Personal Growth

My senior year has been one of the most hectic times in my life. I’ve had to balance everything from AP and honors courses to being a captain and a president of a club along with the process of applying for college and fitting work and a social life all into this busy schedule. It was very hard for me to get into a consistent school schedule with everything going on in my life and at times I became very unfocused especially in the beginning of the year when I was trying to establish a balance of all these activities. As my year comes to an end I’ve noticed my own work in English class become better.

            English has never been my strong subject. I always know what I want to say and I always have very strong opinions but it’s very hard for me to get it down on paper. It is also very hard for me to open up in front of a large group of people that I’m not comfortable around because I have a fear of being incorrect. Although I believe I could have improved a lot more if I put more time and effort into the course I do believe I have improved a great deal over the year. My first explication of the year, which I put on the blog, was the “red shift”. This explication showed that I needed a lot of work in this area. I worked hard on many of my explications. And even though I never really scored high on them by my last explication that I wrote this year on A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man I really felt I was finally able to grasp all the parts you need to cover in an explication. Even though my grade wasn’t that high on this paper I feel like I executed the paper in a more efficient way. I still need to work on the details of the explications but I finally feel as if I understand the correct way to set it up.

            One of the assignments I really feel that I showed my progress in was my College Essay. I was able to reflect all of my feelings and my experiences in a short essay. I think this piece was one of my best writing assignments all year. This is because I was able to put my own personal story behind my writing. This made me a lot more enthusiastic and passionate about my writing.

            The one thing that stood out at me from the beginning of the school year was my journal entries from summer reading. I read two books and both sets of journal entries only took up one page back and front for each book. Now as I look at my journal entries I realized that one entry would take up the amount that four or five did in the summer. This not only shows that I have made more of an effort in my work but it also shows I have widened my thought process and I analysis work better than I did in the beginning of the year. My work has become more extensive and I have an easier time at finding the deeper meaning in all of the pieces we have worked with. Before this year I struggled to find the deeper meaning in any work because I was never sure how to find it. But over the course of the year I have learned how to interpret an authors work through symbols and other literately techniques to find this deeper meaning.

            Throughout High School I have been the kid who could not study and slack off enough that I did the work but not to my best effort and still pull off good grades in hard classes.  But as my senior year is coming to an end I realized that I could have done a lot better. I realized that if I applied myself more to my study’s I would probably be higher up in the class rank. It’s not that I couldn’t do the work throughout my senior year but its that many times I found myself less focused with it because my friends weren’t home focusing on it. I would often wait till the last minute to complete assignments because I was either too busy with another subject or I was too busy with outside activities. So when I stayed up till 3 in the morning to finish that 12-page explication the only person I could blame was myself. That’s why I can truly say I am taking a lot away from this English class and its a lot more than writing. I picked up better working habits that I will hopefully carry with me to college so that I wont be up all night typing a paper or cramming for a test.