This week, the class mostly worked on finishing things up. I, however, was only at school for three days this week, so my experience may have been a little different than others. Being sick as a dog is not a helpful thing when trying to get loose ends caught up, and in all honestly, it makes me stressed beyond all belief. The ending of this trimester is definitely causing me to reevaluate my approach to this class. I definitely will need to work on staying on top of things, so I will not fall behind. Time management is not one of my strongest qualities, and it is definitely something I strive to become better at.
As I look back on this trimester, there are definitely things that I need to work on. I need to work on being less of a procrastinator, learning how to work better in group projects, and how to be more of a confident public speaker. These are all skills that I worked on this trimester, but they all could use more improvement. My goal for the trimesters to follow is to work heavily on improving with these skills, and in general just feeling more confident with myself and my abilities. This week we continued to read tragedy pieces to add to our knowledge about the concept of tragedy. I really enjoy that we are reading all these different articles and are watching all these TED Talks about tragedy. It's interesting having all these different people's opinions on the topic, and being able to pick and choose from them to choose your own definition of tragedy. I'm not quite sure what I think it means right now, but I think I'm beginning to get a better understanding of it. I'm quite excited to put all the pieces together, and come to a final answer.
We also worked on explicating the poem "Barbie Doll". I really enjoyed explicating it and also discussing with the class the terrible sexism that women face in their day to day life. It sort of reminded me how important it is to be passionate about what you speak about. So often when we are told to write about something, we have to put ourselves in a frame of mind where we can pretend to be passionate about it. It's refreshing when I get to talk and write about topics I actually am passionate about, and it certainly helps me in my writing. This week, we added more to our tragedy knowledge by reading Oedipus. It was a very interesting piece to read. I really enjoyed being able to read the piece as if we were doing a play. I think that whenever my class has done that, I've always felt like I've absorbed the story and information better. I think that I'm going to begin to read aloud more often, even if I'm by myself, I think it really helps me hold on to the information, and analyze it a little bit better. I'm a pretty fast reader, so I sometimes have the bad habit of speeding through the text without thinking about it at all. I feel like when I read aloud though, I have to be slow enough for my ears to understand what my mouth is saying. As a result, I often get a better understanding of the text when I'm forced to read it slower. Another thing that I need to work on more is being up to date with these blog posts. If I don't do them on time, they don't cause me to actually reflect on the week in a thoughtful manner. I'll just end up doing them at a later date, and not really remember any revelations I had. As this marking period and trimester begin to wind down, I'm starting to think more about what I want to be doing differently next trimester. Working harder on keeping on top of everything is the biggest thing. Time management is something I struggle greatly with. I always procrastinate and procrastinate, and then life happens, and I'm left with a lot of work to do, and little time and energy to do it. It's not my best quality, that's for sure. This week we began to work on our tragedy unit. I found a lot of the media we have used so far very interesting. I especially enjoyed the Ted Talk that we watched this week, I feel like it greatly helped me with beginning to think about the topic at hand. I'm already beginning to see tragedy in a different light. Before we started discussing it, I had thought of it as merely an unfortunate event, but now I see that there is much, much more involved in it. I learned that as humans, we are drawn to tragedy now, as we were drawn to it years and years ago. Tragedy can often be somewhat comforting, because you feel as if you're not alone in woes and hard times.
I'm excited to read more pieces about tragedy in order to gain more knowledge about the concept. It's an interesting thing to learn about, especially since many of the pieces explain how we, as humans, are outgrowing tragedy in its original state, and moving on. I think this mostly is a result of the fact that we use humans as our role models, and people don't believe in the Gods or God having control over what happens to us. As a result, many a times we don't view things as tragedies, we view them as the result of human stupidity. Which from a literature standpoint, makes writing pieces less magical, in my opinion. |
Mattie BarberAP Lit student. |