2021 was a wild year filled with many highs and lows. Some vital parts of my 2021 include my great academic enjoyment in maths, science and sport. My dislikes in English and HASS. My great achievements and improvements in after-school sport.
Maths
I enjoyed maths this year just like I have most years, but this year especially, it started not tremendous but improved through the year. My maths journey started not as well as I would have liked in 2021 because of the math group I was put in. In 2020 I was in the second-highest math group A2, and I thought it was the perfect spot for me, and I enjoyed my time in class. However, at the start of 2021, I realised that I was in A3 (class 1 lower than mine). As I described earlier, this annoyed me that I enjoyed being in A2. I turned this frustration into a drive to do better, and by the end of the first test of the year, I was back where I wanted to be in A2, and I continued to strive in maths for the rest of the year.
Science
I had a fantastic time in science in 2021. I did not immensely enjoy it in year 7 (2020), but I enjoyed the variety of topics that we covered last year. I found science engaging and found myself excited to go to each class. Besides the tremendous amount of homework, science was my favourite academic subject.
Sport
I have never not enjoyed sport, and I do not think I will ever not enjoy sport, but like every year of my life, I enjoyed sport this year. This year especially because of the excellent sports program set for year eight students. This program implied that all year 8s have sport at the same time. This allowed us to have options on which sports we could do. I thought this was awesome, and I enjoyed doing the sports that I was good at and enjoyed. I enjoyed this. I was disappointed that this did not persist into year 9.
HASS & English
The subjects that I did not enjoy as much in 2021 include HASS. I have never really enjoyed HASS. This has mainly been because I was never good at it, and I also did not find the content very engaging. Sadly, this continued in 2021, and I did not enjoy any of the topics we looked at throughout the year. I wanted to try and enjoy HASS more in 2021, along with not very engaging lessons and topics that I did not find very interesting. I also did not think that the teacher that I had was not the best for me and did not bring the most out of me in HASS in year 8. Even though I did not enjoy English in 2021, I enjoyed it considerably more than HASS. This is because, just like HASS, I am not too good at it, I enjoyed the teacher that I had for year eight, and I thought she was the perfect English teacher for me. However, just like HASS again, I did not enjoy the topics and assessments.
Co-curricular and after-school sport
In 2021 unlike 2020, I did not have many opportunities to try out new co-curricular activities. I still had the chance to take part in 1 co-curricular before I moved squads and didn’t have the time to continue with it. This was the after school soccer, I really enjoyed this as I used to play soccer before I started swimming. I was sad I couldn’t continue with it but I took up soccer as 1 of my electives this year which I can’t wait to take part in. This was because of my very time consuming after school activities. On the note of my after-school activities, my primary sport of 2021 was swimming. I made some create achievements in my swimming this year. These include moving up in squads from silver (second highest) to gold (highest). This change not only increased the amount of swimming I was doing by another 2 hours from 14 to 16 but drastically increased the intensity of each training session. I also qualified for both state championships this year, but unfortunately, for the final preparations for the short course championships, I had an accident and broke my left wrist. This took a huge mental toll on me as I could not use my arm for six weeks, but I also missed out on state championships that I had been preparing for and training hard for, for three months. It was challenging even when my arm had healed enough to go and do kick sets at training because it hurt me mentally watching everyone around me improving and performing at their best while I could not do anything.