Advanced Middle Grades English Language Arts (ENL1W)

My midterm research paper was about connecting Maus to another historical genocide event. My event was the Armenian genocide.  We also had to bond both the events together through a theme, which mine was discrimination.

How does this project help you in your study habits?

This project helped me find more sources, which helped me research more, and I didn't procrastinate a lot because I knew how big of an assignment this was. 

How did peer feedback help you in your project? Describe the feedback.

I received some really nice feedback from Verna. She gave me feedback on wording, where to add more information and how to organize my text better. I agreed with most, if not all of her suggestions and she honestly taught me a few new things like when to use ; and :. 

What problems did you encounter while you were working on this piece? How did you solve them?

At first I couldn't find a lot of sources for my paper, because I could only find the Brittanica version of the Armenian genocide. I later solved this by googling deeper and looking at the sources of the Brittanica's article. Lastly, I found the website for a museum specialized in genocides, where they had a really nice article, so I used that as another source.

Choose three peices of work- assignments or essays. What improvements have you made?

This semester, I realized that my awareness of assignments significantly regressed. I just totally forgot that assignments existed and during the weekends I just completely forgot that I was enrolled in school and google classrooms, so I didn’t even touch the google classroom app even once, except on Sundays, which I regularly cram all my forgotten assignments in. I think this is because this semester I started socializing more and I started going out more with friends so I had more plans and less time. I think the original reason I am in this set and the sets for all my other classes is because before all I did was stay home all weekend and play video games and eventually I was really bored so I would go do homework. However, this habit(good or bad), has affected my academics in English class, examples including; 

• My third google sites portfolio reflection: I completely forgot that this assignment existed, so I didn’t do a single bit of it, and only did the work and turned it in after the teacher reminded me of my missing work.

• Maus vocabulary quiz: I forgot that we had a quiz on vocabulary and I spent 10 minutes hastily playing the quizzit vocabulary test the night before the test. I knew that if I had just studied a little more, I could’ve gotten a better grade.

• My Maus theme presentation: I honestly just kept putting this off and I forgot about it at some point, so when the last person before me presented, I realized I was done for. That night, I sped home and put together a presentation that contained examples from when I would randomly flip pages of the book and just write the stuff down. I could’ve totally gotten a better grade if I found better examples to represent my theme / topic of the presentation.

Despite knowing that I could do better if I just changed my schedule, I simply don’t know if it is going to happen next semester.