Weekly Reflection (22/4-28/4)

This week, the class focused throughly on Never Let Me Go. This week, we reread Never Let Me Go, which I found pretty useful especially paired with discussion groups. I felt this was an effective learning tool to help refresh our memory on Never Let Me Go as well as gain some deeper insight upon the matter. Miss Abena was telling us that highlighting was crucial in helping us not lose track on the question, but for some reason I always forget to highlight, preferring to jot down some points and create points along the way. I'm not sure if this is very advisable in the exam. Comments on this procedure would be appreciated.

The next day, we did a practice question which after the memory refresher of reading the book, proved easier than I thought but I suppose i didn't feel the pressure of the clock enough and points were waffled on a bit too long, causing me to write my last two points overtime. Next time, analysis should be straight to the point, short and sweet without unnecessary waffle, don't want a repeat of what happened in the mocks.

During these final week before exams. I defiantly feel that the class's focus should be on Never Let Me Go. It's characters, themes, ideas and concepts should be analysed through and through. By doing 2 lit paper practices a week, I think it should suffice before exam month but i feel that careful attention needs to be paid to the comments given, as I haven't really been reflecting on these properly.

Who Am I Like?

Who Am I Like In Never Let Me Go?

Out of all the characters in Never Let Me Go, I feel a strong connection with Kathy. It is her sense of unshakable patience and the ability to keep a cool head that drives me to think that me and Kathy are not so different. Kathy and Ruth's fights throughout the story remind me of of the fights and quarrels that I have with my own friends. Ruth usually lashes out insults or puts down Kathy, like how Ruth mocked her for being so unsociable in the Cottages and dislikes that she "isn't getting played with so often." Like every fight between Kathy and Ruth, Kathy always puts asides the lashings Ruth gives her, buries it deep within her and walks away perhaps to avoid further conflict or blow off some steam. This trait of Kathy really connects with me, as I have this personality of extreme patience, trying my best to ignore or put aside harsh words and avoid conflict as soon as possible.

Another connectable trait is that although Kathy fights with Ruth all the time, Kathy still finds it within her heart to forget or forgive the spats she has with Ruth, as said, 'we were quarreling over all kinds of different things, but at the same time we were confiding in each other more than ever." Kathy's quick forgiving and forgetting nature really reaches out to me, as I share the same personality trait with her. Even though I have fights or arguments with my friends, the situation is usually at worst, patched up within a couple of hours due to my overly gentle nature. Perhaps this is why Ruth is able to take advantage of Kathy all the time, due to her gentle, patient, quick forgiving nature, allow her to walk all over her.

Weekly Reflections (15/4-21/4)

Exams are quickly looming around the corner, so we are basically focusing on exam question practice in class. This week, we looked over the exam questions that we were assigned to for the easter holidays. Below are my thoughts towards them:

Language
The language paper was fairly simple. I finished the paper on time with not much difficulty for both the comprehension and creative writing sections. We did go over the paper but I would be more satisfied if we went through the paper with Miss Abena, maybe giving out several tips on how to answer questions quickly and effectively without waffle and gain top marks. Overall, no quarrel with this paper, hopefully I can replicate the results in the real exam.

Literature
This paper proved to be a problem with the challenging poem, Morning Song. Spending too much time with the poem was my downfall and I ended up in the same situation during the mocks, only have 25-30 minutes on my Never Let Me Go section. I seriously need to improve my time management skills within this section. Perhaps following Miss Abena's idea of writing 2 analysis per week would be a good starting point :P Reading over Never Let Me Go to refresh my memory on the events and reading the ZigZag study guide before the exams has proved quite useful and I'll continue doing so.

We also did more analysis, this time with the poem Refugee Mother And Child, which was much easier thankfully, but I should make a habit of giving my analysis to Miss Abena for marking to see what mistakes I've made and improve on them.

Weekly Reflections (18/3-24/3)

This week we did various aspects of literature. Firstly, we did this card game where we had to match up various cards to their respective meanings. This particular exercise was quite challenging as there were various literary terms such as bathos, epic simile and mock heroic. This terms were quite useful, but I am concerned on how I can properly and effectively apply these literary terms to a literary analysis, I don't wan't spending too much time within an exam defining the term instead of using it to help be understand how the poet uses these various techniques to convey their message.

