Reflection: This assignment was to pick a university and come up with tuition, facts, setting, history, etc. about your specific college and include why or why not you would like to attend. We also had to design a pennant for our university. I think this was a good spin to have a writing but also an art factor to the assignment. I learned more about my college and other colleges from other students and it helped to see if I was interested in any of these colleges. I really like this project and how we had to write it in essay form because it let us work on our colleges and we were able to practice more with writing essays.
Debate
Reflection: This assignment was to have a partner and a case and have to argue an affirmative or negating statement. We had to come up with 3 main points and two sub points for each main point. We had to be capable of researching the correct information so we could argue the other side. This taught me how a debate works and it helped me to become a better debater and learning how to think on your toes and be able to argue something in front of a crowd respectively without having to plan for two days to respond to a statement. The only thing I would fix is how lengthy it was, even though it's the real debate format. The rebuttal statements seem pretty redundant, having to say the same things in the crossfire. Other than that, I really liked this assignment and think it will benefit me in the future.
Joint Project
Reflection: On this project, we were assigned the task to create code so we could take a city, such as wake county, and calculate the crude birth date, crude death rate, actual birth rate, actual death rate, etc. This project taught my group and I to put together all of the code we've learned in Visual Basic and apply it to a real-life situation. I found it very cool how you could do something like this with a blank canvas and some knowledge about coding. This project turned out well for my group and we worked pretty well overall to be able to get this project done. I would change not knowing the exact answers to be able to check our work, since we weren't exactly sure if our code was right. Also, out of my group of three, two of us never learned the formulas so we were very confused at the beginning of the project while our other group member was working frantically trying to teach us what we were doing. Overall, I thought this was a pretty solid project and is worth doing next year.
Scary Story Essay
Reflection: In this assignment, we had to bring out our creative side and come up with a story that left the audience in chills. It needed to be an original scary story that isn't about aliens or dinosaurs, but something that could happen in our lifetime. This assignment taught me to be a better writer overall and helped me to be more creative when writing. We also had to learn how to get an audience to be fearful after a story. I really liked hearing stories from earlier semesters and being able to get an idea of the kind of stories we will be writing. If I could change one thing, I wish we had a list of writing prompts so spark our mind with a topic to write about, because it was really hard to come up with a topic. I also wish we had more class time so we could get extra assistance with our stories instead of crowding around after school asking questions. Overall, I thought this was a really creative and fun project.
Analysis of Writing
Strengths: My biggest strengths this semester was probably memorizing the speech because I've always struggled with memorizing in all of my classes for the past couple of years for high school. I didn't think I was going to be able to memorize the speech and I was ready to come into class and take a 0 for a test grade. The speech motivated me more to believe that I actually can memorize things for other classes like Environmental Science. I also was able to improve some on writing quick and easy essays like the University Project. Weaknesses: My biggest weakness is probably still poem writing. We didn't work much on poems in this English and I'm not a very big fan of writing or reading poems anyways but we tend to have a lot of poems in our final exams so I need to improve on writing and comprehending poems more. I also still struggle some with public speaking which is more of a normal nervous thing but hopefully in future years we'll also have more work with that too. Most Improved: My most improved area this semester was definitely memorization like mentioned earlier. I've gotten better as the semester progressed in other classes at studying for vocabulary quizzes or tests. I've also been able be more productive and take less time with studying because I've been working on my memorization. Goals for next year: Next year I hope I will be able to enjoy reading more than I do now and I also hope I can advance my memorization and poetry skills more. In the future I hope I can take the finals for english being prepared and ready to take the test. I also have a goal of not procrastinating so much with homework and projects and holding them until the last day.