1st Semester Reflection

     At the beginning of this school year, I had no idea how 12 English AP was going to go for me. Because of the pandemic school was going to work very differently this year and I wasn't sure whether this class was going to be easier, harder, or the same as when I first thought about taking back when I was a junior. As a writer in 11th grade, I felt that I was pretty good, getting on average a 7 for every in-class essay that I wrote according to the old scale though because of how school was going to be different this year I had no idea if I was going to have to work a lot harder to increase my level. I have learned a lot of things in English this year, honestly more than I thought I would, and have grown and developed my writing as such. One thing that I struggled with was having my own voice in writing. My writing wasn't necessarily bad or incorrect before but it lacked something special that would allow it to differentiate from another person's style of writing. Because writing has been a little less stressful with having fewer assignments than usual I was able to spend more time preparing and perfecting certain aspects like this into my ICEs. For example, being able to have a weekly blog has allowed me to restructure how I write my essays and I can be a little bit more relaxed while still being able to present my ideas in a concise manner. My writing definitely is far from perfection in this way but it has grown a lot since last year. Another thing that has helped me more in this class than in last years was the focus that we have had on literature. Every single play, book, or short story that we have read or have read independently we have been able to dissect and find not only ways the author presents their points but what those points are and how they all correlate to the main idea of the work as a whole. Like I said, last year we mainly wrote in order to prove how a writer used a such in such method to prove such and such and to me that was pretty boring. I love learning about what a piece's message is or what it tries to depict even when it may just lead to complete irrationality like in The Stranger. A lot of the pieces that I have written about give me more interest than others that I have written in the past which has allowed me to learn a lot easier since I am more interested in the topic. Overall I would say that while it does suck that we have to spend hours looking at a screen all day with almost no interaction, I can definitely say that this year in English for me was still a success.