Fall POLs 32Q
Celebrations:
Drive and motivation
This semester, I am proud of many things that I want to celebrate, but I want to focus on celebrating accomplishments in Humanities and Spanish. In humanities, I have been very driven to do well on quizzes like the West African country quiz and the Central African country quiz. On both of these quizzes I got 100%, which is better than I generally do. Doing good on these tests made me feel good because it usually takes me longer than most students to memorize and practice for a quiz, but for these it took me about fifteen minutes to study for each quiz we did. I believe my test taking strategies have improved through practicing memorization techniques and studying skills, and I am motivated to keep improving.
Spanish writing/speaking skills
Another triumph this year has been my growth in my spanish writing and speaking. In the beginning of this semester I was struggling with learning the vocab we were practicing. Starting free writes was very hard for me; putting the words together was difficult. I wanted to use little words like ‘that’ and ‘is’ and I wanted to make the sentences detailed. In the first free write I introduced myself, my age, where I was from, what I liked to do, and what I didn’t like to do, and it had 33 words. In the second free write I wrote 55 words and on the last free write of the semester I wrote a long piece with 63 words. I have grown a lot from the start of the semester to the end and I am proud of this growth.
Writing skills/essay organization
I am deeply proud of how much my writing skills have improved this semester. Having a year and a half worth of practice of writing essays has helped me tremendously with my essay organization. I have gotten better at making my writing more fluent and clear, as well as strengthening my technical skills in grammar and word usage. I have showed this through my Things Fall Apart seminar reflection
Areas for growth:
Being motivated to improve my math skills
An area this semester that I haven’t been doing so well in is math. Math has been difficult and was I trying to avoid it. An example of this would be when we did the calculating area worksheet. This was hard for me because I had to refresh my brain to relearn how to find the area of each of the shapes on the worksheet. Doing this worksheet took me more time than I was expecting. I didn’t want to fall behind on the rest of the work we were doing and because this worksheet was difficult for me I tried to avoid spending a lot of time on going back to make sure I understood how to do the worksheet thoroughly. I wish I would have spent more time on the worksheet to make sure I was doing it correctly, and not just doing it for the grade. In the future I will take the time and make sure I understand what we are doing, even if that means taking my free time to learn more on whatever I am having trouble with.
Improve lab writing skills
I had never completed written labs before this year in Biology, and this is my biggest area for growth right now. Closer to the beginning of the year we did a cube swap write up, which needed to be straight to the point and thorough. Doing this write up stressed me out because I was afraid that I wasn’t going meet the writing expectations, and part of that stress was just not having done lab writings before. This lab write up was a group write up, everyone in the group wrote about three sentences each. There is a difference between the writes we do in humanities and ones we do in science. The essay we write humanities use TEA format, and in the lab writings we explain the research and data that we find in our labs. Next semester I am making it my goal to ensure I ask questions to better understand how to refine my lab writing skills.
Question to pounder:
What can I do during my high school career to set myself up for success after graduation?
Drive and motivation
This semester, I am proud of many things that I want to celebrate, but I want to focus on celebrating accomplishments in Humanities and Spanish. In humanities, I have been very driven to do well on quizzes like the West African country quiz and the Central African country quiz. On both of these quizzes I got 100%, which is better than I generally do. Doing good on these tests made me feel good because it usually takes me longer than most students to memorize and practice for a quiz, but for these it took me about fifteen minutes to study for each quiz we did. I believe my test taking strategies have improved through practicing memorization techniques and studying skills, and I am motivated to keep improving.
Spanish writing/speaking skills
Another triumph this year has been my growth in my spanish writing and speaking. In the beginning of this semester I was struggling with learning the vocab we were practicing. Starting free writes was very hard for me; putting the words together was difficult. I wanted to use little words like ‘that’ and ‘is’ and I wanted to make the sentences detailed. In the first free write I introduced myself, my age, where I was from, what I liked to do, and what I didn’t like to do, and it had 33 words. In the second free write I wrote 55 words and on the last free write of the semester I wrote a long piece with 63 words. I have grown a lot from the start of the semester to the end and I am proud of this growth.
Writing skills/essay organization
I am deeply proud of how much my writing skills have improved this semester. Having a year and a half worth of practice of writing essays has helped me tremendously with my essay organization. I have gotten better at making my writing more fluent and clear, as well as strengthening my technical skills in grammar and word usage. I have showed this through my Things Fall Apart seminar reflection
Areas for growth:
Being motivated to improve my math skills
An area this semester that I haven’t been doing so well in is math. Math has been difficult and was I trying to avoid it. An example of this would be when we did the calculating area worksheet. This was hard for me because I had to refresh my brain to relearn how to find the area of each of the shapes on the worksheet. Doing this worksheet took me more time than I was expecting. I didn’t want to fall behind on the rest of the work we were doing and because this worksheet was difficult for me I tried to avoid spending a lot of time on going back to make sure I understood how to do the worksheet thoroughly. I wish I would have spent more time on the worksheet to make sure I was doing it correctly, and not just doing it for the grade. In the future I will take the time and make sure I understand what we are doing, even if that means taking my free time to learn more on whatever I am having trouble with.
Improve lab writing skills
I had never completed written labs before this year in Biology, and this is my biggest area for growth right now. Closer to the beginning of the year we did a cube swap write up, which needed to be straight to the point and thorough. Doing this write up stressed me out because I was afraid that I wasn’t going meet the writing expectations, and part of that stress was just not having done lab writings before. This lab write up was a group write up, everyone in the group wrote about three sentences each. There is a difference between the writes we do in humanities and ones we do in science. The essay we write humanities use TEA format, and in the lab writings we explain the research and data that we find in our labs. Next semester I am making it my goal to ensure I ask questions to better understand how to refine my lab writing skills.
Question to pounder:
What can I do during my high school career to set myself up for success after graduation?