Reflecting on the Semester

This semester in Mr. Ziebarth’s AP Language class, I have learned quite a lot. In most classes, students learn things just to be able to regurgitate them back onto the test at the end of the unit. This class however, is much different because we learn things that we are able to apply to our everyday lives outside of the classroom. I have only mentioned a select few things out of the many I have learned this semester.

The Use of Concrete Details

Something that I know most kids do is when their mom asks, “How was your day?” or “How was school?” They respond with the unthoughtful answer of “good”. Whether their day was great, horrible, or mediocre, the answer to that question is always the same.

Ever since I wrote a description essay about my brother and his music, my perspective towards these types of questions have changed. While writing the essay, I realized that my description of many things is very abstract and I don’t include many concrete details. I took this as a challenge to myself: to become more concrete with my descriptions.

The first aspect of my life that I challenged myself in was answering my mom when she would ask me the same question everyday after school; “How was your day?” Instead of providing her with the same answer everyday, I decided to switch things up and tell her exactly how my day was and what I did. By doing this, I accomplished two things. One, I avoided her asking me a follow up question of “What did you do today?”, and two, I improved our relationship by making our conversations more real and intentional.

I can truly say that this lesson I’ve learned in class: to be more concrete with details, has helped me notice, process, and remember the things I do or the things I see everyday. I used to go through my day not really paying attention to myself and if I was having a good or bad day because there was no point in doing that. However, now I go through everyday and pay attention to the things I do and how I feel about them, so that at the end of the day when my mom asks, “How was your day?”, I can provide her with a sufficient and real response.

Everything’s an Argument

This semester, our main focus was rhetoric. Everything’s an argument. In every rhetorical situation there is the speaker, the audience, and the message, so in every instance you are in one of those three positions. This is relevant outside the classroom because realizing that you are in an argument all the time, will change your perspective on what you say, think, and do. For example when I am doing something as simple as telling a friend about what I did the night before, I am presenting an argument. In this instance I am the speaker, my friend is the audience, the message I’m trying to get across is that I either had a good or bad time. I am trying to persuade my friend into agreeing with me on whether or not my night was good or bad.

This concept is useful in the world because constantly, whether in businesses, elections, or conventions, people are faced with the task of presenting information to an audience. To make the most of their time and leave an impression on the audience, they need to use rhetoric strategies to make sure the truth or their purpose is made clear. For instance in a presidential election, the speaker, (the president), needs to make their viewpoints very clear so that they can gain the trust and support of their audience. If a candidate for president started off their speech with the phrase, “This is my first time…” or “I don’t have much experience in…”, they wouldn’t be very effective as a candidate because they would be unable to persuade their audience into voting for them due to their lack of credibility as a presidential candidate. On the other hand, if a candidate started off their speech by talking about all the experience they have in the political world and all the great things they have done to better the country, they would establish their credibility as an effective politician and would most likely persuade their audience into voting for them.

“But there have been several times in Earth’s past when Earth’s temperature jumped abruptly, in much the same way as they are doing today. Those times were caused by large and rapid greenhouse gas emissions, just like humans are causing today.”

This excerpt from their article shows how they appeal to the audience’s’ sense of logic by providing a past example of climate change and relating it to the current cause of global warming. By establishing credibility as a scientist and stating specific facts and causes of events allows the author to present an effective argument and persuade the audience to believe him.

Open Mindedness

When learning something new or listening to someone else’s ideas, I need to look at these situations with a clean slate and not with any prior perspective, bias, or judgement. In Daniel Coffeen’s book “Reading the way of things”, he prompts us to look at things for what they are and not for what you or anyone else wants them to be. This idea will benefit me in the future especially when I come into contact with other people in the business world, because many people will have new ideas or perspectives that are much different from what I believe or know. In order to not create a conflict between me and others, I will need to accept other people’s opinions and learn from what other people have to teach me.

Another way that this idea can benefit me is, in the future, when someone is critiquing me at what I’m doing. I will need to be able to take the criticism and not be so arrogant or have too much pride to accept the fact that I am wrong, or I am doing something in the wrong way. This idea of being able to accept other people’s ideas that may contradict your own comes from Margaret J. Wheatley’s essay, “Disturb Me, Please!”. This principle has helped people in my community at church, because when they are trying to spread our religion, the best way to do that is to create a common ground between them and the other person, rather than attacking them for being a different religion or immediately overwhelming them with what is wrong with their religion and what is better with ours.

