Reflective Essay: Reminisce

Here I am, at the end of the line looking back at what I have gone through. All those times of struggle and all those times of panic all come down to this moment. The improvement of my skills in writing and reading has really depended on those times. Those nights with no sleep and those deep books that made me dread the class all not brings this glory and feeling and accomplishment. I feel that I have improved very much in my explication, discussion, and writing skills.

I remember the first day of English as if it were yesterday. We, the class were told what was expected of us and the magnitude of the work we were going to do and that just left me scared and fearful of the class itself. Everyday I would come in barely getting my work done or even not completing my work on time. Explications were like a wound to my grade every time one was graded. I never really got the concept of an explication until just recently. I thought that if you just expanded upon your very own thoughts that it would explain itself and give me a good grade but I was wrong. The problem with what I was writing was that I did not explicate the text but my own thoughts which made my papers so low scoring. It took me the full year to figure it out after I started to compare papers with my peers. Noticed the element that everyone else had that I did not and suddenly when I attempted to put it in my paper, it actually made my papers better. The eight page paper on James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist was what it took to improve my writing. This challenging paper forced me to look at other explications and realize what I was missing. When I incorporated in my paper what I lacked from before, my grade shot up and the teacher even made a remark that it was one of my best papers all year. This taught me how to help myself improve on my own. Peers are an excellent place to start when I needed aid in my work but in most cases, they came up to be no help. I learned to compare work and seek out I was doing wrong compared to other people and that improve my writing altogether.

This class was thought intensive through out the whole year. Our class discussions in my opinion are deeper and crazier than anything I have ever seen. The way a human mind can connect so many different items is so intriguing. Mr. Gallagher could connect the whole world to things at times and it would just blow me away at how a person can do that. This experience taught me of how to think and how to extract significance out of a book. For example, Hamlet was a book there the protagonist, Hamlet goes mad and speaks of such deep and loaded words that is hard to understand. Then Mr. Gallagher could just rip the words apart and just feed us piece by piece where we could understand and even expand upon the words. The word “nothing” to the average person would mean nothing, as in lack of anything. Then all of a sudden it can mean a woman’s sexual organ. These out of the box thoughts just blew me away. To think out of the box is not usually what most people do but this class really taught me how to do exactly that. With this skill now, I could make a discussion definitely more worth while and interesting.

English 12 Honors helped me mature as well as improve upon my skills. The topics that we dealt within the books in the class were beyond most things a teenager would think about and I think that helps kids get a feel of what live is really like out there in the cold and dark world. People are not as nice as one thinks in and around one’s neighborhood. The topics in the books are like a punch in the face of reality. It taught me how to deal and how to just look at certain things that go on in this world. This class is a great class for seniors who are about to be sent into the world because for me, it helped me gain so much knowledge about the world and the psychological side of people. Even though this class is so very challenging, I am confident to say that I enjoyed this class and thankful of what it had to offer me.