My favorite English class I have ever had in 9th grade

In Global Ed. English, I learned many things that I did not know.

For instance, I learned that I can actually be a good writer. In the beginning of the year, I wrote three papers and got 2 D’s and a C. But after being told that I needed to develop my papers and I needed a focal point about a million times, I finally got the idea. I took a couple months but I got a C+ which was above average. Then we started to write a blog every week and that helped me out to get used to writing papers. Since the blogs, I’ve amazingly got only B’s and A-‘s on my papers. From the beginning of the year, I thought that I would drop the class and it would be a very long semester. It still is hard but I have gotten the hang of things and I am a much better writer now.

Another thing I learned was how to take notes. I just figured notes were writing down things that I thought were interesting. I was right but there was way more to it. From the beginning we margin noted a lot which is pretty much like highlighting with some writing in the margins. That was boring but sort of easy. The notes that really bothered me were Q.C.V.I.’s (Questions, Connections, vocabulary, and Interesting/Important facts). First taking them, they were easy to me except for the connections because I could find a way to connect with the stories in many ways. We always had to do 5 of each and one day, Mr. Fielder changed it to 2 questions and 2 connections. I was happy but he said the questions had to be discussion and the connections had to be developed. Now the connections were easier but discussion questions were hard to find. I eventually got the hang of it though.

The third thing that I learned was that there is a lot more to capitalization than and the beginnings of the sentences and proper nouns. There turned out to be many properties of capitalization that I didn’t know about. I then got the capitalization thing and after you understood it, you understood it well. Or so you thought. We had a pop quiz on capitalization and I blew through it but it turned out that I got a lot wrong. I had more wrong than I had right and I didn’t know what was going on. We got another packet and we had to practically memorize the rules. After studying the rules of capitalization, we took a third test on it and I did pretty well on the third test.

After the capitalization, I learned something yet again, How to research on the computer. Yes, I know researching sounds like the easiest thing to do in school, but when you have Mr. Fielder, that is a whole different story (in a good way). He made you look for a source and he had to check it. I only had a bad source once so the researching was pretty easy for me but without learning what a credible source would be, I would have probably just picked the first topic I saw. But then we had to search stories for our topic on South Africa. I thought like it would be the Rwanda articles (the articles that were easy to find). It was for the first two I found. I googled the topic, printed it out, and he checked it. But then I couldn’t find any more that he would okay so I kept looking. It took a while but I finally got Mr. Fielder to check a third article.

What we spent most of the semester on were foreign countries. The foreign countries we studied were Australia, then Rwanda, and then South Africa. I used the things that I learned to learn about these foreign countries. We read a novel about Australian Aborigines called Walkabout and watched a movie called Rabbit Proof Fence. We had to write a paper comparing the two and because of the writing skills I learned, I was able to do a good job on the paper. Then for Rwanda, that was the most difficult for me because there was so much going on in the genocide of Rwanda that I was confused. But the movie Hotel Rwanda helped me get a better understanding of what was going on. And we last learned about South Africa. This was probably the easiest for me to understand because it was semi-modern day and the only time that there was too much going on was the Anglo-Boer war. But research helped me understand the topic more. I understood my topic, which was the first and second decade of freedom but the movie Invictus helped me understand it more. My learning help me learn even more in this class.