My Learning Fall and Rise

       I have changed a lot over the past 4 months. This class has changed my views on teachers and the way I view schoolwork. When I first entered this class, I didn’t expect it to be different than any other English class I’ve had. My plan was to sit in the corner, participate as little as possible, do my book work and get a C in the class. I didn’t have respect for teachers and my only purpose in school was to learn as much as I could and go home. When we were asked to choose how the course would run, I was a little sketched out, I thought he was testing us or something, but he even went out of the room and gave us time to choose. At first, I thought open source learning was pretty dumb and “extra” because I was used to just learning everything from a book and thought anything other than that was too much work.
      When I first started writing journals, I was a little awkward, I felt like I had to write a certain way and I couldn’t get to half a page. My blogs were also not great because I was still getting used to expressing my thoughts. We also had to memorize poems and post videos reciting them, at first it was really hard finding a method of memorizing that worked for me but after a few poems I learn that reciting it in pieces worked best for me.
      About halfway through the semester I started to get lazy with my blogs and I started to not pay attention as much in class because I thought I could just do it at home, but I never actually did any homework. Soon I realized I had a bunch of blogs I had to make up and I was completely lost in the story we were reading in class. I cried, it was too much for me and I felt like I was going to fail the semester. But after a few mental breakdowns I decided that it was my responsibility to catch up and make up any work I had miss for slacking off. I took it one blog at a time, but I managed to get most of them done in a couple hours.
      After this I knew it was my job to be on it and not get lazy with simple things like blogs. I started to manage my time a little better and made time for what was really important like reading and making up any late work I had. After school I would eat and then immediately go back to reviewing what I did in all my classes, so I knew I wasn’t being left behind in any of them. Now I think I am a better student overall, I respect teachers and what they do for the community, I accept different ways of learning and I don’t just think of school as a place to learn and get out, I think of it as an opportunity, to build relationships while learning, and to meet people with different mindsets and learn from them along the way.