This week, we spent a lot of our time just working on our PoW. Me, being the person that I am, and for the fact that I hate myself, really didn't work on anything. I kind of either just read my book, since I enjoy it so much, or just talked with some friends. Which really isn't good, but hey, at least I'm being honest here. Getting work done at school is not my strong suit, I do better at finishing it maybe a week or two after it's due at my house while I cry. Just kidding. Maybe. But, one of the things that I really did enjoy this week was one of the spoken words that we watched. The poem Shake the Dust by Anis Mojgani was something that really spoke to me this week. Pun intended. This week was really rough for me. I wasn't really doing well in my math class, not really doing some assignments for it. You know, procrastinating, my only real talent. This poem really helped me through the week, though. Just hearing him say "shake the dust off" really made me feel better. I know that not turning things in is bad, or that not doing very well on tests or quizzes isn't good either, but it helped me move past all of this. It helped me know that even though this is a rough patch in my life, I will survive it, and I will be perfectly happy with myself, even if others aren't happy with me. Here's a link to a well written article about what procrastination is and how to stop doing, even though I'll probably never stop procrastinating.
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This week, there really wasn't much that we learned at all. It was just a week to work on our projects, read for SSR, and do creative writing. So, really, I didn't really learn anything at all. The only thing that I can really think that I learned was something about the project. I don't know what that is, but I'm sure I can think of something that I learned from it.
One of the things that stuck out the most to me this week was doing work with my table as a group for our essays. To me, it always feels good to work as a team because you have people to rely on to help you. You aren't alone in trying your best to do good with what you are doing. It also really pushes me to try my best with what I am tasked with doing, because I know that I can't let my team down in doing what I have to do. And I don't want to be that person who doesn't do the work that they said that they would do, leaving the other members of the group to do more work than they were originally going to do. I wanted to make my group members happy with the work that I did, and hopefully that's what I did this week, because I really did try my best with what I said I would do. This week was not the easiest to write about, since the week was all just reading and writing. But, with the help of my group, I wrote what I needed to write, and I feel pretty good about it. Plus, it's just fun working with a group. Working with other people is good for me because it's just fun to have people around you and support you. Plus, if you aren't doing work, you can laugh and goof off, even if it's not what you are supposed to do. This week in class, there wasn't really much we learned about. It was all about working on our projects or doing creative writing. The thing that stuck out the most to me was the poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke. It just was all that really stuck with me this week, really. When I first read this poem, I thought it was just about a child getting abused by their drunk father, but it was being covered up with dancing terms. Plus, that's one someone from the hour before me said, so I went into the poem just thinking about that. But, going back to a few blog posts ago and talking about working together and analyzing the poem deeper, I found that it could also just be a kid and a dad dancing together. When everyone as a class talked about it, it was brought up that they could just be dancing. And the more I read the poem and continued to talk about it with my table, I was torn between what I thought it was. At this point, I still don't know which one it is. I'm still kind of leaning towards abuse, but defiantly more towards the middle of the whole thing now. Maybe that's just how it's supposed to be. The author wrote it so you had trouble figuring out if it was about abuse or just dancing. In the end, this blog was more just about looking at deeper meaning again. I really didn't want to write about this again, but honestly, I just couldn't think of what to write. It kind of sucks, but I tried. This week has been really one of the most chaotic weeks of the year for me. I barely got any reading done, I didn't feel like I learned anything in any of my classes, and I didn't know what was going on half of the time. But, at least I had a good time at homecoming. Coming up with a topic for this blog was hard, but I think I got it, so just pray for me. This week, one of the most memorable things that we did was the "I remember" creative writing prompt. Normally, I just use the creative writing time as a way for me to release my feelings or just rant, so pretty much like a diary. But this time, I decided to go with the prompt and see where it took me. While everyone seemed to take it in a way where they wrote a couple of memories, and then picked one to go into deeper detail in, I just kept writing more and more memories. I wrote happy ones, sad ones, exciting ones, boring ones. The list goes on and on. It really was one of the longest creative writings I ever did, which was over 500 words in about 15 minutes. While I enjoyed remembering all these memories from my head, it happened every once in a while where I would write a memory that felt very personal to myself. Something that I didn't really want to write out, because of the fear that someone would read it and judge me for it. But at the same time, it felt good to write something that I held to myself for a long time down.It felt like a little weight was off of my chest. Of course, there's still the horrifyingly heavy weight of anxiety on my chest every single time I enter the school, but writing things down still felt good. This week, it helped learn that writing down my feelings is something that I might want to do more often, instead of keeping them inside of me, just to grow. If I don't feel comfortable enough to tell someone these things, then maybe writing them down can help me feel better. If this can help me lower my stress levels, then hopefully I can pick it up as sort of a hobby. Last week, we had the discussion of story versus literature. Moving onto a similar topic this week, we talked about viewing literature as art, which I only thought about last year, when we got our books at the end of the year and Mr. Schoenborn said something about an art gallery and books.
