Oh, English. Oh, Townzen. Through nothing less than a miracle, I have finished the class. However, looking back on this year, it does seem that I have in fact learned a lot more than I actually thought I did, despite the many times I have insisted on how I hadn't learned anything, and that the course was pointless. I by the end of the course, I feel like I have learned how to analyze text for techniques much better than I did coming out of Advanced Sophomore English. Although it's a funny thing, pretty much all through this English class, as I would be reading one of the books for the first time, I felt as if there were no literary elements, and no reason to be reading it. I would think "this is stupid, why am I reading this?" and this only impeded my ability to look deeper into the text and find deeper hidden concepts. I feel like if I had been told beforehand, "Yes, despite your insistent attempts to believe that there is nothing here, there is stuff in here, just look harder." that I may have searched a little more. I know, this is an English class and there would be no point in you giving us a book to read that had nothing of importance in it. I guess it's just that reassuring element that would have given me a reason to look harder because I would know for a fact that there was interesting concepts and techniques used in the book before going back through it in class to talk about what concepts were coming up.
Looking forward to Senior Year, I believe that in order to succeed in English, I will need to learn how to further analyze quotes, and learn how to build my analysis' upon one another better in order for them to further strengthen my point and connect to my theses better, and I feel like that is one thing that could have been taught a little better in the class. Writing an essay I wouldn't really know where I was going at the start, and I would only really start to understand what I was trying to say and how to effectively put it into writing until I had maybe half of the paper already written. Although I know you specifically said in class that it is extremely difficult to tell people "how to think" and how to instruct them to have the right thinking process, I feel like there is some way that this problem could be helped, like having specific questions that people should ask themselves when they are looking at a piece of writing that could help themselves along with interpreting the text better. That may seem kind of unrealistic, its just something to put out there. Anyways, I do feel like I have improved as a writer, and as a thinker to some degree, and I think that the rigor of IB English has contributed to that.
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