1st Blog

I have had many fun and memorable learning experiences during my academic career but one stands out to me in particular. Like in chapter 3 on page 83 when Mrs. Davidson worked with Rodney after school to help him become better at arithmetic, I had a teacher who continued to work with me to become a better writer.

During my sophomore year of high school my teacher assigned us to write a 15-page research paper. When I first heard that it had to be 15 pages long, I thought to myself that this would be an impossible task that I could never complete in a thousand years. What Mr. E did unlike many other teachers I had before is he would tell us that we should meet with him on a regular basis to discuss our projects. When I first met with him at what was called the conference table, he asked me what my interests and passions were and I told him that I am into music. We brainstormed ideas together and decided that I could write about the history of Hip Hop music.

Over the course of the quarter, my teacher and I worked on countless drafts of my paper. During these meetings he showed me the importance of proof reading as well as how important it can be to talk to someone about my ideas when writing a paper.  When I finally completed my paper it ended up being 25 pages long!! In chapter 4 on page 108 the author states that, “I also liked the idea of students each having a turn at being the ones giving the grades.” My teacher thought this exact same way and had each student trade their research paper with one another and critique them and the critiques that students made would be incorporated into your projects final grade. I ended conquering my boss-level challenge with an A on my research paper.

This project helped me both in and out of class. When it comes to in class settings it taught me that it is important that I always proof read my work and to always look for ways that I can make a project better. In the out-of-class setting it taught me to never doubt my abilities and that it is important to communicate with others when you need help.

How this could relate to a boss level challenge for this class is that even if the project sounds tough I should not give up right away and if I have a problem I should communicate with others to try and find ways that I could possibly solve the problem.

The boss-level challenge that I would like to see myself be able to tackle this quarter would be to use and learn a computer program that I am not familiar with such as wordpress or a film-editing program. I hope that we will be using these programs a lot this quarter because these are programs I could see myself using outside of an academic setting.