There are many things to consider as one year ends and another begins, one being my progress in English class. I am proud to say that there has been an upward trend in my work (from the start of first quarter to now). As an English 2 student, I must ask myself three questions to determine my success into third and the final quarter of the school year.
- What has been your greatest success in English class this quarter? Why?
- What has been your greatest challenge in English class this quarter? Why?
- What is one specific thing that you will do next quarter to improve yourself and/or your work in English class? How will this one thing improve you and/or your work in English class?
Achieving the Impossible
....or at least what I believed to be impossible. Throughout my life, I always enjoyed writing essays (as much as one can enjoy writing essays). I believed that if I was given sufficient time to work on something, I could do well on the assignment. I found that my work lacked in its quality earlier this year. Normally I spent so much time perfecting an essay, but as a tenth grader at Windermere Prep, I prioritized incorrectly and pushed English aside. I am happy to say that this quarter I finally started prioritizing correctly. Although our last blog post and the article we wrote in class weren't exactly formal essays, they still required as much work. I am proud that I finally gave myself ample time to complete the assignments to the best of my ability. I researched thoroughly on both projects before starting, and I got out most of my ideas in my rough drafts (I spent remaining days to clean up and fix the work). Working on these two projects for a long amount of time contributed to my success on these assignments, and it allowed me to build confidence in my writing (that I needed!).
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Nobody Said It Was Easy
My greatest challenge remains to be focusing on my work. Sometimes when I write, I get lost (not in the good way), and I confuse myself even more. It's also hard for me not to be distracted by things outside of my work. In this day and age there are so many distractions. I find it so hard to concentrate on specific things, and that is when I start to have trouble on my English assignments. In the future I hope to be able to eliminate all the distractions around me and work. It is difficult for me to focus in all of my classes, but it is getting increasingly harder for me to concentrate on my English work. I hope to gradually become more focused, and I hope to improve on my time management skills.
Something I Need to Work On
One thing I am going to improve on next semester will be annotating/note-taking with the books we will read. Over the quarter, I don't think I spent enough time taking notes on the book, so I didn't understand a lot until our discussions. I want to write better annotations so that it will help me when I am writing an essay or when I need to study for an assessment on the book. I'm going to either write notes, quotes, and important in the margins or on a separate document so that I can understand the book more (and so it will be easier for me to find quotes for the book if I ever have an assignment when I need to). I only realized the importance of annotating recently, so I will definitely annotate books/short stories we read later this year. I look forward to the next semester in English, not because we're halfway done with the year, but because I feel that I will be well-prepared for what lies ahead.
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