English Reflection

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 Honestly, this has been a very good English class so far. I enjoyed the variety of books, plays and short stories that we read together as class. Likewise it was to fun pickup books that I had a personal interest in reading. There's no doubt that the literature that we read together and discussed had a larger impact than that of what I read on my own; knowing that I'll have to actively engage in discussion upon completing a text meant that I put more effort and care into what I was reading. That quality was often lacking in my personal reading books as it was more for enjoyment and less of analysis. My prefered type of reading isn't novels or plays or anything like that. I find articles and research papers that are tailored to my interests in politics and engineering to be far more interesting. These texts provide information in a easily digestible manner — unlike the convoluted English found in the texts we read — and I enjoy that. 

I thought that the work for this class was very reasonable. To be honesty, I was actually underwhelmed by the amount of work we have. This was nothing like the reading and essay writing we had to do in 11 AP; I can't say I'm complaining though. 

My favorite assignment was easily the Oedipus free will vs. fate debate. Sadly I had been dealt the losing side which actually made it the most enjoyable: coming up with roundabout explanations to defend a stance I didn't even believe in. Debates like this are hugely enjoyable, and they would be even more interesting if their focus is on current issues. It shouldn't be too hard to find an issue that relates to the concepts of feminism and racism that we had studied so far in class. 

With the Harkness discussions, I didn't really see it as being anything different than the discussions that we've had in other classes. Maybe it's just that we've been doing Harkness discussions without labeling it as such. I can draw contrast to the Socratic seminars we did in 11 AP however; rather than having a list of questions that we have to discuss, we had a focal question that most of our discussion revolved around. I enjoyed the flexibility of being able to wander away from the original question to discuss things I found to be especially interesting: something we didn't have the option with the Socratic seminars.

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