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.

This Week's Reflection 7/1-13/1

This week, we did poetry once again. Divided into groups, we were supposed to analyse and later act out one of four poems that were given. My group was given a poem called Fatima, which I was curious about from the very beginning we got this booklet. After some discussion, it was finally revealed that Fatima was actually a girl from Bosnia who fled due to a civil war and was placed in a typical British classroom. Within that classroom, she was frightened and confused and when she saw the nativity play of boys shooting guns and killing babies, it reminded her of her war torn home and she broke down in tears.

This poem really struck me as a powerful and moving poem, reminding us of humanity's ignorance towards others in plight, to our ignorance to the the world outside of us and our lack of compassion towards those in need. Later in the week, there was a time of reviewing our study guide. Filling out a questionnaire, we were able to view other responses and we saw how unmotivated and unsatisfied we were on the project and we all sat down and discussed how we could improve.

It was a moment where we would stand back and ask ourselves, "do we really want to continue this? " Further discussion brought ideas on how we could greatly improve the site and motivate us to do better. So we had a little competition to see who could spruce their assigned page up the best and the best page would act as a model for the rest of the class. I've already done the best I can for the page and so it's all up to my other partner, Chua to deliver his side of the bargain.

Weekly Reflection 31/12 - 1/6

So another weekly reflection, with much to discuss about what has happened in the past week. But first I would like to address to Miss Abena that this weekly reflection was unable to be submitted on time due to lack of internet connection at home, thus the assignment could only submitted on Monday when I came back to boarding.

This week, we had a critical discussion on the Trello website for our group. It seems that we are not producing enough work and the work that we produce is lackluster. When I step back and look at it all, I agree with what Victoria has said, we're all playing a blame game. Let's say when person A does not finish his work, person B looks at the site and thinks, oh well since A didn't finish his work may as well just slack off. This becomes a domino effect that lead to our study guide being lackluster and off schedule.

I understand that feeling students have when they have to do something that's not assigned as compulsory homework but I myself feel that we as a class should take more initiative as students. After all, this is our study guide after all

Would To and Used To

A simple exercise last Tuesday tested our knowledge on a simple past tense difference, would to and used to. When I was doing the exercise, I didn't really understand the actual proper usage of used to and would to and the only way I determine whether I was correct was seeing if the sentence fitted.

After doing some research, I finally understood the difference between the two:

-"Used to" is used when you talk about a past state that does not happen anymore in the present

Example:

I used to work in a cactus farm two years ago until my accident happened

The "used to" in the sentence is acceptable because he is not working at the cactus farm in the present, so "used to" can be used


-"Would" can be used to talk about repeated past actions not past states

I would always go the pond Correct
I would stay in Georgia 4 months ago Wrong

-'Used" can also be used to talk about repeated past states


I used to live in Canada 3 years ago  Correct

Weekly Reflection 19/11/12-25/11/12

This week, we had a language session which we discussed collocations. Unfortunately, Miss Abena either didn't explain what a collocation was or I wasn't listening properly as I still don't know what a collocation is. We were given a worksheet where we had to match a noun with a given verb. This exercise seemed easy at first, but as the words we filled in I doubted whether my answers were correct as the remaining nouns didn't match the verb. I was also surprised to find that several collocations that I used to thought was right were actually wrong for example you can't "give someone a compliment" you can only "pay" and there were some which I presumed were wrong but was actually right for example, "cut a tooth"

Then came the second round of literature circle which went smoothly as last time. There was much talk about Madame, significance of the student's artwork, whether they were clones etc. We were able to keep track of this information via a shared Google Doc as it seems that these questions would aid us in examination preparation. I'm really satisfied with the group's overall effort and I know that with this dynamic effort we can give meaningful and insightful knowledge into our class study guide that we are currently creating Overall, Never Let Me Go was far better than I expected and it really showed to me that you should never judge a book by it's cover.

Later in the week, we analyzed a poem called Base Details. When I was analyzing the poem some stanza's in the poem gave away the what the entire poem was talking about in general. Basically, the author who is a solider imagines himself as a bad general and how he loathes the comfortable lifestyle that they live. I have learned through this activity that you should have some background knowledge on a poem beforehand, this allows us to read between the lines much more easily. Also, I have learned that there are just as equal interpretations of a poem. When we were doing the mat circle, I tend to easily shoot down opinions that contradict mine. I learn that analyze poetry is like looking at a piece of modern art, each person is entitled to their own opinions.

Overall, I feel that I have been successful in analyzing poetry this week. It's really quite interesting cracking the insides of a poem, revealing meanings and interpretations that give you that sense of awe and wonder.

