Year 10 English – Inquisitive growth

During this year in English, many of my learning skills have been tested to withstand the pressure of ATAR learning. One of these skills that had seen the most improvement is my inquisitive ability. This ability was tested during our second task of the year in which we had to write a speech about a problematic topic using a persona. The task was foreign as we had never written as someone else before, but it did not worry me. I had decided to write my speech on problems in YouTube’s suggestion algorithm and had taken on the persona of a YouTube PR representative. During the assignment preparation, I had researched how YouTube recommends their content and certain harmful events that were caused due to their lack of agency. My extensive research had gone so far that I had researched extra topics just so I could better understand the situation, I had essentially absorbed the knowledge needed to be my persona. My hard work was later rewarded with an amazing score for achieving greatness in a foreign field.

My inquisitive growth had also been showcased during our sixth assignment where we had to compare two separate texts in an essay. During the preparation time before the essay, I had extensively researched both texts by memorizing various quotes and scenes and pinpointing how each quote was similar and different to one another. I had even studied how to write an essay to the point where I had a formula for each paragraph. This thorough pursuit of knowledge had led me to achieve excellence in this assignment as well. Throughout both assessments, this inquisitive attitude had always been a highlight of my work, as I believe that a normal person trains themselves to remember a concept while I should strive to understand it.

Dear Year 8 Me

Dear Matthew Baldock,

Some advice that you could gift to people in year 7 going to year 8 would be to work hard going into the year because it will be best to adjust to the difficulty spike between year 7 and year 8. I would also say that they should prepare to invest more home time into projects and assessments.

I would probably change how this year’s classes would be arranged and which topics when. I would have for HASS: P&L, GEO, ECO, HIS for science: CHEM, PHYS, ES, BIO for Math I would not change anything and for English it would be: DOCO, PLAY, BOOK, P-C

My best learning experience was in HASS and English where I finally understood how to use and essay structure and how to plan and write essays efficiently. I would also say that I learnt a lot from the pop-culture group assignment as it taught me how to deal with the worst partners.

The most enjoyable thing about year 8 would be camp as it was a time for me to relax and have fun during the term and helped me destress from the mountains of work that we had gotten.

My biggest contribution would be when I donated games to my class for them to play with or when I donated to the salvation army Christmas appeal because I couldn’t participate in a lot of events because of a busier schedule with my academic life.

I learnt a lot about myself. Something that I had learnt is that I am a bigger procrastinator than I had thought as during the start of the year I would leave my assessments to the latest possible moment or leave it later then. I also like to not do things with my time, usually.