Semester Reflection

This semester, I definitely grew a lot as a writer, reader and I have even gotten better at analyzing things at a more critical level of thinking.


One thing I definitely improved on was my writing, as in establishing a connection between me and the reader, using ETHOS and PATHOS. One thing I did was in the
letter to the U.N, I said that if they didn’t do anything to stop the genocide, they would have had the deaths of thousands of people on their hands. I would never have been able to establish that kind of connection before this year. Also I have gotten better grades in my writing. At the beginning of the year, I got a C+ on a paper that I spent a very long time doing. Ever since then, I had also gotten C+’s, but I knew I could do better, and on the last piece I wrote, I got a B.


This semester, I also grew as a reader. I feel my comprehension has grown greatly, and an example would be the American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was easily of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever read, and it took me quite a while to grasp it, but I eventually did.


Our debates this year were very interesting, and I feel I learned a lot from them. I especially learned that your own point of view could be wrong if you looked at it from another person’s perspective, especially in the Rwandan Genocide Debate. I saw that in the case of the Belgians, they thought France was at fault, but for the French, it was completely the opposite.


I also learned a lot about researching, and how credible your sources need to be. For example, I found out one thing about the genocide on BBC, but I found something completely different on a different, non credible website. I found out that it is better to use the more credible website.


Lastly, I learned how to analyze things on a different level, like The Man in the Well for example. At first glance, it seemed like a basic piece of writing, but if you stopped to look at it, and try looking at it from a different perspective, there was a lot more to it.


So like I said I learned a ton this semester, and I will carry that with me all the way through high school and throughout the rest of my life.