We also analyzed Simon and Garfunkel's famous hit, "Sound Of Silence" This song is particularly excellent and I enjoy listening to it while discussing the meaning with my classmates. When I looked over it, I felt that the poem's general ideas were someone trying to enstill rebellion against a government, but the people's voices were oppressed and they didn't dare speak out against it. This exercise was also good practice on annotating key features of a poem which would be crucial within a exam.

Overall, it's been a good week with no particular problems, looking forward to moving forward to newer lessons.

Weekly Reflection (21/1-27/1)

This week, poetry was the main theme of our learning as we looked as various acronyms that could help us remember the key elements when it came to analyzing poetry. A few examples were given and we had to discuss the usefulness of these acronyms, as a group we all agreed that each acronym had its strengths and weaknesses and using this we had to create our own acronym which in the end, we decided it would be called MOTELRAPS which stands for:

Meaning
Organization
Tone
Evidence
Language
Rhyme
Audience
Purpose
Structure

But the acronym wasn't complete yet as we had to further add questions to each of the key elements to provoke analyzation instead of feature spotting. Each group decided that they would come up with various questions that would help us to provoke analyzation. We also had to create a portable version of the acronym so that we could analyze anywhere at anytime. I feel that the exercise and the acronym proved very useful to help me structure ideas and my writing when I analyze poetry, it also gives me a key insight of what to spot when reading a poem so that it can be interpreted correctly.

Weekly Reflection (14/1- 20/1)

It wasn't a very optimistic week for English this week. This week, we decided to revamp the current Never Let Me Go page and me and Chua were assigned Chapter 6 to recreate. Over the weekend, I decided to check if Chua had made any adjustments to the page. There was none, so I decided to begin refixing the page. I fixed about the majority of the page and left Character Analysis and Themes and Symbols for Chua to create, I messaged him on Facebook to remind him about the site. Overall,  I felt what I created was pretty good as the page look neat and organized but lacked the multimedia flair of other pages. I headed back to boarding and found Chua and the site untouched, he seemed confused on what we should do and I told him I messaged him but never he replied, he soon began hammering me on how to finish the Themes and Symbols and Character Analysis which I found pretty frustrating as he could have messaged me way earlier and I would be more and than happy to help, but now at 9.45, tired after a long day, I wasn't in the best of moods to help him, I just gave him some advice and let him work on it.

The next day, I checked the site for the Character Analysis and Themes and Symbols and all I saw was a crummy mind map and a short paragraph in character analysis. At this point, I was annoyed with Chua but I didn't say anything. When it got to English, there were so many weakness's to the page, formatting error, font size not consistent, mind map done poorly, character analysis uncompleted.... It was a complete mess and when Chua asked when we should redo the page again... I sighed and gave a date which obviously won't be done by then. Moving on to more positive matters, we were assigned song called Ballad Of A Thin Man, a very cryptic and confusing poem, it seems it was practice for our exams as I heard that any poem could come up and we had to expose ourself to many types of poems to get an idea of what's going to come out. there was the general idea of it being an interpretation of the gap between the rich and the poor, of slaves and slave traders which all suit it perfectly fine but I want to know what the actual meaning of the poem even though Miss Abena specifically warned us not to. Sigh, that google search button looks so tempting now...

Opening Questions

NOTE: 

Your response to these questions will greatly affect your interpretation of this chapter and the characters involved. Make notes in your learning blog (public) or workbook (private). Be sure you understand alternative perspectives that are different from yours if you want to explore the literature fully. CRITICAL THINKING ESSENTIAL!

• How much do you talk to your friends or family about sex?

I do not talk about sex with my family members as the topic never comes up within my household and it is a very awkward and uncomfortable issue but I do occasionally speak about sex with a couple of my friends at schools  

• How important are the issues of sex to a teenager in your experience?

I feel it's quite important to understand sex during the teenage age as it allows us to better understand ourselves and to ensure that we understand the elements that accompany sex such as STD's.

• How do you differentiate between sex and sexuality? What are the different issues connected to each one?

• Do you think 'sex' is an open topic in your social circle or is it very much taboo?

Sex for me is a open topic for my social circle, it's not considered taboo among my family, it's just not touched upon at my household

• Whatever your response, do you think this is the best way for your social circle to be?

I suppose it's ok that my social circle does talk about sex

• Do you think sex outside of marriage is OK? Explain your answer.

Sex outside marriage for me is really up to the individual. If the individual feels that he or she is ready to have sex and has feels that they have enough maturity and sense to have sex, I see no restrictions in having sex after marriage.