Second Semester Blogging

The end of the year is so close. I feel as if I am at the final stretch of a marathon, but as I step back to look at the big picture, I see that I have only been through half of my high school race. Sophomore year is coming to an end. Now, I must take the time to stop and examine my blog. I am briefly going to compare this semester to first semester on the different types of assignments my class had, and how they affected me. Blog posts were increased from three-hundred words to five-hundred words. Literature circle group letters were given a new format. They changed from addressing how one annotated a book, to more of a quote analysis type of assignment. But, just like last semester, my blog post topics vary from a wide variety of random topics with different styles of how I approached them. These are the very mild changes that have affected the way that I write.

I am positive that my writing has improved in at least one way. I am beginning to become a faster writer. This skill will certainly help me in the future if I am ever timed for writing. I believe that my speedy writing has been caused by all of these quick-writes that my English class does on some unique topics. Strangely, I wrote quick-writes last year in class for practice as well. They are an interesting task where a teacher gives their class a topic, and the class must write without stopping for a said amount of time. Sometimes the teacher can give the class a few minutes to arrange their thoughts on the topic. Over the two years that I have done them, I guess that I was bound to become a "quick-writer." An example of one of these awkward writing tasks would be my blog post called the "Quick Write: Rules of Love." This is not the best example of a quick-write because I put it in question format rather than attempting to form paragraphs about the questions (which is the normal format). Thanks to practicing these, I am capable of phrasing complex sentences for my blog posts in smaller amounts of time, and pretty much finishing them altogether in a short amount of time as well (roughly thirty to forty minutes). In "Chaotic Week," I discussed an unfortunate position I was placed in, and briefly about the book I would have to read over the weekend. "I am only forty pages through this four hundred page or more behemoth, which means that I have only taken a small glimpse of what is yet to come." I had hardly slept the night before, and yet I was able to formulate this sentence. I thought that it sounded perfect the way it came out. I did not even consider altering this sentence as I proof-read the blog post. The several minutes that I use to plan out a quick-write have also affected me. Every time I have to write a book review (e.g. Unwind, Hot Zone, and Parable of Talents). I now find myself using a sheet of binder paper to prepare for what topics I will write about and what quotes I may use from the book. It is a habit that I nearly find impossible to do without.

As I had mentioned in my "First Semester Blogging," I stated that "my blog has a lot of varying topics." I would still find this true. I still even blog about "either an event that recently occurred, or a thought that was lingering within my head for the past twenty-four hours." Some topics are not too out of the ordinary (well at least for other people). While I was writing "Avatar=My Hurt Locker Anticipation," I got to act like a legitimate sophisticated movie critic. At first it was a bit strange talking about the two most highly acclaimed movies of the year, but eventually I just let my ideas flow for whomever to see. Just the feel of writing like a critic was a bit different for me. Another blog post that appears completely bizarre is "Our Kitchen Sink." The title is not suppose to have some sort of double metaphoric meaning. That might actually throw off the reader before he or she begins reading. I even included "This weekend was not so good" as an intro. The whole post is just a plain and simple story telling the sequence of events that happened on my (at the time) recent terrible weekend which involved the replacement of my family's kitchen sink. I was still in a bit of a "handy-man" mode and decided to write about the experience the following day. Well, there was a familiar topic that I decided to write about with a new approach. "Easing Up" is about my somewhat new writing topic of skateboarding with a slightly new form I chose to write in. I decided to write as if it were just a journal entry. In the first two paragraphs, I mainly reflect on the distant past. But, things change in the last paragraph as I tell of a more recent event where my friends and I were "playing a game of L.I.N.E." For the ending half of that paragraph, I allow the reader to see exactly what I was thinking at the moment I was losing and also the feeling of triumph for being able to perform certain tricks under a certain amount of pressure.

I can hardly believe that I am at the middle of my high school career. I am beginning to feel concerned if the remaining other half will pass as quickly as the first one. All that I know is that I have become a better writer during the time I have been blogging. New assignments like quick-writes have given me the ability to write faster while being able to form perfectly coherent sentences. And now, I briefly, yet carefully, create a layout for what my essays (or book reviews) should include. My random blog post topics still continue to exist. New topics and new approaches to familiar topics are seen throughout my blog. They will continue to be posted onto my blog for as long as I want them to be. I think I might still blog even though it will most likely not become an English class requirement for the next school year. I want this to become a hobby of mine. For once, I have found a method of writing that I do not hate, and I might even conduct on my own free time.

