Richard Kern
Dr. Preston
English 3
June 2, 2017
A Look Back
A Reflection of this
year
Have you ever looked back and asked
yourself if you could have done something better? This year in English Class
has been a very interesting and surprisingly very enjoyable one. This year has
had its ups and downs but for the most part this was a big year for me to grown
and learn into what I am at the end of the year. I have learned a lot and have
been given a lot of information that I really haven’t taken advantage of even
though I should have. There is going to be 7 elements of that things that we
talked about spread throughout this essay about the things that happened and
the things that I have personally learned about this year in my English class.
This year in class was all about
communication and learning to trust one another in a new way. We have been
treated as colleagues and had some very big choices in the way that we learned
and the way the course was even being taught. Also, we have been given such an
important level of trust. I feel that at times we really deserve the trust but
sometimes we just abused this power and just didn’t do the work that we were
supposed to. Some people had this trust all year but some lost it. I feel that
we all earned it but sometimes we really didn’t honor it. Sometimes we are
giving a certain amount of trust and we either keep it or lose it no matter
what.
The characters that we were reading
about felt real even though they were fiction but some felt real. “The lie that
tells the truth” is a perfect way to describe some of the characters such as
Montag who realized that technology can make people blind to emotion and
feelings. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald is a novel that shows
many various parts of society like the rich but the miserable, Gatsby, or the
pretend that everything in the world is positive even though you are sad,
Daisy. I feel that Montag kind of showed a part me because I can see that
everyone loves and pays more attention to their phone more than their friends.
Richard Cory was also a character that is very like how I am in the way that he
keeps things to himself and doesn’t really need to show a lot to people. The
way that the authors of these books and poems used diction and syntax was so
well because it made the characters on paper feel so real and genuine. Sometimes
I feel that through books and movies we can find ourselves in characters that
are just made up.
Sometimes things that we love or
find enjoyable can be forgotten but then brought back better than ever and
predictions can be so scary that they become reality. This year I have been
going back to listening to music a lot because in 7th and 8th
grade I would always have my iPod on but freshman and sophomore year I didn’t
really listen to music I just started to just leave my phone home and throw
away my headphones. One of the things that made really laugh was that the
events that were happening in the book Fahrenheit 451 were starting to
happen in our real time and the book was already old so the author Ray Bradbury
was able to predict such thing is crazy and really funny if you think about it.
The fact that something from a sci fi book can start to happen is crazy.
There are many ways and things to
teach but sometimes people think alike and can create something different and
be so similar. In the masterpiece academy presentations, many people went but some
of them could be considered similar such as Adrian and Elias’s presentations
were similar because of the way they talked in front of the class and the
topics of not really giving up on your goals and sticking to them. Another
similar presentation was Alex and Luis’s because they both talked about clothes
and both showed examples of different websites that you could go to start your
own type of business. I also felt that Jaime’s presentation about lasagna was
like Isaias’s presentation about makeup more because of the way they were
presented in seeing the steps and then the final product. I feel that my own
presentation on the impact of music was like Victor’s presentation on religion
because I let the music play to show my message while he read exerts from the
various books to explain his message. A lot of the presentations were similar
in the sense that they would talk for a little big and then play a video. Also,
Satchel and Angle’s presentations were similar because they both had riddles in
them. Ever though you can see similarities these presentations were good and
different.
In life, we must go through things
that almost feel like a fairy tale and we are either the hero or the villain. I
don’t really know if I am the hero because I think that there was room for
improvement many times but I never took any chances or tried anything different
but maybe. I feel that I tried every time that we had to do something I didn’t
really want to be the minimum I want to kind of go beyond. I never really found
a mentor but there is always people who inspire me and I feel that this class
has helped me conquer the challenge of being quiet because I started to talk a
lot more even with my friends even though most of the time I am the quiet one.
Sometimes the things that seem the hardest can be the easiest if you practice
and find something that inspires you to try harder.
This year was fun because of the way
that Dr. Preston made and structured this course. This course required so much
trusted between the students and the teacher that for some could seem that it
was too much freedom and a bad idea which sometimes it was but most of the time
it was fine. We, the students, at times had to do things that were out of our
comfort zone and speak up even if we didn’t want we just had to. This course
also made me think that working as a team could help whenever than just
thinking by yourself. This course at times was really frustrating and at time
boring but the times that were exciting and extremely special made all of the
bad things go away this course is very special and I am extremely grateful for
having the teacher that I had and the classmates that I had because everyone in
that room made it special.
