My dad always said, “Learning is a never ending experience”. Day by day, I blatantly ignored this quote until one-day light shined unto my eyes. That was the day that I experienced 8th grade. This year has been a horror movie with much of ups and downs, accomplishments and failures. This essay would showcase much of what I experienced during this auspicious year and my thoughts upon some further topics.
On the beginning of the year, we were supposed to write goals that we would try to accomplish during the duration of the school year. One of my major goals was to improve on my English, sentence fluency and enhance my limited vocabulary. Throughout the year we read some challenging books like Lord of the Flies, Tempest and the diary of Anne Frank. From reading these books, I have managed to understand and improve my vocabulary as reflected in my pass journals. Another great example of my growth could be reflected on the Anne Frank Project. Video editing was premature to me and I have only done once before in my life, but for the specific project we were supposed to showcase Anne’s message to the whole world. I worked on Windows Movie Maker and tried out each of features to create a message that would touch the lives of many people. The combination of music, text and images helped convey my message. My long hours of working and editing had paid off in a incredibly successful in the final product. I have also vastly improved my communicating skills with people around the world in the Teen Life project. Since we lived in different parts of the world, communication was a trouble. We sent emails back and forth, which took much time to get replied, but we still managed to work great collaboratively and created a illustrious final product. It was much of a achievement because we had many communication crisis but still managed to move forward and completed our assignment. Subsequently, drama was an overwhelming experience. I was dreadfully lucky because I have had some previous experience in drama but I have never really gave a 100% and show my true heart for acting. As quoted, ” practice makes perfect” and that was precisely true in Drama. I took my time and overcame many of my fears of performance in front of an audience. It was nervous at first but managed to pull myself out of my box so that I could express my true talents and gifts. Last but not least, my writing. Writing for different audiences was a tricky matter but we practiced different forms of writing, for instance, reflective journals, poetry and some other writing activities. Right now I am able to use different voices or different forms of writing, which greatly improves my forms of speech later on in life.
Moving on, the significance of reading and writing poetry. When I first entered the poetry unit, all was fresh to me. I knew absolutely nothing and was terrified even at the sound of the word. I started out slow, always nervous when writing poetry in class. Slowly and steadily I began progressing and felt comfortable writing poetry. I think that writing poetry helps express your inner emotions unto paper, whenever you angry, sad happy, poetry gives you the freedom of speech and to just take control of your vocabulary and write up whatever that’s on your mind. It’s amazing to see what just a mixture of words can create such an image into the readers mind. Writing poetry helps release a lot of stress and it makes you feel comforted after you fully expressed your emotions. Reading poetry on the other hand also contributes much to your English. You can explore freely the work of others and relate them to yourself. You would also learn from other accomplished poets that learn from their writing
The ESLR were something new to me and I found myself trapped in my own world learning about them. I barely understood them after reading the descriptions but the one that was most relevant to me was being Critical Thinker. I think that a Critical Thinker would be able to solve problems by using whatever resources they have. I started realizing what these mean and found out that they relate much to my work, more so on my Anne Frank Project. We were split up into groups to work together on a Final Product that consists of a reflective journal and a video. One of our members gave a lackluster effort into helping the team finish the required work, so my remaining groupie and me had to become Critical Thinkers and also work effectively together to finish the remainder of the project. We had much trouble but in the end we endured and came out on top. Another example would be when preparing for the Lord of the Flies project. We had many choices into what type of project we would want to do and each of them has a specific major. I chose to do a writing project since the others were mainly focused on Visual, art and creativity that were not my strong points. In the end, I have fully progressed much on my Critical Thinking skills. These abilities would help me much in the future and in the work life where there would be bigger dilemmas and even higher stakes.
In conclusion, the 8th grade has brought trials and tribulations that one could not miss out on. A time of learning and failing that could be the building blocks of your life.
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