Semester 1 Reflection and Goals

Goals for Semester 1
Becoming a more persistent, constant, and more thoughtful reader.

This goal is especially important for me as I plan to become a writer, and to do so, reading books would be crucial to broaden my perspective. I will try to read beyond of what is asked of from this class, and will do everything I can to bring my own legitimate conclusions, opinions, and careful observations. I think this would be assessable by comparing the quality of essays I would come to write as the class continues, as deeper and accurate observations within the essays would be able to give me better scores.

Becoming a much clearer speaker and writer.

I’ve always had a problem about droning on and on without getting to the point, and for me, it would be self evident that it is a weakness I have to solve. When people read my essays/stories and hear me speak, they tend to lose focus and interest quickly as I run around the bush. I would like to fix this issue no matter what. I would be able to assess this goal by checking for how long I speak whenever I contribute to the discussion, and how many people managed to properly understand what I had said.

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Evaluation:

As the first semester of my Senior year comes close to completion, I am led to reflect upon my overall performance, and, more specifically, the achievement of the goals I had set up at the beginning of the semester. The goals themselves are due to their nature subjective, and difficult to evaluate in an objective manner. Therefore I have taken the liberty of combining my personal sentiments, peer reviews and the brief guidelines which I had set up at August. 

The need to become a genuinely more thorough reader was a goal that, thanks to the nature of this course, was something that I was able to work on constantly. The pieces of reading that was given to me made me endlessly ponder upon every dialogue, symbolisms and their possible implications and impact to the work as a whole. Even better, there were plenty of opportunities to test my knowledge and understanding of the given pieces through essays, discussions and grades corresponding to every work I had read during the semester. Reflecting on the essays I had written during the past semesters, it became apparent that not only has the depth of my writing gotten significantly deeper, but also that the scope of my readings have widened as well. It can be seen in my poetry analysis (Major Artifact 3A &B) that I was able to build, expand, and elaborate a coherent story from a poem, something I was unable to do previously. In my two Independent Reading entries, I was able to weave a comprehensive common theme from groups of symbolisms and characterizations, which was exactly what I was aiming for from the beginning of the semester. 

That being said, my second goal still has a lot of work to be done. The clarity of my essays and theories have definitely improved, and for the first time in my life, I was able to maintain an A in an English Course, which for me was a significant achievement, and perhaps a proof of my improvement in this category. However, a good majority of my peers still have slight difficulties understanding what I am saying during discussions. While I do not do this at the same, alarming frequency at the beginning of the semester, I still feel that I am dominating a lot of the class discussions. This will certainly be a category which I will work for during the next semester. 

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Goal for Semester 2

Pay Attention to Directions: 

While my grades would not tell that I have this problem, my inabilities to pay attention to direction has on several occasions landed me with a replaceable F in some of my assignments. As a result, I was forced to redo a good portion of my work, leading to a lot of wasted time I could have otherwise used elsewhere. In order to stop this vicious cycle, I will pay more attention to directions and will ask more questions on what needs to be done before the work is due. I will keep a count over the course of the semester to see how many times I failed to follow directions in order to measure my success in achieving this goal. 

Be more Approachable

While my lack of clarity in opinion has often thrown people off, this semester has led me to believe that it isn’t only my long winded speeches that makes it hard for my classmates to understand what I am saying. I have developed a theory that my attitude towards others may have hindered debates and counter-arguments, so I would like to work on fixing this issue. In order to see whether I have improved on this aspect, I will have one of my peers flag me whenever it feels like I am dominating the conversations and discussions within the class.