1. This trimester, I put the most time into the American Drama Assignment. My group and I all collaborated well together and had the same vision for how the project should turn out. We used the time given to us productively by working together on the written assignments and also the mis en scene decisions and filming of the scenes in the play. Everyone in my group put in 100% effort into getting the project done to the best of out abilities. Although we worked extremely hard, we also had a good time. The strengths of our project ended up being our filming, acting, and how we used mis en scene techniques to convey meaning in each shot. What we lacked in was our communication with the audience. We were not as clear as we could have been in our thesis and why we chose each scene to act out in support of our thesis. Everyone in our group understand and could defend the choices that we made, we just did not portray this as effective in our presentation. We could have added some shots with words before our actual film or framing to greater emphasize our thesis. After working with "Death of a Salesman" for so long, I got a very in-depth understanding of what the theme of the play was and messages that it conveyed about the American Dream.
The project that I am most proud of how it turned out was my group's fairytale presentation. It was the fifth and final group poetry presentation that we did. I feel like everything that we had learned and struggled with on the previous presentations all came together and clicked for us. Throughout the entire process, my group had been working so hard and putting in so much effort and even though we all worked well together, I felt like we were never all of the same page with each other and where we should be with analyzing and interpreting our poems. When we were assigned "Little Red Riding Hood" as our fairytale, we all could immediately understand and discuss the meaning of the poem that went with the fairytale. With our united understanding, we used our creativity to make the PowerPoint itself and tweet to present what we had learned in a more interesting and catchy way. The only weakness is that we may have been able to dig a little bit deeper into what the author was trying to convey in her poem. Overall, this final presentation earned my group not only our best presentation grade, but also the confidence that we had gotten what skills we needed to analyze and interpret poetry from all of our previous presentations.
2. In class this trimester, I feel that as I grew more confident with the material, I participated more. From the beginning, I did all of the assignments that I was asked to do and kept my blog updated. I also took personal notes during all of the poetry and literary analysis presentations and while reading Hamlet. When it came to my own work, I steadily put in my best effort throughout the trimester. When working in groups, the situation was a little bit different. While working on our group presentations in the first part of the trimester, I worked hard and tried to contribute my best effort to the group. The only problem was that there were people in my group that understood what we were doing better than I did so they often stepped up and took control. Despite that, I still did my share of the work although I did not feel like I was contributing as much as I could have. For example, usually I was not responsible for doing anything but information slides and occaisionally a topic sentence. As we moved on to our last couple of group presentations, I felt more comfortable with analyzing poetry and felt more satisfied with my role within our group's work. I actually helped come up with the thesis statement and one of the topic sentences for the fairytale presentation.
After changing groups for the American Drama assignment, I kept up my strong group participation. I put forth a lot of effort into both the written and filmed part of the project. For example, I organized my whole group for filming at my house, drew and wrote a couple of the story boards, choose which scenes we would act out and their framing, and also helped come up with the thesis for the theme of the play. In my new group, I found myself helping out the other members by sharing my opinion and giving them advice whereas I felt like I was the person recieving all of the advice earlier in the trimester. The reversal of roles shows how far I have come in my understanding of literature. My in class participation has remained fairly steady throughout the trimester. I share my opinion and ask questions occaisionally when I feel like there is something that I need to say. Overall, I think that my participation in class discussions has been average and it is something that I hope to improve on next trimester.
3. Looking back on the measurable goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the trimester, it is evident that I have improved greatly. On the first practice AP test that we took, I recieved a 55%. On the practice AP test that we took for our Unit 1 test, before test corrections I got a 67%. On the practice AP test that we took for our final exam, before test corrections I got a 72%. In just one trimester, my performance on the practice AP exams has improved by 17%! And I still have almost all of second trimester to improve as well. If I show as much improvement next trimester that I did this trimester, then a reasonable goal would be to get around an 87% on the second trimester final exam which is a great score to go into the real AP test with.
To break down and access my specific goals for improving on my AP test performance, I have been doing well so far. On the first practice AP test, I counted 14 words that did not know. On the most recent practice AP test, there where only about 7 or 8 words that I did not know. My goal at the beginning of the year was to know 3 or 4 more vocab words on each test than I did on the previous one. This means that I am right on track for my goal of not knowing only 1 or 2 words on the actual AP exam. I have learned these new words by writing down and looking up any unfamiliar words that I have come accross in class. Another goal that I had set for myself was to not rush through the test but rather spend more time analyzing the text and thinking about the questions. The first time that I took a practice AP test, I finished in 30 minutes. This time it took me about 40 minutes when we get 50 minutes on the actual test so I am getting closer to using most of the time that I am given. There are also some goals that I would like to set for myself for class next trimester. I would like to participate more in class discussions. To turn that into a measurable goal, I would like to make at least one comment or ask one question every time that we have class discussions. Overall, I am proud of my progress in this class so far. I think that as of now, I am on a solid path to be able to achieve most of my goals by the time I take the AP exam.
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