For English it is easy to see the class has been sowing down a considerable amount with the trimester coming to a close along with everyone finishing their book. It also helps that the exam will not be to challenging, I am not saying it will be a complete blow off but I think it will be easy to the max. That's just how I have always been on English tests though, even if they were on material I didn't know I found that I went through the test or exam at a surprisingly fast rate despite my knowledge on the subject. In my honors English 11 class i found myself racing against other people to finish first and be done. The result of that was getting a 92 or 93 on a test instead of a 100% but I was happy with that regardless. Its funny how you can do good on something you have no idea what your doing. Last year for my AP history class we had to write these big response questions and i always found them really easy due tot eh fact that a lot of the time I just BS'd my way through them so that makes me think whether or not trying your best is really effective.
This week went by as most others do, we read as a class and had a few assignments here and there , nothing really to challenging. It was so easy actually that on Thursday I got through the assignment early enough in the hour that I was able to watch you tube for the rest of the hours. This being said this class has become very low leveled is the best way I can describe it. A lot of people do not have good grades in this class because of different reasons. I can't really go to far into this but the people that don't have good grades do have a valid argument that not a lot of grades are being entered or they are turning in assignments but they are being put back and that their is no way for their grade to get better because of the amount that seems to be needed to be graded. Many pages were read this week, we had a good amount of reading to do which did take a while including reading out of school and in on the same days which were not really a big problem. I am a little disappointed in choice of book so I will be glad to finish it soon.
This week we started reading our new book that were assigned to us before Andy left. At first my group had an argument in my group as to which book we were going to read but eventually we came to the conclusion of the argument and we decided as a group we were going to read A Brave New World. I was excited for this book and was not disappointed when I began to read it. It talks of a perfect future where everybody is before birth given a role and without everybody working together the whole system would collapse in on itself. The book is mainly based around Bernard who cannot seem to find the purpose of the system and so he is seen as an oddball or an outsider. This book speaks to me in the way that at times it can seem like everybody is together in a collaboration against you. This week is also Halloween so on the day of fri I came to school in a polar bear costume and it has been awesome so far.
Can a community come together without trust or righteousness
If a group of people are together without trust or righteousness then how could they be suspected to do the right thing without doing the right thing. This week it kind of seems like we did a loop getting into another set of groups and then choosing a book along with a question that we can use to guide us through the book. Its not that I am not interested in the groups book I was more or less hoping for an independent project or smaller groups not big ones. It seems that their is a bunch of chaos with these larger groups and that it will take even longer with a sub in class in charge of everything. I guess it will be able to be handled but the pace of class is going to be slower, which to me seems boring. This week in class the main objective was to read the book Andy gave us the choice of choosing last week for us to read and find the answer to the question we as a group made last week. My group chose to read the book The Alchemist. For most all of my high school career in English when i have been giving a book I would do that average thing most kids would do and joke around when time to read the book was given to me. I was lucky enough though to apply myself in what seemed to be a very little amount my junior year and get into honors English 11. As much fun as the class was I found that I actually enjoyed the books I was suppose to read like lord of the flies and Frankenstein. Bringing this back to The Alchemist and English 12 I found that I actually wanted to read the book and that it was not a bad story although I am quite disappointed in the ending of the book.
This week the class was given books to read that they could use to answer their questions from the previous week. I was gone Monday for class so I kind of came in late to the whole project and had to join in a group with some friends. The book they had chosen was The Alchemist, initially I thought this book would be a walk in the park. The Alchemist is a good book from the twenty pages I have read so far, being an eighth of the way through the book so far and thinking it was going to be an easy read to decided slack of for the next day and a half. This was not a good decision because I found coming back to the book that I no longer was interested in the story of the book or what it had to offer. To make things worse I had no idea what the group question was and how to apply it to this book so it was easy to come to assumption that I had no idea what I was doing. Frankly i'm still confused on what I am doing but I was able to come by the information that we need to apply the pictures that we get from the book to the phrase that we have as a group.
This week I learned how difficult it can be when a large group of people try to upload something to you-tube, it takes awhile to say the least. With various people having problems on different subjects it made for a busy time for Andy in the classroom. I can say feeling pretty good that I was not an adding factor to the chaos. That was probably because since the beginning of sophomore to the current time in senior year I have been the class Digital Media in the tech center. Having had the class for two years now uploading a video to you-tube was no problem at all and being in that class was able to make the process of making the video a whole lot easier. This would explain why I was slightly startled when I heard that there was very few others who were done with the project. I kind of took my basic skills that acquired throughout digital media as a given that most people had so it would be easy for everyone to finish their video and upload it to you-tube in a timely manner. I was wrong seeing how so many people were surprised when it came to the uploading time it was able to give me a full circle moment of when i had to be helped on how to upload stuff to you-tube.
What did we learn this week: This week in class we spent the majority of the time typing our "This I Believe" paper. At first I thought this would be an easy assignment that i could knock of in one day then spend the rest of the week playing minesweeper on the library computers or continuing reading comic books in class. I was wrong, it is not that this assignment took more brain power, it just took different brain power. When you normally write a paper in school it is and argumentative one that requires you to make a point that you have to argue over. This paper is different in that i'm not really arguing over the point i'm just telling the reader something I believe in through the from of a story that brings the reader in and by the end of it makes them think about what they believe. It is not the point in this paper to make somebody who is and atheist or an agnostic turn their ways around and become a born again christian or Muslim. The point is to bring up something you believe in, if it makes somebody question their own belief in that subject I guess that's just a bonus. This made it hard for me to even begin this paper, I have many beliefs but i realized as I was going through them that i have beliefs in things because of stories others have told me about themselves or people they know and have read about. It really made me reevaluate those ideas that I had to the point that i was able to come up with a belief I found I could say I have gone through to figure out and could apply to myself in various situation.
|
Jack
|