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.