get rid of that 5 paragraph essayThis week in AP Lit we did a lot of collaborative learning on our own. At the beginning of the week we scrambled to get things down, but by the end of the week everything had come together. After finishing this project, I can say that I have enjoyed working with my group members and I feel proud of the work I put in. I thought that senioritis would get the best of me, however I did work hard on this project in the end and I learned a lot about Buddhism, collaboration, and webbdesign. I felt like my group worked so well together and I’m really proud of us. There were no disagreements and we all equally shared the workload. Mr. S likes to talk about how this class is preparing us for college writing and working in the real world, however I don’t feel prepared. In the past month I’ve been hearing back from colleges and I have a lot of decisions to make before the end of May. I’ve also been reading about and talking to people about college, and they all say that it is much much much harder than high school and high school didn’t prepare them. The writing is much more rigorous and is graded harder, and I’m worried that my best in high school will only be mediocre in college. I hope that projects like Siddhartha and the other learned things we did in this class will carry over to college so that I’m not thrown into something completely new. This class has definitely improved my writing, and gotten me away from the “thesis with 5 paraphs” essay stuff though.
0 Comments
This week in AP Lit we dived into our Siddhartha digital article project. My group finished our book and worked well together all week to get a good start on the writing portion of the project and set up our website. I was sick this week, so I missed two days of class. However my absence did not deter my group from working hard on our project, and when I got back, I was able to jump right back in. My group has worked well together to be collaborative, which I learned was extremely important for this project. Even though we all have separate roles in this project, it’s important to understand all aspects of it and know what other people are doing in order for you to do your job well. Outlining our article was very helpful to begin writing our piece. Without it there would be no direction and our ideas would be messy. This way, we know exactly all the points we want to make and can execute it clearly. I found the outline helpful for website design as well. This is part of the collaboration of group work. Without the outline, I would of have a difficult time designing the layout of our digital article. Overall I feel as though this project is good and the book Siddhartha is extremely thought provoking. My group members and I had really good conversations about it that were pretty deep and actually very fun to have. However, I feel like as the end of senior year comes closer I am losing motivation to do more than the bare minimum. I want to just talk about Siddhartha and share my thoughts through a discussion rather than a group project with a bunch of different, weird aspects to it. Perhaps being sick as something to do with my slow start to the trimester, or I'm burned out. I really want my motivation back!!! FIghting SenioritisThis week was an abnormal week in AP Lit because Mr. S was only here for one day. So, we were in charge of getting all of our stuff done to begin our new project. Basically, we are modeling our projects off an article called Snow Fall. This article incorporated a lot of different aspects into it, like images, video, text, and graphic design elements. On Monday groups chose their books and roles in their groups. There was a writer, video journalist, graphic designer, and a wild card. My group has two wild cards that can help with anything, and we also all decided that we would all contribute to writing the piece because it’s too big of a job for one person. In my group I can the graphic designer, so I have to figure out how the layout for our project. I also need to learn how to code and things like that to make our page flow nicely together. The book that my group picked is Siddhartha. It follows a young man and his journal to reach nirvana or transcendence. So far I have really enjoyed the story! In our project we are answering a big question: “How does purpose motivate or discourage you, and at what point do they differ?” We think this is a good question to ask while reading Siddhartha because Siddhartha is really about just trying to find a purpose in life and his struggle to find it in a lot of different ways. Through following Buddha, to being on his own in the forest, to being taken in my strangers, he finds his path to peace… I think. I haven’t finished the book yet. How Snow Fall Was MadeThis week in AP Lit we worked on our Pecha Kucha presentations. This is a difficult project, not because of the subject or assignment, but mainly because presentation itself. Sense it’s a timed presentation we have to fit all our information into 10, 20 second slides. Putting all our information down into a short one page paper was helpful, because it allowed me to condense all my ideas and get my main