MY PROGRESSION

   This course is definitely something that helped me in school and life. Because colleges usually take advantage of the technologically advanced time we live in and use the internet as a source of education and input, the idea of blogposts is perfect and really helped me understand and reflect on my thoughts on whatever the topic was. It also gave us the freedom and opportunity for input. So this has prepared me for college.
   Throughout the year we read many books and had some socratic seminars, which I do think we should've done more of, and the class discussions really helped me learn and understand different point of views and also made me further realize how different we all are and how our opinions could change or be affected by one another, which is awesome. Life-wise, I do think that the themes behind the books we read and the characters in them made me more aware of my surrounding and more aware of the world I live in and could not have been done without class discussions and socratic seminars. Some of these books definitely include In Cold Blood and The Great Gatsby. These two came down to my 2 favorites. In Cold Blood I liked because it had this really ominous dark enigma behind it and how it was written which interested me and the way that the writer twisted the way the reader felt about a character that would normally be seen as evil but shines him in a light that forces the reader to sympathize. The Great Gatsby's commentary on society and the nation we live in and the type of people that we can be surrounded by that could affect everything that we do captivated my attention and I thought was a really cool addition to the reading list this year. To be honest, there was no novel that I did not like. 
   When it came to the essays, I wasn't the best writer, which I am completely aware of. But I'd say the strongest essay that I could write was the argumentation mainly because it was easy for me to pick a side and just go for it and stick to the layout and "convince" the reader to understand my side and pick it. Although some of the prompts for the argumentation were sometimes difficult to grasp, I could do it. The most difficult essay to write was the rhetorical. Finding 3 devices in the reading was challenging, but the planning and putting the whole essay together was the difficult part for me.