Weekly Reflection 12/11/12-18/11/12

This week as we only had one English Class, we did quite a lot of individual and team assignments outside of class. This week, we began looking at our exam text, Never Let Me Go. At first glance, it seemed like a dull book, but after reading up to Chapter 4, the story has grown on me a bit and I'm interested to see where the story will develop.

During presentation time for our pre reading topic, disaster struck us all. Chua could not make it due to an eye infection and he had the actual presentation with him and what he left us with was a sloppy presentation that he made up in 10 minutes. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, we had no choice but to go impromptu. At the end of it all, we learned a lesson that we had to come prepared for any mishaps like this in the future.

This week, we began work on the study guide on Never Let Me Go that was planned last time. There was quite a lot of work ahead of us as we had to do various elements for our study guide.We were divided into lit circles and thankfully I got Brenon, Syahirah and Chua as teammates. Before we began working, we made a solemn "vow" to make sure that we all worked our hardest at any time. Then became the first session of many literature circles and unlike other groups we had a face to face discussion at the discussion room in the boarding house and I had to say I was quite pleased with the progress we've made so far. Everyone was very open minded and flexible and agreed to take on any task that we set as a group.

Hopefully during our second literature session, we can achieve the same kind of seamless discussion among group members either face to face or online.

Juxtaposition Essay Reflection

This week, we faced a particularly difficult task, which was to write an juxtaposition essay (which is basically comparing two things within the essay) I had some good ideas for this essay, but unfortunatly the chapter choice that Brenon and I wanted to pick was already taken and we got stuck with Chapter 8. There were quite a few challenges along the way to the completion of our essay.

- We were not able to find possible connections within the chapter and if we did we were not able to make a strong link between the two elements
-We didn't understand how to create a juxtaposition essay, we tried referring to other people's work but it didn't really help us understand how the essay would be completed

Although this task was particularly confusing and challenging, we were able to gain some new knowledge such as we currently roughly know how to create a juxtaposition essay and we have gained some knowledge on comparing and contrasting events to find their significance. For the completion of this task, we had to consult teacher, peers, online resources and offline resources. By working together with Miss Abena and with peers, we were able to get the support we needed to finish the essay.

In my opinion, I don't feel as if I have acutually achieved the success criteria as I am still in the dark about many things regarding to this lesson. If I am going to consider myself successful at this lesson, I would strongly suggest that another lesson be carried out on this topic to clarify and strengthen our understanding on the matter.

Interpreting Poetry For Dummies

Whenever I read a poem, I usually don't have much of a strategy. I would first look at the poem and obtain a rough idea on what the poem meant. Then I would usually read each line again and try to decipher the meaning of that particular line. I would usually read the poem about 3-5 times, each time trying to obtain the meaning further with each reading. On occasions when footnotes do appear, I would take the time to read it to help me further understand the meaning of difficult and old terms. I rarely use a dictionary when reading a poem, unless there is a word that is completely alien to me, then I would refer to the dictionary. Also, I will always read the poem in my head, never out loud because in my opinion, there really isn't much of a difference if you read it aloud or in your head. Furthermore, I do take notes on occasion when I am trying to decipher the meaning of a poem to help keep track of my idea. Lastly, I do encounter a few problems when reading poetry, for example on some poetry when the meaning is too encoded, I don't have the mentality to figure my way around, which leaves me slightly frustrated but I do feel that maybe after some practice on analyzing poetry, I can get around that obstacle when reading poetry.

This Week's Reflection (10/9)-(16/9)

This week was like any other week. We started the week off with an character analysis essay, as I have written a few before this, it was just a matter of brushing up some unused skills such as analysis skills and thinking and rationalizing skills. It was a bit of challenge at first reusing this skills after about a year or so but with some thought and practice, I came up with an essay that I was quite confident about.

After that, we did a poem called, "A Martian Sends A Postcard Home." A poem that's like a couple of riddles that were joined into a poem. I particularly enjoyed this day as we were more care free and not so serious about our work. We also took pictures of everyday objects at a different perspectives and made others try to guess them, some were kind of plain and some were kind of "dirty" :D We also made riddles that we had to make each others guess. I really wouldn't mind having these kind of activities again every once in a while, just to release all that stress we've been penting up after hours of essay writing, poem analyzing and novel discussions.

Creative Writing

84 of us line in a neat and orderly row. Some of us are white, some of us are black. There is no discrimination between the two as we band to sing to the gods who listen to us. We sing the voices of the dead and the living, a song of sadness or joy but alas as the curtains close, we only may stay silent in the shadow of our master as he receives his applause and kisses

This Week's Reflection (2/7-8/7)

This week, we started off with doing our commentaries with a activity where we had to match a section of commentary to the questions being careful to ensure each section was correct. In my opinion, it was a break from the norm and it helped give us an idea on how each section of the commentary should be structured and answered. After that, we began writing our commentaries which was quite a manageable task given that we had the questions to guide us through which I found to be highly useful.

