So far this year, my reading and critical thinking skills have improved immensely. I have developed my critical thinking skills by making better and more frequent connections among our texts. In addition, my understanding of the purposes of details and character traits as well as events and turns in the plot, have begun to expand. However, I still find periodically in class that I have missed a few important connections or themes. Consequently, my goal with regard to critical thinking for the rest of the year is to improve these skills so that I am able to be less reliant on what we cover in class, and more dependent on my own notes and deductions. In my reading, I have become more adept at noticing literary devices, which I find helps immensely when it comes to comprehension of our books. I have found that I have become better at identifying significant events, characters, and symbols. Although for our lesson on the Odyssey this has been less important, I know that being able to text mark will be important in the future, and so my goal for the end of the year has become to make better bullet points and recognize more literary devices. For our unit on the Odyssey, I have decided only to mark names of important characters, places, themes and similarities that relate to Genesis, and elements that complement the themes of the book that we discussed in class. Although I make an effort to use bullets as we did earlier in the year, I am not consistent about it. All in all, though, I feel pretty comfortable with the reading we have been doing.
In my compositions this year, I have made great progress in limiting background and summary, and increasing analysis, which has been my greatest difficulty. In preparation for a writing assignment, I like to look over my text marking, as well as create a broad outline to help me organize my ideas. I find that formulating an idea, and writing an introduction and conclusion are not difficult. Where I do have trouble, as I said before, is being careful not to do what is easiest-summarization-but rather to include lots of organized, thoughtful analysis, something that has always scared me a little. I have noticed, though, that in my essays throughout the year, this problem has noticeably diminished. Our last large project involved close analysis of The Golden Compass, and though it was not my best work, I think it contained much more organized analysis that some of my other compositions, a feeling that was reflected in some of the comments I received on it. Something new to me this year has been working on style and voice in my writing, which until now was something I thought was a bad thing to have. So, my main goals for the remainder of the year are to improve the quality of my analysis, strengthen the style of my work, and work on the organization of my arguments.
In general this year, my greatest improvement at school has been devotion. In the past, I would do my work with finishing being my main goal, only doing assignments so they wouldn’t be hanging over my head. This year, I have begun to spend more time on my work, proofreading and making changes. When I’m confused or want to work ahead, I meet with teachers and make this happen for myself. This is something I should have always done, but I am glad that I have begun to do so. In the remaining part of this year and the rest of my professional life, I would like to continue this trend of working hard and caring about what I am doing, partially because I feel it’s a good work ethic, but also because I don’t want to go through life doing what I have to. I would rather enjoy myself a little.
Marav2013's Blog 