reflection

Reading and writing- the two things I dread the most, still- has always been my biggest academic setback. I don't know why, but I just suck at it. I don't really feel comfortable with my essays. I'm not the biggest fan in participating in the Harkness discussions... for some reason, I always feel hesitant in sharing others my thoughts because I fear that I would be judge... or just forget how to speak entirely. 

One improvement I made this year is confidence... I think at least. Well, I definitely will say I got a little bit more comfortable with my reading and writing skills—maybe I wouldn't necessarily say I got better or anything, but my scores on my essays prove to me that my analysis isn't stupid. I can trust myself more and have more courage to share out my thoughts and ideas, but this is something I just need to continuously work on for rest of my school year. 

I feel like confidence in this class ties very strongly with reading skills, and maybe I wasn't so confident at first because I never thought I was a good reader... oh I'm terrible by the way. My reading comprehension is definitely below par, but I am definitely getting better marginally every time I finish a novel, especially the really deep ones that we read this year (like The Stranger, Lolita, Their Eyes Were Watching God). This year, I set up an extremely difficult challenge for myself, which is to rely on sparknotes LESS (I know I know... big task but for real, not using it helps you improve reading sorta), and I must say it's helping me grow tremendously as a reader (maybe English teachers should've told me sooner that sparknotes doesn't make you improve as a reader smh).

Before taking this class, which I kind of had no intention to other than my sister telling me that the class is supposedly "easier" than 11AP in terms of the stupid workload that got me stressing during the pandemic, I had goals in mind... goals of what I wanted to achieve specifically in this class. One of the goals is to learn more about myself as a person, and for some reason, from exploring "complex relationships" for months to doing a whole research project on author's bias to just writing blogs every 2 week, I feel like I'm learning more about myself and my place in this world?? —can't really explain this too well, but I'm sure someone can relate hopefully. 

Perhaps the reason to this is because this class transformed into someone brain dead like half of the time into an overthinker. I don't know why, but recently I've been overthinking about literally everything late at night—me, family, friends, school, college, , my future, my life, afterlife, universe... you get the point. I guess this is good other than the fact that my sleep schedule is basically ruined at this point.

saw this meme on instagram the other day.... thought it was funny and fitting for this blog

I still got a lot of learning and reading to do, and for the rest of the upcoming semester, I want to put all my focus on reading... just reading more... for fun or for academic purposes, it doesn't matter.