Ending of the School Year
There are many things that I’ve got to learn and experience throughout my 2 years of middle school. I’ve learned many new life lessons and made many new friendships and lost a few of them, but that’s life, right? People come and go. My 8th grade year was cut off early due to COVID-19 and ever since we started being in quarantine, I’ve started to think more about all the memories I’ve had in school, being field trips, times with my friends, elective, and at times schoolwork. I’ve had both good times and bad times at school, but both of those experiences have helped me grow as a person and my thinking.
Experiences
My middle school experience has been normal, by normal I mean that I’ve had the average middle school routine that any other people have had. Both my 7th and 8th grade year were very different experiences, but both taught me different lessons throughout the years. As I looked through my old work, I noticed how my writing has changed throughout the years and my ability to develop more academically throughout the years. One of the projects that really changed my thinking was the monster symposium project because I had to analyze a movie, especially the movie that I chose which was the movie “Us” by Jordan Peele. This movie had many different messages and they were all hard to find out what they meant. Overall, the movie was a bit confusing and the message wasn’t clear but after I used critical thinking and changed the ways I saw things I was able to determine the message. I wrote “As this essay demonstrates, Jordan Peele uses the Tethered to embody fear of your own self and used the Tethered to show poverty, racism and homelessness” (Amezcua, pg.2). This is the message I ended up with and I’m proud of because it took a long time and a lot of thinking, research, etc. to find.
Struggles
Like anyone else I’ve had struggles in school, academically, with my grades and more things but I’ve always found a way to improve them and grow from those struggles. One of my biggest struggles in school is that I tend to limit my creativity knowing that I can do much better than the work I am providing. For example, on my blog post, if you go back to my week 1 (first) blog post you can see the difference between how this blog post (week 7) looks and the blogs I would use to post when I had just started. I feel like I’ve begun to improve and be more detailed by providing the necessary details. Before I would just get to the point and not explain myself so well which would bore the reader and make my writing not interesting and further on make someone not want to read it. I also used to not setup my blog post right and it would just be confusing to find. I’ve come to learn nowadays that I should stop limiting my creativity because I can do so much more and provide higher quality pieces of work.
Puzzles
Every day we will all have many things that we still don’t understand well or haven’t figured out. Some things are still confusing to me either in school or just daily life challenges. Something that I still haven’t figured out, but I have improved in are having strong conclusions in an essay or in writing. Usually my body paragraphs are strong but the only thing I still have a hard time in is citing correctly because if I cite incorrectly that can bring down some points in my work and it can affect my grade. I want to improve from both of these struggles I have because I want to be able to improve from my mistakes and I want to see and improvement in the future from when I look back at my old work.
Insights
Now that I think about the ending of the school year and the beginning of a new school year and going to high school very very soon I think about all the hard work I’ve accomplished and what I’ve learned about my work and how I can improve them now. For example, at the beginning of middle school I was not very good at public speaking and used to be shy but as I’ve gotten the opportunities to speak publicly for example when I have classwork that involves presentations or projects that involve me to present either in groupwork or independent work I’ve grown as a public speaker and become less shy. I feel like now I’m not shy anymore, of course there are times where I am bit shy but usually, I’m not. I’ve learned that when you speak publicly or any type of speaking in front of a crowd or group of people you shouldn’t rush what you are talking about when you get nervous because you won’t provide the information as clear as you would’ve liked to. And public speaking just takes practice, don’t be scared of public speaking because it can help you a lot in the future. Switching the topic, some insights I’ve learned about just life in general is that you shouldn’t surround yourself around people that make you unhappy, you can be so much happier by making the right friends who actually support you and don’t make you insecure or you don’t feel comfortable around. Another thing is that you shouldn’t believe what everyone else tells you, don’t let anyone change the way you are and don’t try to be someone you’re not because at the end of the day you’re limiting yourself from happiness. And remember to make the best out of your experience because those memories when you’re happy are the most important ones that you will cherish and look back at in the future. JUST ENJOY THE EXPERIENCE!!!!
Jennyfer A's 