Since this is something that I think will help me in my future, I looked to my mom for a specific example of how this idea actually relates to and helps better her life.

Two years after working at the Palm Desert Marriott, my mom got transferred to the Philadelphia Marriott. The work in Palm Desert was a laid back, resort atmosphere, but she knew that in Philadelphia she would be working in the busyness of a city. Since this was a huge transition, she had to go into her new location with an open mind and with no prior bias of the working conditions. With this openmindednes, she was able to adapt easily to her new location and conditions because she knew it was going to be much different and she was prepared to learn their way of working and handling business on the East Coast.

Changing Perspectives

When faced with the prompt of “School is the best place to learn” for a question exploration assignment, I came up with the question of “How does school affect your future?”

“School teaches knowledge, life requires wisdom”| Original work by Phoebe Minch

This assignment excited me because I was able to choose the topic, and therefore choose something I was actually interested in researching. The book we read in class, “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger helped me gain inspiration as to what to write about, as well as providing evidence to answer my focus question. Since Holden Caulfield had flunked out of school or gotten kicked out many times, his result was a pretty unsuccessful life of living on the streets and wasting his life away drinking and smoking. This strong evidence found in the book led me to choose my focus question because it is a topic that many high school students question based on some of the activities or things we learn in class.

Since I was interested in the focus of my essay and it was very easy for me to understand, the writing process came fairly easy to me and therefore led me to create my best work. Usually when I have to write an essay, I don’t know where to start. However, with this question exploration I just started writing based on what I had researched and I had a clear thought process throughout the whole essay. My essay opens with, “Have you ever found yourself questioning the reason as to why you are learning something? Or when am I ever going to need to use this in my future?” These questions were some of the things I frequently pondered during some lessons in school. When my audience reads just the first two lines of my essay, they can immediately relate to me and will read further into my argument to explore what makes school essential in life. From the very beginning to the end every argument I brought up related to my prompt, which usually isn’t the case in my writing because I tend to lose track near the end. At the end of this essay however, my focus was just as strong as in the beginning with the ending statement of “The majority of our lives are spent out of school, which is why you need to learn how to be successful outside of the classroom.” This ending to my essay relates directly to the beginning questions I asked the audience because throughout my essay I proved that school teaches lessons that are essential outside of the classroom.

When writing this piece of work my audience was students in high school because that is the prime age where kids are starting to grow up, be more independent, and start to think about what they want to do later in life. I make my intended audience clear by using phrases such as, “might get you into a prestigious university” and “students need to figure out”. All of my examples have relevance to teenagers, like myself, mainly because this topic applied to my life and I was sure it applied to my peers’ lives. I had some of my peers review my work and their feedback was mostly positive. One student wrote that “As a student, I can relate to this point because many of us are extremely busy or spoiled.” This shows that a part of my essay stood out to him and he could relate. Another student commented and said, “Many times, I forgot I was reading an assignment and found myself enjoying someone’s perspective on education.” This is exactly what I felt while I was writing this assignment because I was so interested in the topic and information that I gathered.

Through this writing experience, I learned that writing what you are passionate about is enjoyable, and therefore changed my perspective on essays as a whole. I remember one of the first weeks of school, Mr. Z asked us to write what we think about when we hear the word essay. I immediately wrote “dreadful”, “boring”, and “stressful”. This was a view of essays prior to this semester, but now I can say that when I write about a topic I am passionate about, essays become enjoyable, interesting, and a learning process.

Related posts:

Version control systems are a category of software tools that helps in recording changes made to files by keeping track of modifications done in the code. In a distributed version control system…

Chief Operating Officer, Fred Becker, shares his reflections on a year of uncharted business change and progress at Aire. As the evenings draw in and the season changes, it feels like the right…

We will review the theory for line search methods in optimization, and end with a practical implementation. In all optimization problems, we are ultimately interested in using a computer to find the…