Alawar 1

Ramy Alawar

Mrs. Sellers

English IV Honors

11 January 2018

Reflective Essay

This Semester was a lot of work for a non-AP class and had a lot of annotating. Although

these were the negatives, there are enough positives to counteract. The fact that we had a wide

variety of sources to learn language and its rhetoric have greatly improved my skills in the field.

It was an English class with diversity ranging from analyzing music to dystopian literature.

First off, I learned a lot more about gothic and romantic literature just by reading

Frankenstein. The idea of gothic prose and themes, and how these romanticized novels can also

have aspects of dreary, tragic story has got me just slightly more interested in that kind of

literature. Not only that, but I also was already interested in dystopias, and this class opened up

whole new worlds of dystopia to me, rather than the idea that all dystopias are under an

oppressive government, but rather, it can have a setting of being corporate, societal or even

among a group of children. In this class, any type of literature was annotated, so I had learned

what annotating was and how it could be used as a helpful tool in organizing my thoughts in a

piece of writing, and recalling the information I needed when it was required. I also learned how

to greater use commas and semicolons, as before I had used and stuck to the same techniques,

but after doing the noredink, I had learned new ways of structuring a sentence in more dynamic

fashions. The sentence structure was then further aided by the vocabulary I had learned from this

class, and its an English class where most of the vocabulary I have learned this year has actually

been of use and was relevant in certain things I have read since learning them.
 Alawar 2

In addition, I have not only learned new things, but also improved skills from this class.

Spotting allusions would be a great example of a skill that has been honed due to English IV; In

the past, I was able to spot allusions in text when they were blatantly apparent, but now this class

has taught me to look deeper in the text to spot these biblical allusions and literary allusions. I

had also honed the skill of leadership, while there were many other things that have improved

my leadership throughout highschool, being in my group helped me to take incentive in doing

what must be done in group projects and get work done for the group and also tell them what

work needs to be done. I also had also improved my skill in incorporating vocabulary words in

my writing due to the sizeable amount of sentences we wrote in the class that involved

vocabulary words, and this had helped my writing sound more sophisticated and more laconic. I

also improved my thinking skills in this class, mostly due to the socratic seminars. The openness

of everyone’s ideas being shared in a big discussion helped me think even more freely and

consider different approaches to certain meanings of a text.

This class had many students that put in effort and had talent, but some were

distinguished from the crowd in my eyes. Roger, for instance, always had put in effort to read out

our work to the class when need be. Tyler was decent to assign menial work, as he was reliable

in getting things done, even if it wasn’t perfect. Marissa always had good and innovative ideas

for our projects and group assignment, even though she tried to stay anonymous. Jalin was

always keeping discussion going and provided a lot of insight into our lessons, all while keeping

the class entertaining. Thank you Ms. Sellers for being the most understanding and equable

teacher I’ve had in a long time!