I think both my second Hamlet post, post #14, and my Independent American Drama Assignment posts demonstrated the most hard work when it comes to this electronic portfolio. The American Drama pieces exhibited a long, involved group project that showed great effort and cooperation while the Hamlet post a lot of creativity.
The American Drama Assignment took a long time and was rather difficult to post onto the blog. I think the fact that I managed to get the whole project posted alone makes up a good portion of how proud I am of this assignment. Because the project was made in a group, it combines a range of perspectives on a single play, Buried Child by Sam Shepard, and remains clear and cohesive as a whole. Admittedly, the drawing of the storyboards and a few other pieces to the assignment were rushed and to not contribute as much as they could to the work. But still, this project showed me how well group work on such difficult pieces can go if everyone equally contributes. It also allowed em and my group mates to improve upon a variety of skills having to do with the filming and editing of the video as well as the online research and in-depth reading of the text that was required.
My second Hamlet blog post successfully compared a rather silly movie with Hamlet, a play of a more serious nature. I spent more time on the work than was necessary and I feel that over-thinking shows in the writing. The composition may be less than satisfactory because part of it was very rushed. But the creativity int he comparison, I believe, makes up for that. I was able to deeply analyze and find meaning in a movie that I previously viewed as a nonsensical film with no real significance in the plot. In that respect, this project has taught me to more deeply analyze things instead of just taking them at face value.
I felt that I participated well enough in class but I know I could have done more. For the group projects in the beginning weeks of class, I was still trying to get my bearings with how the class worked and was mentally unable to contribute to the best of my ability. I was unfamiliar with the idea of writing an essay in a group in such a way and I believe the other members of my group were better at taking charge on such things. This group work was even more difficult when done separately from each other; the times when we were forced to work with each other across google docs or skydrive. For example, I was absent from class and could only contribute through the internet for a few days. I wasn't even there for the presentation. I feel like that post was one I unfortunately was able to participate in the least.
As for individual work, I believe I did as much as I could do for how busy I was this past trimester. The switch from having no work in the summer to tons of work during the school year wasn't easy, either. That being said, therew were days where I did not fully complete the homework which made it difficult to participate in class discussions. I will keep this in mind so that I can hopefully get more out of class next trimester.
To be honest, I haven't paid much attention to my goals since the start of the trimester. My original goals were to write practice essays, take full practice AP exams, familiarize myself more fully with literary terms and read poetry in order to get used to its structure and nuances. The final goal was difficult to achieve because I did not have the time to find any poetry to read let alone actually read it. I underestimated the work load of this class. At the same time, I misunderstood what exactly we would be doing in this class, which made the other goals difficult.
This class has not involved as much preparation for the actual AP exam as I had expected. That has made the first two goals impossible and unrealistic. I believed opportunities would arise for some of it as we practiced timed essays and such in class. While the few practice multiple choice exams were a step in the right direction, we have not been assigned a single 40 minute essay in this class. I also have not become as familiar with literary terms as I had expected to. Perhaps it's because of my lack of participation at times, but I feel as though the terms were more so brushed over than really studied. I believe it was difficult t o make and keep goals that we made at the beginning of the trimester because we did not know what to expect coming into this class. I relied on my knowledge of how AP Language and Composition worked and some students didn't have even that. You cannot make goals for a class you know nothing about.
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