Through my eighth grade year I have learnt many things in many different ways. However, in English I have learnt things that astonish and wow me, especially when it comes to the “ESLR’s”. You see at the start of the year I hated the ESLR’s and never thought I could actually do even the simplest one but now I am sitting here at the end of the year going, “wow I was already doing all of those things without even realizing it”. So now here are a few paradigms of the astonishing (to me) ways I have stabbed these ESLR’s and ways I have simply touched them.

Throughout my life I believe I have been a critical thinker but it wasn’t until recently that I realized I was able to apply problem-solving skills to facilitate learning. The first way I believe I have done this is by simply reading books, you see before while I was reading I didn’t always understand everything but I just kept letting that slide to a point were I did not understand the book, but this year the first thing I do when I don’t understand something is I try to figure it out through all sorts of ways, in the vein of using a dictionary to look up words I don’t know, to (the dramatic) reading a basic summary of the chapter on spark notes before actually reading it. Something else I have done is I have applied these skills to when I am doing projects like the recent pod-cast for “The Tempest” which we are actually still doing. When we started recording we were doing so in a very long and complicated way, until Mr. R came over and told us it was going to take to long and that we should change our strategy, after this we were frantically trying to figure a new way of doing it and as a group we came up with a great solution, which proved to be very successful. Within the whole I have definitely proved myself in this ESLR and if we were to get a grade on it I would do very well.

In my short time and experience with the all-powerful ESLR’s I believe I have always been an Involved Citizen but it was this great year in English that really sparked me to interact respectively with people of diverse cultures. It was English class that really made me see all the different people we have in our school and how many different nations we work with every single day of our lives, if its’ not our school mates on weekdays its’ our shop clerks on Saturdays, if its’ not our maids on Mondays its’ our best friend we meet on Sundays. Something else that English really pointed out to me this year is that everyone has a slightly if not completely different lens, at the start of the year I guess I was kind of ignorant of what others thought but now in quarter four I see them, different lenses everywhere and I am finally able accept all different types of thoughts and different ways of thinking. I believe the book that really pointed this out to me had to be “The Tempest”, I believe this not through simply reading it but by all the different and interesting class discussions we had and how people had completely different feelings about characters, a paradigm of this would be one class discussion when we had created this huge argument between to people in our class that I will not name, but the point is that they had completely different and contradicting thoughts and I was able to see that. Now last but not least I will point out the obvious, just recently in quarter three we participated in something called the “Teen-Life Project”, this was a project we did with people from around the world in all different schools. We each chose a topic and we were each with at least five other people from all different countries and all bringing in the separate thoughts and separate, you guessed it, lenses. Over top I have surely shown growth as an involved citizen and I am surely proud to say I should receive a good grade on being one.

At the start of the year we did an essay on our goals for the rest of year. When we did this I was confused and did not understand why we had to do such a thing but now I do finally get it. By doing this I have definitely become a self directed learner because I have developed, prioritized and continually revised my personal goals. At the end of the first quarter it was time for us to meet the crossroads of Bloom’s taxonomy and the ESLR’s (for the first time) so I decided to look back at my old goals and see how I had done. To my surprise I had not done any of them and I decided I needed to step up my game and so by the end of the second quarter I shakily looked back again and I was shocked to see I had conquered all my goals and without realizing it even thought up new ones. So without realizing it I had done this ESLR and now I am even starting to go beyond. You see starting the first month in the third quarter I decided it would be a good idea to look back just once a month and see if I am still doing each and every goal each and every day. So by doing this I have once again accidentally done another part of this ESLR which says to monitor (looking back each month), adjust and document work in progress (when ever I have to write a reflective journal for English). Over all it is very easy to accidentally conquer an ESLR and not even realize it, but even if it is an accident you still should receive a good grade on the respective ESLR.

In conclusion eighth grade has been a good year with lots of great experiences in store, but sadly and horribly we have had some moments none of us want to remember. But one of the great things is that I am now able and eager to learn things through recognizing the ESLR’s and through just simply learning. On top of all that I now believe I am a better student than before not only in English but in all other classes too, including the ones I thought were easy at first and are still easy.