My main goal at the beginning of this school year was to become a better writer. I wanted to learn new skills to combine them with the ones I learned my freshman year. I learned some new skills when we studied about language. We studied what language really is, how it is constructed and how it changes over time and distance. I picked up some really interesting things that I did not know and now I know that they will help me in the future. Also, something else that helped me become a better writer was the weekly vocabulary. This helped me learned new words and become a better speller. Now I feel more confident when I am writing because I know I am more capable than ever to spell correctly.
The assignments that I found the hardest where the Bless Me Ultima essay and the Kaffir Boy essay. I found these assignments difficult because we had to find very specific examples of certain situations in the books. Sometimes this was hard to me because I wasn't completely caught up in my reading. However, always found time to read and was always able to find the examples I needed. I learned a lot about curanderismo and Apartheid thanks to these two assignments. By finding these examples I was able to built very good essays, despite having trouble at one time or another.
The assignment that I liked the most and gained the most satisfaction from is the Brag Sheet essay. I enjoyed this assignment because I got the opportunity to write about myself and what I like to do, instead of writing about a book. I wrote this essay on something I like to do in my free time, play basketball. I didn't get bored writing this paper because when I write about something I like, I can write for hours and hours. I felt really good about this assignment because it is without a doubt my best work of the year. It is the only big essay in which I got an A this year. I felt really proud about myself because I knew that my hard work and determination had paid off.
I enjoyed being in Mr. Girard's class this year. Although it was a good class, I wish we could have done more poetry, as we only did one thing on poetry this year. After taking this class, my feelings toward reading and writing haven't changed. Although I don't like reading and writing any more than I did at the beginning of the year, I will try to practice them more often because I know they will come in handy in my next two years of high school and in college. I would like to thank Mr. Girard for always challenging us and encouraging us to always try our best and never give up. Thanks to him, many of his students, including me, have become better in many areas of English.