points across in a certain amount of time. While writing my essay I realized how much my topic is actually talked about in society. There are a lot of articles, books, TedTalks, movies, and songs about the connection between love and money. This means that I’m definitely not the only one that contemplated this idea or was concerned about it. I think the thing I found most interesting this week was how divided people are on this topic of love and money. Some believe that love is more important, like all of my sources, however a lot of people don’t even care about love and just want easy, rich lives. The next part of the presentation is gathering meaningful pictures that go along with my project. The pictures in our presentation should match our theme, but also the tone, or mood, of our presentation and subject. I want to get really powerful images that match my subject of love, selfishness, and greediness. I think that there will be powerful images to go along with those themes. If I do this, the audience will get a better feel of what I am trying to convey and it will get my points across better. This week in class we shared our This I Believe videos. Most of the videos shared were very personal, and about touchy subjects, and this allowed me to learn a lot about classmates. There was a large range of topics like traveling, being yourself, bullying, and failing. I even ended up learning stuff about my close friends. I’m glad that our classroom environment isn't very judgmental, as far as I can tell, or else I don't think people would have shared the stories and beliefs they did. I was afraid that most of the videos would be sad, and I wanted to avoid that, so I tried to make mine as uplifting as possible. I thought that my class had a lot of diverse themes/beliefs, which was cool. I think we have a really creative class because each video was so unique. I especially liked Kiara’s, even though she was kind of doing a different project, I really enjoyed it. In 2nd hour it seemed like a lot of people talked about their belief in their faith in some way or another, so it was kind of repetitive. However, even though many of their beliefs revolved around religion, everyone's videos were very different and interesting to watch. Although I didn't realize how religious our school was. Overall I think this is a pretty interesting and unique assignment. It makes you use writing and storytelling skills, which I guess could be important in the future. I mostly enjoyed creating the video for the project. My favorite part of my video is the end when I added a clip of Hillary Clinton making a comment about staying home and baking cookies. Elements of digital storytellinglearn Basic editing skills in premiereOur This I Believe projects basically dominated the whole week in AP Lit. Last week we wrote our essays and recorded our voices, and this week we worked on our videos. Like I mentioned before, I’m doing my project on the belief that we should challenge stereotypes. Specifically, gender stereotypes. I find that they are everywhere in our culture and very annoying, so we should just ignore them.
Since I have experience in video editing, because of Digital Media, I decided to make my video in Premiere. My video making skills aren’t that great, but I already know how to work Premiere and it can make much more professional looking videos, which I like. I’m glad that Mr. S is allowing us to do our own thing this week to get what we need done. It’s helpful to be able to use AP Lit class time in Digital Media to be able to finish this project more efficiently. One downside of doing this project on Premiere is that I can’t work on it at home. Next week we will be sharing all our videos with the class. I’m nervous for others to see my video and hear my story, but I’m also excited to watch other peoples because I know they will all be so different and unique. I’m hoping that most people aren’t sad though, because sometimes I feel like major beliefs that we have come from bad or sad memories that we have, and I don’t want to leave the class sad. How to tell a good storyThis week in AP Lit we focused on our This I Believe Essays. On Monday we watched different Ted Talks about storytelling and then we took notes to share with the class. I found that watching these Ted Talks was a good way to start the project because it gave me some ideas for how to start telling my belief and different guidelines to follow. Like, don’t give the reader 4, but give them 2 + 2. I choose to watch “The Mystery Box” which was given by J.J. Abrams. I choose this one because I love Star Wars and he directed Episode 7, also I think he’s just a good director in general and I was wondering how he would talk about storytelling. I’m glad I watched his because he was actually funny and very intriguing. He said to leave the audience on edge with mystery and he told a story about his grandfather and a magic box to get his points across. I choose to write my essay on stereotypes because I think they’re the stupidest thing ever, and you should just be who you want. I’m passionate about being your own person, but finding a story to go along with it was difficult. My mom