Final English Reflection

  Isaiah Quinones
  5/11/17

1:  Having the freedom of choice when it comes to doing various projects in the class gave a great positive impact on my work. The freedom of choice made me more accountable for the quality of my work as it was my executive decision alone on what i was to be doing my project on and not an every day assignment that was forced upon me. I loved the push for giving us many options for our projects as i felt more of a drive to complete them with my best  effort as it was something i became much more passionate about. I felt more creative as well when doing a project that i was able to choose the topic on or the actual project its self when in comparison to the generic projects that were given in the past such as freshmen year.

2: I was surprised at the ability for me to genuinely enjoy reading this year. Through both the books we read in class and our Friday personal reading books, i found great pleasure in reading books this year. The most time i found to enjoy reading came with our personal reading book for Fridays as the work that went along with it was not very taxing and actually helped me to comprehend the book as i was forced to comprehend my reading furthering my understanding of the novels in which i read. I did not however enjoy the blog posts as they did feel slightly repetitive when i did not finish my book and ended up with two blog posts for one book.

3: I have read more this year then any time in years past. From the Friday reading books to the multitude of books we had read in class and even at some points simultaneously, I was able to find a lot of time to get to read this year. This year gave me a new found love to literature even going as far as my self reading at home on my own.

4:  I felt that my writing experiences this year were very authentic as i wrote to prompts that i have never really experienced in the past. The creative writing piece where i continued the story for Laughter in the Dark which was very adventurous and tested my writing skills. I felt that every writing piece this year challenged my skill to write in a different way which kept it fresh. The re visionary period also gave me sufficient time to understand where i could improve and reflect. The feedback was also very detailed allowing me to truly improve my work from one essay to the next.

5:  I felt very in control of my learning experience this year by really getting out what i put in this year. The projects that gave great variation along with many options to choose from gave each student in the class the ability to choose how they would experience senior English. Examples of this would include this project right now, the poetry projects, the final Laughter in the Dark projects, and the final Oedipus and Antigone projects we had. If i had to choose one class project i felt went very well i would have to go with the final Laughter in the Dark assessment. I have never experienced this form of creative writing before in my life and you had encouraged my to try new things and test it out which resulted in what i felt was a very well crafted piece of work derived from trying new things. I never would have choose this own my own given the 5 other options, but this resulted in further developing my artistic creative writing ability which i was very happy with.

6: Most of the negative experiences this year came from most of the curriculum that you are forced to teach with some of the books being very slow and hard to get into like Hamlet. One major thing i would work to change is focusing on one thing at a time as reading multiple books at once and doing simultaneous projects senior year can become very overwhelming especially during the start of the year when we had scholarship essays to write and college applications and such. Overall i had a great experience this year and I loved having you as a teacher this year! keep being awesome.

  Love,

Isaiah Quinones