First Semester Review

I feel I have learned a lot during my first semester in the Stevenson Global Education program; especially in the English portion of it. I have always liked writing, but I feel this year I was introduced to a completely new type of writing. This had to do with writing about event s that were either taking place currently in the world or in history. Never before was I given a news article to read, margin note and then write a one or two paragraph essay to state my opinion on the situation. Did I support what was happening or not? What did I think they should be doing? Well, to be honest, I had no clue. Sometimes I didn’t even know what I thought of the situation because it didn’t seem to affect me in any way. And I often asked myself why we had to do this, because I am no expert on these sort of cases. I had to think really hard about what I thought. Once I had my stand, I needed to support it, which was probably the hardest part. Of course I had reasons for my thoughts, but I wasn’t exactly sure of how to make them into two whole paragraphs. And as the year progressed, I felt much more comfortable with these assignments.
Margin notes were another thing I learned to do this year. Before, it was always just highlighting, but now I had to write down my thoughts and ask questions and summarize the articles. At first I wasn’t really sure what to note on, or what to do, but now it’s all very easy to me and when I’m given an article, in any class, I feel like I should be margin noting.
The movies we watched in class like the Rabbit Proof Fence and The Power of One really seemed to help me understand what was happening in the countries we were learning about. I also went to see Invictus over winter break and I found that some events I was reading about in the articles were the ones I saw in the movie and it really helped me connect better to the history of South Africa and the Apartheid.
In class we went over grammar and the usage of capitalization and apostrophes. I was surprised to find the mistakes I made sometimes and I also had some questions answered. Like, I always wondered if “it” was used in showing possession, as in saying,”There was a long, red dress and on its skirt …” I came to find out that “its” would not have an apostrophe, once and for all. The apostrophe in “it’s” is only to be used if you are to be combining the words “it” and “is”.
This was the first year I was in a class where we actually had a debate, and it was on the topic of the Rwandan genocide. I found that I don’t have much of a voice when it comes to this, but then again it didn’t seem like many complaints were thrown at my group’s part and Paul Kagame. Although looking back I feel there could have been times where we should have spoken and did not.
All in all, this semester has been pretty challenging, but when I received the letter we had to write from Paul Rusesabagina to the U.N. and realized I had gotten an A, I was realized that all my hard work had definitely paid off!