A lot has happened over the past school year. Friends were made, fun was had, but most importantly, things were learned. As students, we built upon what we already knew and grew in many ways, especially as a 10th grade English students. If you don’t already know the five aspects of English are: reading, writing, viewing, listening and speaking.

The first aspect of English that I grew in was reading. While I used to pride myself on being a good reader (I still do) I didn’t really know what a good reader was until Mr. Luizzi made it more clear. He stated that there are two kinds of readers. There are those that read books for some quick entertainment and then there are those that read and search for deeper meaning. What motivated the author to write this? What is the symbolism here? It is this fine line that I crossed. While reading, my mind probably pondered over these questions but never really gave it a good enough look. Well, I got plenty of practice this year! I believe that I read around twelve books just for this school year. Please check out my reading list. That’s a lot of reading and there was even more stress because Mr. Luizzi had us going at a pace of a new novel every two weeks in the beginning of the year. You can tell I’ve improved by viewing journals from the beginning of the year and then viewing journals from the latter part of the year. My journals exemplify the new perceptive skills I have attained. Also know that I’ve grown as a reader because I’m, well, me. I also have increased my vocabulary through all the reading because my journals will exemplify better vocab usage than from a year ago. I guess all those hours doing vocab did pay off!

I also have improved drastically from last year in terms of writing. Writing is a biggie! I’ve probably grown most of all in writing, or this is the most notable improvement out of the five aspects of English. When I reflect back upon this year and look back on my freshman year, I notice how much I have improved. This is improvement can be accredited to the amount of practice we, as a class, received in writing. We wrote many, many journals which allowed us to reflect in short bursts what we had read. This helped us develop more skills in analyzing the text we had read. This is very closely associated with reading. These smaller writing assignments paved the way for much larger and more heavily weighted assignments. This included our analytical research paper, which required that we read two novels in a particular category and then write a 6-7 page research paper. This assignment was more of a learning experience than a success story. While I didn’t do very bad, I was a little confused of in what direction I should go in. I really learned a lot about the process of writing a major research paper and how the focus of your paper can easily stray and constantly needs to be emphasized and stressed during your paper. My papers from the previous year were much shorter and lacked a constant focus. It sort of skipped to vague topics. I also learned a lot about creative writing. While we didn’t write in this medium often the few times we did it paid off. I wrote two short stories. One,Empty Dreams, involved a family deciding to come to America for a better life at the turn of the century and was partly based off family history. Here I gained some experience with mixing fact with some fiction as well as your own opinion. My second short story,Epidemic, was required to exemplify the theme of hysteria in it, yet had no other creative restrictions. This allowed me experiment and gain some confidence when writing pure fiction. Also if you look at my introduction you can see how much more informative this end of the year conclusion is than the beginning of the year intro.

The third aspect of English that I improved upon was viewing. This is a little tougher to describe and prove than the other aspects. First, I love watching movies and have seen a lot of them. Watching so many gives you a lot of practice in trying to determine how the director of a movie interpreted a piece of literature and then allows you to form your own opinions and interpretations. This past year, we viewed only a few films and plays. Yet, if you have seen the movie of one of the books I have read, you can view my journals or research paper to see the differences in interpretations.

Next on the list is listening and speaking. I’m including them together because they go together, hand in hand. Listening and speaking form a good part of a play. I believe we read three plays this year, Julius Caesar, Oedipus Rex and The Crucible. When reading all these plays we not only listened to it being performed but acted it out and spoke it. I believe that it is important to realize both the importance and viewpoint of the actor (speaker) onstage as well as the viewpoint of the audience (listener). I think that I improved in both these areas. Hey! Did you know that if you rearrange the word l-i-s-t-e-n it will spell the word s-i-l-e-n-t. There’s a little bit of info to use with next years kids!

Well, upon this reflection, I’ve noticed how much I’ve grown throughout the year in so many areas. I have improved in spots, such as my research paper’s focus and added to strengths such as my enriched vocabulary. All in all it was a good year. Thanks!!!