For the Love of Math

I can't believe that math was a subject that I use to enjoy. I was actually a pretty good student. I was a student that usually got A's and B's. I think that the reason to my success in the past was because of my great teachers and my desire to succeed. Ever since I accepted the fact that I was a mathematically advanced student (yea right), I had teachers that pitched every lesson in a way that us students would learn easily. They went over all of the homework assignments to see what our strengths and weaknesses of that chapter were. If we did not understand a certain section, they were willing to put of the section's test for a few days so we can spend extra time on reviewing that and other sections. Reflecting on my history with math classes, it made me notice a trend. Whenever I have an entertaining/good teacher, I always do well.

On the other hand, whenever I have a difficult teacher, I struggle quite a bit. I remember in sixth grade, I thought that I was stupid. I always got C's and D's on my math tests. But, one day I got an A+. I guess that might have been motivated by this to try harder. Even though my teacher made us work a lot in class, I would try my best to score high whenever an opportunity arose. For some reason, this year is a little different. I'm not entirely sure, but I'm slowly starting to lose that motivation to work hard. In HPpre -calculus, I get a lot of homework every night. Usually, I hardly understand the lessons, which ends up with me not doing a lot of my homework problems (every night). For some reason, for the first couple of tests and quizes I was able to get A's and B's. But just last week, I barely got a C on a test. I mean I was pressed for time and it was sort of long, but I made many foolish mistakes. I switched numbers around in the answer and I did the hard problems (which I only got partial credit for) instead of the easier ones. This made me wake up and realize that summer vacation is over and I need to start working harder. Hopefully before progress-report time, I'll be able to raise my grade.

My History Project

Every once in a while I always ask myself certain questions. But one that keeps recurring is, do i really know that much about my parents? It took a history project to get me to recently ask myself this question. I was supposed to interview a relative that grew up in a different period of time. I thought about interviewing my grandfather. He has so many different stories from growing up in Mexico, but then I would need my dad to help me translate some of his words because he is fluent in Spanish and speaks only some English. Since that idea would not work that well, I thought about interviewing my dad. He has a couple of good life experiences to share and he enjoyed listening to most of the music that I like. The only major problem with this, is that my dad was going away to Denver, Colorado for a business meeting. My mom recommended that I should interview our neighbor Jewel. That was when I found the perfect person to interview staring me right in the face, my mom.

She is only one generation before me, but this was the time where great advancements in technology took place. My mom would probably be the best adult that could expose me to the life from a few years back. I asked her if I could interview her for my project, and sure enough she let me. It was a very casual interview. We sat down. She was reading the paper when I asked her a couple of questions. And all of a sudden I was done. In the twenty-five to thirty minutes that I interviewed my mom, I learned a few things that I had never known about her before. I found out that the first place she lived in America was Oahu, Hawaii. She also told me that her family lived right across the street from the hospital her mother worked at. I thought that this was pretty cool because after her father and brothers had surgeries, they would just walk it home. Learning about this new information has surely impacted the way I use to depict the kind of person my mom as.

What Will I Blog About?

For my blogs, I plan on writing about numerous subjects. I want to write about things that I use or activities I do on an average day of the week or weekend. School is probably going to be a major topic because most of my life revolves around it. I wake up early to get ready for school. I talk and fool around with my friends at school. And even when I get home, I have to do work for school. Other topics that I will most likely write about will be music and movies. When writing about movies, I will share my opinions about different genres and favorites that I have enjoyed watching for many years. This might apply to my thoughts on music as well. Ever since my cousin and father had enlightened me to the world of rock and metal, my view on music has changed quite a bit.
This year, I hope to improve my writing in one major way. I really want to find my own individual style. In sixth and seventh grade, I had teachers that gave the class handouts on formats they wanted their students’ essays to look like. I got so use to following and relying on the formats that it almost became second-nature to look at the handouts the whole time I wrote any document. Then, in eighth grade, I had a teacher that objected to that form of writing. He made us write final drafts only one paragraph long almost every other night. He disliked the “filler” sentences and words that were there only so the students could reach the assignments minimal length. For his essays he wanted us to explain everything because it is better to leave the reader well-informed rather than completely lost. He would always say, “In my class, two plus two equals five as long as you can explain it.” Since people see things in different way, this caused group discussions to have multiple answers to just a single question that was brought up. I was finally starting to understand writing. But, that was a while ago, and I haven’t written as much ever since then. In ninth grade other classes gave me more homework than English class, so I might be a little rusty. I just hope that I can try to improve on interpreting and explaining the text again.