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. 

College Essay

Childhood Memories

I was eight years old in the third grade; my sister was eighteen in her senior year in high school. My sister had made what many people would call a “mistake” and became pregnant. This affected my life greatly. I was young and didn’t quite understand how this would affect me for the rest of my life but it did. It made home life difficult because my sister was always there for me after school when my mom was working late. After a couple of years she moved on with her life and moved out. I had to become independent.

Although my parents were always there to support me, they both worked jobs with long hours. My parents were divorced when I was nine months old and I have always lived with my mother. She always provided everything for me but worked several jobs. I learned how to cook dinner and do household chores around the house.
Seeing how one “mistake” affected my sister’s life so greatly made me more cautious about the decisions I made in my own life. Unfortunately these events in my life had a negative impact on me too. I grew up hearing that I was going to end up just like my sister for a long time. For half of my life I felt like I was growing up in her shadow and that everyone doubted my ability to achieve. This really affected me when I was younger. I wanted to break out of the box people placed me in and show them I was a totally different person.

My family put me down many times over the course of my life. They thought that since I wasfrom a city and had a public education I would end up no where. I took their negativity and made it positive for myself. I strived to do the best I could in school. My dad pushed me. I managed to get good grades and excel into Honors and AP classes throughout my high school career. Not only is it a great feeling to prove to people that I could do something they said I couldn’t. But it’s even more rewarding to know that I achieved it through my hard work and dedication to what I believed in.

Today I am seventeen years old and my sister is twenty-seven. She now has three kids and is unfortunately divorced. Her own “mistake” shaped my life greatly it made me cautious but also showed me that I cannot categorize people by where they come from or who their family is. I realize that I can’t let the harsh statements from people set me back. Instead I should use it as motivation. Thankfully through these hard times I have been able to maintain a close relationship with my parents, my sister, and my three nephews. More importantly I have become a positive row model and active person in my nephew’s life. Providing them with the attention I wasn’t always granted growing up. I try to attend most of their sporting events, baby-sit when needed, and visit on birthdays and holidays with hopes that they realize what took me many years to realize that there is always someone there for them.

I was lucky enough to have both my parents stand by my side and care about me. Moreimportantly I had my dad’s side of the family throughout my life to support me and to help me through hard times. Today I am a young adult who is ready to succeed more in my life.