Reflective Piece

At the beginning of the year, when everyone received the schedule of their whole years worth of teachers and the beginning the tedious and sometimes and might be torturous work. On my schedule, only two of the teachers I don’t know about, while the others I known from previous years and through my siblings who were taught by them. One of them was listed Mr. Gallagher and I not sure who he is or if he was one of the teachers who would torture the students with ridiculous amount of work. I am nervous and concerned, since this is the last year of my high school days and it is numbered. I am not sure if I would be able to get into college I want to go to, it is either success or failure. I don’t know if I would survive this class That was my beginning thoughts, but now in Mr. Gallagher’s class, I learned a lot of things that benefit toward my current education and are next step, college.

When I received the book, The Stranger by Camus, I thought that I can get a good grade with my English skills and tried use my little touch into the surface of the topic to books back then, but I was wrong. I realized that as the years as we all start to grow up we have to use a lot of thinking and things based on philosophy to understand the complexity of the English subject as it begins to lead our way to college and adulthood and that it is not a childish thing that should be taken lightly on. I received have really bad grades on the essays I did in the beginning of the year on the Camus paper and also the Red Shift Paper. They were not the greatest work I did during this whole year. It was not only me who were unprepared for this Throughout this year due to the consistent work on the vocabularies and writing sentences on the board with editorial statements commenting on the grammar and the organization of it, it advised me on lots of ways to improve my writing. Mr. Gallagher always mentioned that everyone should go up to the board and write sentence at least two time a month. He commented on a lot of our sentence and helped. For instance, the college essay was a good essay even though I did not know what I am exactly writing about or if the college would accept it. It came out alright and probably the best that I have done at that point. Everyone had been trying by themselves and did everything alone, which was different from the real world where they interact. Mr. Gallagher also tried ways to allow us to interact with each other such as acting out Hamlet and reciting the poems. It allowed us to understand the speech, the tone, and built the foundation on public speaking and portraying of the language art. I had a bad time at speaking, but on the poem recitation, I did my best not to hyperventilate even if half of my body is going through the process. I felt a bit more confident that I tried and received a good grade for trying though not to the extent of perfection.

For our very last assignment, the research paper, I did not know what I was doing, but in an instant the philosophical and analytical outlooks started to burst out. Due to all the work and comments Mr. Gallagher gives to the whole class, thoughts and philosophical ideas begin to connect and allow me to research into the depths of the artist and his style not just glazing over it. I was able to produce a strong thesis backed by good facts that satisfy myself for producing a good and acceptable work.

This year is nearly coming to the end; it might be the last time that we get to see our class mates of English class again. At the very beginning, I always know that I am not really good at writing or analyzing the literature books to the very depth that make the text comprehendible to everyone and I tend to skim the surface of the text instead of going deeper but this year, I have improved, though I might not be the perfect student, but at least I improved thanks to Mr. Gallagher.