My Learning History

As a young boy, I was constantly reading books like Magic Treehouse and other fictional stories. I would sometimes go through a book in a day! I never really enjoyed writing early on unless it was about myself or an experience that I had. I found it hard and sometimes boring to write about something I didn’t have an interest in. As I have gotten older and matured I have grown to appreciate nuance and theme in books, movies, and music. Throughout the years I have noticed my ability to write has gotten better and better; I attribute that to maturity and exposure to exceptional works of literature and instructors. Something that hasn’t changed, however, is my ability to write about something that interests me. Last year I took an English class that focused solely on war and combat and how it affects soldiers. For me, history and world wars have been a fascination of mine since I was a young boy. This class seemed too good to be true! My teacher was phenomenal and despite being a harsh grader, he prepared the class for the rigors of college English courses and never went easy on us. It was especially beneficial because the class was his favorite to teach and it showed, he had presentations and videos and even guest speakers! The extra resources and insight that my teacher had taught us a lot about a subject not many people are very aware of. Our final project was a research paper that we had to create that connected a topic of our choice with its impact on the literature of war. It was pretty challenging at first but because of my instructor's ability to assist, I was able to figure it out early on. Even though the research paper is a different form of writing, it still helped me weed out unimportant information that distracted from the main message and it taught me how to write concisely. The connection to the literature of war was the portion of it that had the most literary freedom; as long as you had facts and evidence to back up your claim, you could write about anything you wanted. One of the interesting things about the class was the way it was conducted. Contrary to many classes at my school we watched, listened, and read many stories that contained lots of profanity and violence that may have been offensive to some people. The instructor was always clear that if it wasn't something that you wanted to watch or hear, you could step out of the room and work on an alternative assignment. For me, I felt like an insider because none of the things we did ever offended me nor rubbed me the wrong way; in addition to the fact that I had prior knowledge of almost all the subjects we covered concerning wars. This could be for a variety of reasons but for some people they just don't like the things we saw. This caused some people to drop the class, although some did because of the workload, and we ended up with twelve students by the end of the year. For some, the topics we engaged in may have been uncomfortable and caused them to feel like an outsider, however, as a class, we did everything in our ability to make sure everyone was on the same page and were included. I knew what it felt like to be an outsider in an English class because during my sophomore year English class I had the most struggling encounter with the content we learned. I feel I was an outsider because none of the topics we covered interested me and my teacher never did a great job of making it interesting. He made English feel like a chore when all my other English teachers made it an artful and unique form of expression. Our emphasis on themes seemed rigid and stale in contrast to other classes where the themes were rich and uplifting. My teacher also never made assignments nor projects clear and many of us felt we were clueless. When students would confront our teacher he would often get overly emotional and engage in a long lecture on why we weren’t doing things the right way. In the end, however, I overcame and managed to find a way that worked for me and found my success. That success, in talking with my peers, doesn’t always happen. For some, they don’t end up figuring it out and they struggle yet for some they do. This has shown me that there are varying degrees to everything that happens in the world. While some people have issues that I don’t share and some of us share commonalities we all have at least one thing in common and that is that we all have our imperfections we battle and attempt to overcome. My measure of success is being able to say that each and every day was better than the last. I learned how I can better understand and help myself along with those of my classmates around me. Hopefully, I can help my classmates achieve their highest level of success possible.