My absolute favorite blog that I wrote for this semester was the one about the little things in life that make me happy, even when I have a busy schedule. I enjoyed writing it mostly because it gave me a chance to reflect on all the positive things that I get to experience in my life at the same time as difficult things I may have to go through. It reminded me that I need to find a balance between working hard and giving myself time to relax, which is something that I occasionally forget. I was also able to go through my camera roll on a search for the items I mentioned in my blog so I got to see other happy memories I’ve experienced so far this semester.

My LEGO blog gets an honorary mention though because, obviously, I just got to talk about Legos and then take pictures of said Legos. Overall, I really enjoyed writing the blogs this semester.

Throughout this semester, I feel I have evolved a lot in my writing. The blogs have helped a lot in figuring out things like syntax and word choice that I can use to make my writing more interesting for my reader when writing about topics that I can choose myself. Outside of the blogs, I had not had much chance in other English classes to write something similar; pretty much anything that I wanted to write about and wanted my classmates to read. I also really enjoyed being able to comment on other people’s blogs and see the topics that they found interesting or important. As far as the AP test, I have developed my commentary further than what it was at the beginning of the semester. I have a better understanding of the balance that needs to occur between the evidence and explanation of my ideas within the story versus the commentary I provide that extends outside of the novel.

Within the blogging cycles, I was able to learn a lot about either random topics or my classmates from the blogs that they wrote. I found responding to other people’s blogs to be one of my favorite parts of this class because I really never knew what I was going to read about each cycle. I found that a lot of my classmates and I have similar interests and opinions on certain topics, or I got to explore the opposite side of some of those topics. I also got to experience a lot of different styles of writing and approaches to topics, especially with the very first blog we posted about our experiences with reading.

There are definitely a lot of lessons that I have learned from this course, both writing-related and completely separate from writing. As far as writing is concerned, I was able to get a chance to learn more about my writing style and how I would write about topics that I actually find interesting (no hate to my past English teachers). I also learned that there are many different ways to approach writing and that I can have a lot of different ways that work for me. Still within the course, I found myself learning quite a bit from the novels that we read this semester. I’ve read a lot of assigned books throughout my English career, some that I would run over with a car (Boy’s Life for one) but some that I enjoyed reading for the new perspectives that they gave me about society and history. This semester, Beloved was one of those books that opened my eyes to the experiences of people in a part of history that I hadn’t gotten the chance to learn about before. I enjoyed watching the documentary about Morrison’s approach to writing this book because I feel like it made the book feel more personal and therefore have more weight while reading it.

Outside of this class, the biggest lesson I’ve learned through this semester is to live in the moment as much as possible. Yes, it is important to be prepared for the future too, but sometimes I find myself so focused on that future that I forget to be fully present in the situations that I get to experience in my everyday life. In that sense, I hope to keep that in mind throughout the rest of this year and into whatever beyond I find myself in.