red flags were the two mortgages with fluctuating interest rates after five years. Nevertheless, our real-estate agent had us convinced that this was the right thing to do and reassured us that five years would be plenty of time to refinance and combine our mortgages; we shouldn't worry about a thing.

Here we are three years into living in our future retirement investment thinking to ourselves; what are we going to do now. The economy has taken a dive and the housing industry has taken a major hit. We now can't refinance like we had planned because now the price of our home has dropped dramatically and unfortunately everywhere you look you can find the same townhome uninhabited and selling for a dime a dozen.

I do feel that we were taken advantage of by the double mortgage deal, but I think we were not so smart on buying the house on a whim. We jump too quickly sometimes and don't weigh out all of our options. Of course, we could never have predicted what has happened with the economy, I just think we should have been smarter. Unfortunately you can't predict the future nor should you try. I have learned that you should always try to live within your means and never buy something with the thought of you will be able to pay that off, because you just never know where life is going to take you.

Writing Feedback / Addressing the one or two problems of not utilizing your Course Textbooks [3]

Word Length 500
Really struggling with this essay....
I would really appreciate any and all comments. I feel I was really all over the place with this essay.

Textbooks are one of the most important tools when it comes to learning. Somewhere along the way, students I believe have come to think that they just don't need one. At the beginning of a semester, so many students come to their first class without a textbook. When asked why they are without a book they say they didn't want to waste their money on something they may not need. They thought they would come to their first class, feel their teacher out, and make a decision then on whether or not they think it will be useful to them. When did this become the norm?

Sometimes it's hard for teachers to remember that students will not dedicate all of their attention to everything that they are saying. There are so many students with learning disabilities or different techniques of learning. Having a book to look back to after class can help clarify questions, a student may have or for some it's somewhere that they can go to on their time where it's quite and they can reflect on class in their own way.

You may have a teacher whose teaching style you just don't jive with. For whatever reason everything your teacher says may make absolutely no sense to you. By having a textbook to fall back on you can then make sense out of what you learned by combining the teachers thoughts with your book.

Textbooks contain so much more content then one teacher can cover on their own. Teachers only have so much time to spend with you. The research that our textbooks provide can help them with the students learning experience. This gives the teacher the ability to focus on things they feel are important and rely on the book to teach you the things that they just don't have time to do.

There are many strategies I believe teachers can use to keep students focused and interested in there textbooks. I think teachers need to keep the book as part of the class learning experience, incorporating it with their curriculum. Giving students assignments that force them to pull information from their books. When teachers stray from the textbooks and use other sources, so will their students. There is so much technology out there today, not that that is wrong to search for information outside of your books but I think it's a great starting point for all students.

I also think it's important to keep textbooks current. It's way easier to keep students interested in their textbooks if they can relate to them. I personally find it more interesting when I have to read an assignment out of my textbook and I can relate to it in some way whether it is a chapter in English about how to write an essay and there is an example essay about the current economic downfall. I find it interesting to have to read a chapter out of my math textbook but the examples relate to current on the job experiences. We just need to make students realize that book are no longer an just an option, we need to make them realize what a great tool they really can be.