ohmygoshwearedone!

This blog has been time consuming, work, not fun, tiring, and annoying, but I am very glad we did it. Although it was not the most fun assignment, it helped analyze books, quotes, and compare the books we read to real life so that it did not seem like we were reading all of those books because we had nothing better to do.  It also improved not only mine, but everyone's writing skills.

From my previous blogs, which start from the end of January for me because I created a new blog due to technical difficulties, I learned not only literal things like Romeo and Juliet can be seen everywhere including the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but also interpretive meanings of seemingly meaningless quotes of Pip, from Great Expectations. One of my favorite assignments was actually one of the blog assignments, from the beginning of the year when we had to write an entire post in certain diction. Now I will never forget what diction is, even when I am 30 and am much more knowledgeable.  Writing about ideas from novels relating to pictures or other movies/books to just our impressions or thoughts, the blog has been almost like a refuge for our ideas that we did not say in class.  I have said a lot of things on my blog that I would not normally say out loud or in a discussion, like in the post about conflicts I said "standing up for what you believe in will mend any of the damage to society by people being robots and believing everything they hear and only following, weather it is right or wrong..." which I would not have said because it was about technology and if someone was really into technology I didn't want to offend them. But I also think that some of my best ideas originated from my blogs.

Reading other people's blogs and adding on to what they discussed or starting a new chain of ideas from their blog helped me a lot, and is possibly a reason for the blogs.  In general,  the point of doing all of the work that came with the blog was to get deeper into what we were doing in class that week and also to practice writing.  Not only did it do that, it was also a weekly assignment so we had to remember to do it every week, which is a skill we will need as an adult. With routine, comes improvement. My writing has improved tremendously since eighth grade, you being a good teacher a big factor, but also the continuous practice I got with my blog.   When you first announced at the beginning of the year that we would be doing one, I thought you were the meanest teacher, but thank you for doing that. It has helped me so much! When we first started doing them I didnt put much effort into it, and i wouldn't go very deep, but in the past few blogs I feel like I did a great job analyzing and thinking about what I was writing.  I think that the blog deserves a nice good bye, so thank you blog you should know that from the thoughts of Theodore Roosevelt, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing (quotelady.com)."

The most memorable assignment... :)

This year in general has been my most favorite year of all.  A lot of it has been about the new friends I have made and the fabulous teachers, but it is just the step above middle school that I needed. English has always been one of my favorite classes and I have enjoyed most of the projects we have done, but the one that I feel the most proud of is my Great Expectations essay.  I worked really hard and spent a lot of time making every sentence as good as I could get it.  All of that effort and relentless analyzing made me realize how good of a book Great Expectations is and how amazing a writer Charles Dickens is, even though I still don't like his style.  While reading Great Expectations, I really hated it and dreaded reading it every night, but after I finished it and wrote the essay on shame, it magically became better!

Besides all of the annotations, word power quizzes, discussion questions and other small assignments and quizzes, I got the best score on this than any thing else. I feel like I deserved it too because this essay came first before my social life when I was writing it, sad, I know. Writing it was really fun for me and I wish that the Romeo and Juliet essay was that fun to write, but it wasn't. It was probably the most boring classroom time in this class, but the best outside of class time (after we finished the book). Now we are doing poetry, which I don't want to do, but as Robert Frost would say, "nothing gold can stay..."

Poetry

My past experiences with poetry have been limited and truthfully, very boring , but in third grade I clearly remember keeping a journal with all of my poetry that I wrote and also some of my favorite poems by the famous poet, Shell Silverstein. I remember one of them being titled "I'm mad" which was all of my problems from that day including walking through a spider web and having my younger sister take my gardening shovel. I think that back in third grade poetry helped me relieve some of my elementary school stress, and if I started writing again, could be a good relaxation device.

Also at Lincoln elementary school, my teacher would let us pick our favorite poems that we wrote or that we read out of our poetry book and read them in our circle time.  I would always read poems by Shell Silverstein because his poems were simple yet pleasing and funny. His interesting and random content made poetry fun for us, but now that I look back on them they definitely say something else. His poem Where the Sidewalk Ends  for a child was about, literally, where the sidewalk ended and the world dropped off into nothing, but now it is about a place where everything is better, but to get there is a challenge but the chalk arrows will always give a comforting sense of direction.  I agree with all of the pleased kids, that he is a good poet and my favorite so far.

Whenever I think of poetry I dread it. Most likely because of my horrible job in the poetry out loud competition, I really don't like poetry.  Memorizing words is very difficult for me and that is what I think of when I think of poetry. Writing it is not bad, it is actually pretty fun, but reading and analyzing it seems to ruin it because it is suppose to be what you get out of it without going deep into it as a school assignment.  If we could just spend a class period where we get an object or an idea and write a poem of our choice about it, that would be good. Or if we go outside on a nice day... even if I don't like it I can still make it fun for myself.