had to tell me some stories about my childhood in order for me to come up with an idea. I’m pretty excited to make the video for it though, I really like video editing. How to write an argumentative essayIn AP Lit this week we mostly focused on College Ready Writing Program assignments and activities. The activities we did in this program were centered around online tracking. We close read some articles, did a Save The Last Word activity, took partner notes, and had a small debate in class. All of these activities and assignments used group work, reading and writing skills, and helped formulate my own final opinion on online tracking. Then, in class, I wrote an argumentative essay on about why I am against any more government intervention with online tracking. I think the debate portion of the CRWP was the most fun and influential part of the program. I was part of the undecided group, so I got to ask the other two groups questions. This really helped me choose a side, which turned out to be the disagree side, because I saw how strong each team's arguments were and their personal opinions on the subject. I thought that the disagree with government intervention side had stronger points and it made more sense to my personal beliefs. After doing all this, writing the essay was very easy. This class has pushed me to think and write more quickly and because of this I am able to write a pretty good essay in very short amount of time. Mr. S also mentioned our new projected on storytelling where we are going to be writing This I Believe essays and then creating videos to go with them. I think this is a really unique project and I am eager to make the video portion of it. We watched a Ted Talk where a prisoner told a story that then developed into a belief he has. It was a really captivating speech and Mr. S showed us how the storytelling portion of his talk made us remember his whole speech more. This will be helpful when we go to write our This I Believe essays. In AP Lit this week we finished our Shakespearean critical theory projects. I finished up the essay on Macbeth, and my group and I presented our theory to the class. Although this project started off rocky, I am proud of the end result. I think the essay and presentation turned out very well. My group got a perfect score on our presentation, and I hope to get a good grade for the essay as well. I worked hard on our presentation to make it look very professional and also include good content. I think the tone of our presentation was presented well through the images and colors of our slide show and that we did a nice job relating our songs and art to our theory. I’m very happy with our score! I am mostly proud of my essay though. I worked hard to make sure there was a large variety in our credible sources and that the essay laid out our feminist theory really well. Writing the essay turned out to be entertaining and fun because I was so interested in the theory that I picked that. When looking for sources I didn't just want to use articles, so I incorporated a Ted Talk and a speech. The ted talk I chose was from Sheryl Sandberg called, "Why we have too few women leaders." It was actually really interesting and I would recommend everyone watches it. In the end I liked this project a lot because I enjoyed writing the essay so much. (Yes, I had fun writing an essay. Weird.) I was really intrigued by my theory and how it applied to Macbeth and I think that’s why it was so easy to write the essay and create a good presentation for it. After a week and a half off from school, we came back with a shortened, four day week. Even though the week was shorter, we still got a lot done in AP lit. We worked on analyzing two poems, writing an PoW, and our Shakespeare projects. At first, I really did not like the poem we read monday, “Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams. However, after analyzing it, I realized how deep the poem really was. I can tell there is a significant improvement in my abilities to decipher the meanings of poems. In this one I was able to tell that Williams was talking about babies and birth, using spring as a metaphor. I wasn’t here on Wednesday, so all I know about that poem is what people told me… It’s dark and about death, but it also uses spring to talk about it. I feel like I did really well on my PoW, though! In class on Thursday we had a guest speaker come in from CMU to talk to us about Shakespeare and our theory projects. I thought it was interesting, and a great idea to have her come into class to help us expand on some of our ideas. She was helpful in giving my group context to our play, Macbeth. She explained to us how Queen Elizabeth just lost her power in England, and a man had taken over as King. King James I, her prediceser, was trying to gain support for himself, becuase he was an outsider. So, she gave us ideas as to why Shakespeare might have written this play to please him. We were thinking that, maybe, Shakespeare wrote about what would happen if a women was in power. Like, how Lady Macbeth was really in charge of MacBeth. |
This is my Reflective Learning Blog for my AP Lit class. Archives
March 2017
Categories |