Out of all the strenuous, tear-inducing, fun assignments we've completed this trimester, I definitely have a few favorites that come to mind. Overall, I found that I was better suited to the more creative projects because they combined structure with the freedom of choice. One project that I'm really proud of is my Summer reading creative piece. I chose to read Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, which, as I found out after receiving the novel, was about 700 pages long. (I'm not gonna lie, just because it's more pages doesn't make it better). For my project, I decided to make a board game similar to battleship that paralleled the novel's major theme: duty vs. morality. In the beginning, I faced some challenges with choosing the medium by which to display the theme. Just coming up with a board game took my the longest time out of any other stage of the project. I hadn't been expecting everything to come together as well as it did, but when I finally crafted the game and wrote out my essay, all of my points supported the main theme while smoothly translating into a playable and educational board game.
Like many others, I really enjoyed working on the American Drama project. The assignment naturally lent itself to a more "outside-of-the-box" approach, which I liked, and which worked well for all my group members. Originally, our group only had three girls and therefore we had chosen The Women as our play because it featured all female roles. Little did we know our group would be joined by three dudes, which complicated things a bit. The start of the project was round, but once we devised a plan and wrote a schedule, (and told the boys they were playing girls), things began to run more smoothly. In the end, the testosterone addition actually added to the comedy of our video and better stressed the main theme we were trying to portray. Writing the transitions in the script was a lot of fun and they turned out extremely well when everything was put together. Although it was hard to get things going, I learned that adjusting to things that are thrown at you and not fighting them, add to the originality of a project and that you can't have control of everything.
As an individual, I can admit (painfully) that I have a hard time when I'm not in control of things. In the beginning of the trimester, I was still getting used to the idea of getting a lot of group grades in the class, and truthfully, I wasn't too happy about it. You can control your own effort, but it's hard to control other people's. My first group for this class (fellows of the pelo) turned out to be a great mix of talents and students, but it took me a while to learn to let go of all the control. The first few assignments, I did a majority of the work, which was my fault, not theirs. I was afraid that things wouldn't get done if I didn't do them. Turns out, boys stay up way later than girls and don't get things done as soon as possible. When I finally trusted them to do things and let go of the reins, the last of these groups projects turned out really well and we all contributed equally.
On individual assignments, I'd like to think that I got everything done on time, without procrastination, and gave things all my effort. With marching band conflicting first trimester, it's been really hard to get things done without distraction, and physically, to have the time to do them. I'm pretty proud of my ability to get things done without wasting time and to have worked as efficiently as possible for all assignments. I hope that the end of the trimester will end this same way, and that I'll be able to plot out my time strategically to finish things up without losing sleep or time.
Looking back over my goals, I'm shocked to see that I completed more of them than I thought I would. I said that my major weaknesses were being able to classify poems, knowing about literary time periods, analyzing quotes, and understanding the author's purpose. Through the first part of the trimester, we focused a lot on literary periods and the classifications of poetry that went along with them. Just being able to group them and generalize different types of poetry, made it a lot easier for me to identify that things I should be looking for when analyzing poetry. On our practice essays, especially, I found that this knowledge made it a lot easier to infer the purpose and overall meaning of what I was reading.
Even though I accomplished many of the major goals I had set for myself, there are of course, those that I didn't follow through on. I told myself that in order to better analyze quotes, I'd individually set aside time to practice reading essays and poems, which I didn't really get to. Probably unrealistically, I also told myself that I'd memorize words and names literary devices so that when I came across them on multiple choice tests, I wouldn't be completely taken off guard. But, that didn't really happen...Although I neglected some of these set goals, the first trimester of this class pretty adequately prepared my for the challenges I so often face in taking multiple choice tests and writing essays. Looking back over all the work we've done in the class thus far, I can confidently say my analytical and composition skills have improved greatly, and I can't wait for the second part of the class to further these skills.
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