Other than that matching activity, Miss Abena also read and showed us the children's book called The Gruffallo. Having the book read to me was quite an experience as books were rarely read to me but with Miss Abena's dramatic reading tone plus the animation that she showed us, it was quite an enjoyable week and just hopefully this reading session may happen again! 

This Week's Reflection (18/6-24/6)

Due to the fact that I was away on the IA trip, I was unable to post this till this point in time. This week, we worked on improving our essaies. In a pair with Syahirah, we worked together to recognized how well our structure of our essay was, Syahirah said that my essay's structure was ok and she couldn't find any major mistakes or flaws which was good but I had to get confirmation from Miss Abena first. We also did exercises on coherence and correlation went Miss Abena wasn't here, this exercise did help me understand how points in my essay were supposed to relate to each other, after checking my essay, I felt that the various supporting sentences supported the related topic setencenes but I could only be sure after checking with Miss Abena.

After completing a few exercises on how to write a good essay, I approached Miss Abena to write my essay and after some discussion with her, there were some major flaws in the essay. The major flaw that I thought was most critical that my essay was almost like an encyclopedia, I needed to interact with my reader more instead of spouting fact after fact. To improve this, I need to introduce my personal perspective to show that I have engagement with the essay.

Overall, my essay just requires some tweaking, but with some major improvements, I'll feel much more confident with my essay.

This Week's Reflection (7/5-13/5)

After what Miss Abena commented on how we did our reflections, it finally hit me that the reflection wasn't some place were we would say: "Oh I did this today, I thought it was good but I could us some improvement." It's about questioning and looking back upon your work as questioning why you did it? what have you learned from it? etc. So I will need to change how I am doing my reflections.

This week as me and Nazrel continued working on the project "Using Easybib and Evernote" I was quite frustrated with Nazrel as somehow I ended up doing most of the project while he sat there twiddling his thumbs, but eventually he did produce some good quality work after much nagging and pushing. We decided to finish up the voice recording at home and tidy up the presentation on Wednesday but Miss Abena postponed the presentation till Tuesday, so there might be time for extra improvements, I am quite happy with the Imovie I produced and I hope i can achieved the personal target on the rubric that I have set.

Also I've learned quite an interesting thing this week, Miss Abena showed us how to make our own Google site, It was almost overwhelming at first as this was my very first website, thoughts like How should I design the page? How should I organize it all? were rushing through my head. Google sites in my opinion are quite easy to set up, edit and manage, so it won't really be much of a hassle when it comes to looking back at what articles, pages or notes that I've put on the website when revison time comes around.

This week's reflection (30/4-6/5)

This week since there was a holiday, we didn't really do much in class. Firstly we did morphemes which were confusing to understand at first but eventually I got the concept that it was a word that coud be broken down into a smaller unit of word such as "re" which means to do again and "create" which is to make "recreate" means to make again. Then we did this activity that asked us to make notes on morphemes and recreate them in our on words, there were 10 marks in total and grammar, punctuation and spelling counted in them, This helped me improve my proofreading skills, I feel this activity is quite useful as it makes you double and triple check all the spelling grammer and punctuation, I wouldn't really mind if we had this activity again.


Also, we were assigned pair work and I was with Nazrel, our topic was how to use search engines effectively which was a pretty good topic, we decided to use Prezi as our medium for our presentation. In my opinion, I feel that the workload for this pair is quite one sided, so I require some way to encourage and motivate the pair as a whole to do what they should do and do it well. I perform best in individual work, because sometimes I feel that I place my expectation on how well people should produce their work and would sometimes get out of control and do all the work myself.But as the days progress I understand the value of working in a group, it helps ease the work process and fresh ideas and concepts can be introduced into the group. I still feel some unease when I work in a group but maybe I'm just stuck in my old ways.

I'm actually not very proud of anything I have done this week, as well there's wasn't really anything outstanding that I feel requires to to say, overall it was a good week, but nothing much to shout about. Although what do with some improvement this week is that I could possibly be using prompts and completing reflections on time, as this is the second time I've being called back to finish a poor reflection. Also, I feel that my group trust skills could use a bit of brushing up, I ned to tell myself that people are just as capable of producing top notch work and the sooner I adopt that mantra the better. How I would try to improve of those two problems are I would most likely give myself a constant remainder that reflections must be finished before the next monday, also with the group trust problem, I could give them a small task to do at first, and maybe grow on that if the work they produce is up to snuff.