I thought that English was pretty fun this year, especially because we didn't have a huge ten page paper to do or something similar to one. Having the options for the essays and projects was great as not only did it allow us as students to better express ourselves, it made it much more interesting when we got around to presenting the projects. The poetry project was sort of boring in this regard as everyone's was pretty much the same thing. The choice reading on Fridays was good and I think most of the students read at least one more book this year than they would have usually read. The book clubs along with the discussions were alright and I liked how we could choose what book we read (but I wish I didn't read Blindness as the book was really weird and the ending was garbage). For the poetry project I wish that we got to pick from all of the names by choice at the start because some kids may have not really liked their poets that much, but that would be problematic as some students might want the same poet. The presentations were pretty boring (mine included) as the rubric for the project really only allowed us to write an original poem (of which I think literally no one read out loud). These problems might be better attributed to the class being first period and no one really being awake yet.
I very much enjoyed reading on Fridays as it was relaxing to come into school and start it with reading something I wanted to read, rather than having a test or something. I also liked reading Hamlet, but I think I might be alone among my classmates on that. I wasn't really that big of a fan of Oedipus or Antigone, I could follow the books fine, but I think that they were just kind of boring reads. Although you did make the projects for them pretty fun so I don't know how you could make reading them not boring.
With the choice reads and the book club meetings (and me having an AP European history class) I think I read more this year than I did last year (I only read two books in English last year, Gatsby and the Crucible). To be fair, we did spend most of last year writing a big research paper on Gatsby and over analyzing something for that long will make almost anything get stale pretty quick. At least last nowhere near as bad as when we had to read the House on Mango Street in middle school and spent more than half the year on a book that is about one hundred pages long. I didn't feel like any of the books we read this year got to much time devoted to them to the point that they got boring so that's good.
I liked the blogs and some of the essays we wrote like the one comparing Oedipus to another tragedy. Which I compared to one of my favorite games that being Warcraft III. I thought that was fun and talking about something you like is authentic in my opinion. This reflection is also authentic as it is practically just one big opinion piece.
I felt like letting us choose our Friday reading book, our book club books, topics for essays and topics for projects made it so everyone's English experience was different this year. The personal choice definitely made it feel like there was more personal control over what we were learning this year and the variety of choices we had made presenting projects more interesting, as they were usually on different topics of were different projects. I certainly think I am probably the only students to have written one of their essays on WarCraft III ever (out of curiosity were there any other years when a student wrote that essay on something that wasn't a book like I did?) Reading Laughter in the Dark went down well with the class and everyone seemed to like the book, the Friday reading sessions also went well as I don't remember a time when people were talking or doing other homework during one of them.
I can think of two things that would have made English better this year. One would be having the period happen later in the day (but you can't really do much about that one) and the other would be to have a better variety of book choices for the book clubs. Three of the book club books were dystopian fiction, and the others just seemed kinda depressing from what I saw from the other group's projects. You could have a survey or just talk to the class about this, but I would recommend having a horror book and a fantasy/science fiction book next year for the sake of variety (and more variety is usually more fun). While reading a book like Blindness was interesting, I was mostly just grossed out by it, which is something I'm not looking for in a book that I'm reading for fun. I would much rather read a more fun book about a less depressing topic for my book club book, but maybe that is just me. I do think that most of the people in the class that read Blindness agree that the ending was terrible, so maybe next year you could try to look for books that have interesting or more thought provoking endings to them.
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