Third quarter has felt really strange, I guess is the best way to phrase it. It feels like second quarter ended like two days ago and third quarter had ended prematurely. What makes it even stranger is the fact that we're going to be on our last two months of school in the span of fourth quarter. I guess third quarter is a time to realize that middle school really doesn't last forever after eighth grade, whether that's good or bad.
Without a doubt, my biggest improvement was in the art of writing essays. Before, I don't think I was very efficient or good at doing it. However, now that we've spent a lot more time going over format, style, and the necessities of having a good essay, I feel a lot more confident writing them. With that, I also learned that revision is far more helpful and important than I previously thought. I'm not going to lie and say that I always revise. In fact, I rarely ever do. Third quarter showed me that revision shows you where you went wrong, and you end up teaching yourself how to prevent yourself from making those same mistakes again. I would like to give some kudos to revision. Kudos.
The hardest part of third quarter isn't something I can really pinpoint but it was quite possibly writing the argumentative essay on Blackfish and SeaWorld. Getting your thoughts out and into the paragraph wasn't difficult; and finding evidence to support you wasn't very hard at all either. Really, just getting the format correct was the most challenging part for me. I'd be missing whole parts of the format in some paragraphs (rebuttal, warrant, quote, etc,.) and would make my whole paragraph sound choppy when I would try to awkwardly add them in (which then took quite a lot of rewriting to sound OK again).
I've always found it hard to find books that I actually enjoy. So, I feel rather accomplished when I've been able to read quite a few books this quarter that I don't dislike at all. In other words, my accomplishment it finding more genres of books that I like. A perfect example of this is my favorite book this quarter: Requiem for a Dream. The book was rather descriptive, in-depth, and dark. However, I had always thought that I wouldn't enjoy third person books as much as I would like books in first person. Reading Requiem really proved myself wrong because it was just as amazing as it was third person omniscient. Overall, I'm just really interested in seeing what fourth quarter brings.
No comments:
Post a Comment