Anyways, we started out by watching a TED talk. This was about taking the time to appreciate a single piece of art in a gallery instead of rushing through to look at all of them, and being able to make a story out of what you see. You need to find something that you enjoy looking at and take your time looking at it. That's when I realized the connection and the point that it was supposed to teach us. We need to find books or literature that we enjoy to read, and take our time with it so we can really understand what it is about.The class isn't about reading as many books as possible in the quickest amount of time. It's about having a good time with what you're reading, and not feeling the need to rush through it to go onto the next one, and making something out of the story. After this, we got the chance to take a look at a piece of art and really examine what the artist was making and what they were trying to convey through their art. Our group decided to look at Guernica, by Picasso. This is when we found many things about what the piece could be about. When you get to look at something specifically, when you get to choose what you want to look at, you can really find what it's trying to say. This week really made me appreciate taking the time to enjoy things in life. I feel like we've never really done it in school much. We always just spend a week on something and then move on to something else. It just makes me think about how much I would learn something if I chose what I wanted to learn and enjoyed. Good thing college is coming up soon. During this week, we spent most of the week making our visual metaphors, which I didn't really enjoy that much, but it was still a good learning experience. It was interesting to see what others came up for metaphors. The thing that I felt impacted me the most and I learned the most from was finding the difference between story and literature. Reading the article about Story versus Literature was a strange thing to learn about. Mostly because I didn't know the difference to begin with. It never crossed my mind to even think about the difference, I guess I just assumed they were the same, really. The article talks about how the story is just the plot, events, and the characters of the book, and everything left behind, the point of view, thoughts and feelings, etc, is the literature. It then talks about how that is the reason why the book is almost always better than the movie. A movie cannot explain the thoughts and feelings behind words, or really go into detail with everything in a book. That's what makes them almost a one of a kind type of thing. As much as we wish we could, you can't just bring a book to life and have it be exactly the same. I really enjoyed this article. It gave me a new perspective on why the book is better than the movie. Plus, it was just really well written and I could get behind every point that the author was making in it. This week, we read the poem The Eagle, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It was a rather short piece, and was a little confusing. At first, I thought that the poem would just be about an eagle, and that's what it seemed like it was. Just an eagle. But, as we looked at it as a table, it began to feel as if the eagle wasn't really an eagle, but maybe a person. After this thought, we continued to analyze every line of the poem, and realized that it could very easily be describing a person as an eagle. Perhaps we were just grabbing at straws, trying to make something out of nothing. I mean, of course someone could just write a poem about an eagle. But what are the chances of that? You just feel something inside you saying; "That can't be all it is, right?" It can't just be about an eagle. I felt the need to try to look deeper into it, maybe a little too deep. I've never been one to enjoy poetry. I have always found it boring and it's never really been something I've connected to, and to be honest, I still kind of feel that way. But, this week has taught me to look deeper into the meaning of things. It has shown me that some pieces of writing may not be what they look like. You need to read it over and over and over again, just to see if there is something you are not getting. Because of this, it has made me feel some appreciation for poetry. I'm still not the biggest fan of it, but I can appreciate it. For the past three years in high school, each first day was filled with anxiety. Worries that I won't have friends in my classes or someone to sit with at lunch. While the latter of those two is a problem for this trimester, I've realized this week that I don't need to worry about these things.
This week, I wasn't expecting to get much out of any of my classes. Just homework out of my math class, boredom out of my English and science class, and everything else as a relaxation period. Surprisingly, I didn't get any homework out of math, I actually learned something in AP Lit, and science was still boring. In AP Lit, when we were asked how we got here, I didn't know what to say. A million things flew through my head as I started to freak out. Should I be taking this class? Will I even want to read and write as much as I will need to? It wasn't until when we began to discuss ourselves as readers and writers that I began to realize that I should be in this class, and if I am not prepared for the workload, then I will push myself to complete it. It's time that I stop making excuses to procrastinate and avoid doing a paper or read. The discussions in class, and being able to pick a book from a certain author, have helped me understand that I should read, and not just sit around and sleep. They've helped rekindle my interest in reading. It was this week that I learned I need to start over with how I view my education. I can't just keep faking my way through all my classes. I need to do my work, I need to get the grades that I deserve. This week has helped me realize that I need to have a new beginning for my final year. Reading was such an important aspect of my life when I was younger, and I'm hoping that I can get back into it this year. |
AuthorJust a senior trying to survive his last year. Archives
November 2017
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