Involvement
Overall, I think my involvement in English is standard; I’m neither extremely involved nor too withdrawn. In the past term with poetry, I’ve involved myself with contributing information that I know or thoughts or reading out examples that I feel confident with. For reading out passages, I don’t normally like reading out because then I don’t concentrate on understanding what it’s telling me and more on reading and saying it right. When sharing our answers or thoughts, I only involve myself if it’s something I’m passionate about, or to give a completely different perspective that I think should be accounted for.
Marks
When the first set of marks came out for our English short answer assessment, everyone got way lower than what was expected and it was miles away from what I had previously gotten in year 7. At the start, I was devastated at how low I got (70) and that one test had stuck in my mind for weeks. As we did more and more assessments, I eventually got used to getting 80s and realised that the standards for year 8 were drastically different from year 7. Overall, I think that compared to others, I’m doing pretty well as long as I put in my effort into reaching the highest I possibly can.
Confidence
Even though I’ve gotten used to the standards of year 8 and the realisation that getting 90s are a rare occurrence, I still don’t feel extremely confident with English. I’ll never feel confident in any subject unless I know I’m getting 90s or more and even then, I don’t feel safe not putting in the same amount of effort I do for the other subjects. If assessments are in class, I feel even less confident because I can’t refine or look over my work multiple times.
Organisation
Honestly, I’m not the most organised person and I tend to procrastinate and push back doing work. I try to be organised by brainstorming or pre-writing answers to questions that might appear in the assessment. However, I take ages to write them and when I make big goals, I normally take twice as long to fulfil them. I’ll do 5 minutes of work, and then have 20 minutes of break, which is why I take so long. Recently, I’ve tried to physically map out what I’m going to do over the next few days so I can actually visualise the amount of work I have to complete. However, I’ve only just started doing this so I’m not sure if it’s helping yet.
Learner Agency
I think my learner agency is ok but not amazing. I am generally independent in terms of studying and planning my work because my parents are strong on not wanting to baby us and remind us of everything we have to do. If I don’t do my work on time to a good standard, that’s on me. However, I’m not very efficient at doing work at home and get easily distracted but I’m working on it. I don’t really involve or contribute in class in English unless it’s something I’m passionate about. In general, my independence is up to standard even if my efficiency isn’t but my contribution out of my own will is semi-low.
Collaboration
English normally isn’t a subject where you collaborate. However, when I do collaborate or help other people next to me, I do my best so it can benefit both me, and the other person/people. For example, in our Current Affairs task where we had to record our own new story in groups, I worked well and enjoyed working with Anna and Muskan. Even though they’re my friends, we worked efficiently and didn’t goof off that much so we would all have fun, and also get good marks.
Skills
My skills and capabilities in everything is always changing and growing but I think where I got the majority of my English skills and grammar was from my year 5 or year 7 teacher. In year 5, my teacher would always make us write paragraphs in cursive that explained different rules in writing and grammar. I learnt a lot in that class and I’ve taken that as my basis for everything English related. In year 7 was when I think I learnt the most vocab. Year 7 was when I searched up and looked for the synonyms of every word the most when writing stories or assessments. I did this because I hated seeing the same word within a few sentences or paragraphs repeat over and over again. I wanted to expand my vocab capacity so I could avoid repetition which increased my skills in choosing different, better suited words for different situations.
Goals and Challenges 2023
Goals:
- Get a hold of my organisation better and learn how to control or reduce my procrastination
- Continue to achieve A’s and good marks throughout my school
- Keep putting in as much effort that I can to do the best I can
- I hope I can get better at writing on the spot because right now I prewrite answers because I’m afraid of not being able to create sentences under pressure.
Challenges:
- I get easily distracted by my phone and I can’t balance the amount of work time I have and the amount of break time
- I’m afraid of doing bad if I don’t prepare and prewrite everything but it takes a lot of my time to prepare
- I’m not very productive during school hours or even out of school