Self-reflection

Josh Liu

Humanities 9

6/3/15

Self-Reflection Quint 5

            When I look back to all the assignments I’ve done in school this school year, I am quite impressed by how many thoughts and ideas I’ve gotten in different topics. Also, I see many improvements in different aspects in class. For example, my writing skills have improved quite a lot during this school year. This was the biggest improvement, and I worked very hard to improve. In the first quint of this year, I was feeling very happy because of the escape from the tiring Chinese traditional education. I thought studying would be much more relaxing than before, but I changed my opinion when I came into the school. I realized that as an international student, getting used to a new studying environment that is very different from the one before would take me lots of time and effort. Without a doubt, when I tried to write a complete essay in English, it didn’t go quite well for me because I made a lot of grammar mistakes and unclear statements in my essay. Because of that, I made myself a goal of being able to write a complete essay that is more than seven hundred words in my first school year. That goal seemed impossible to me at the beginning, but luckily Melody in our ESL grammar class taught me some great ways to write paragraphs and sentences, and those tricks made it much easier for me to write essays in class. In the end of the first quint, I was able to write a four hundred word long essay with two body paragraphs, and that was not bad for me as a studying result. As I kept improving continuously, I was able to write longer essays with more content than before, and finally I wrote an essay on the Silk Road that was one thousand six hundred words long with great content and arguments. Thus, I achieved my goal and got a lot of positive comments from my teachers. This has been my greatest success in Humanities, and I want to keep learning and improving.

            The education in China is very different from the education in the Northwest School. When I was studying in China, I was studying in a classroom with forty-eight classmates. Clearly, teachers couldn’t do well in getting every student to understand the topics they were teaching in class, so teachers used a lot of homework to give us self-studying chances to master the points and skills they taught us in class. However, this kind of education was not too effective for my learning because I preferred to learn with a few more students as a small group in class, instead of learning at home alone. Therefore, I chose to try a new kind of education in America, and I came to the Northwest School. Surprisingly, my study went pretty well in the Northwest School, and I was learning with passion and curiosity. In addition, teachers in the Northwest School are able to meet with every student in class, so students can get more detailed advice from the teachers on their essays and projects. With the help from Heather, I understood how to write a good introduction paragraph and a remarkable conclusion paragraph in my essays. I got great benefits from American education, and from then on I learned much more knowledge everyday than I did in China.

            In this past school year, the school taught us a lot of topics and skills. I was very impressed and excited about the topics our teachers taught us in class since the first day of class. However, the topic that excited me the most was about the Silk Road in my Humanities class. As a Chinese student, I learned some knowledge about the Silk Road in my history class. In fact, those topics that our teachers taught us were mainly about what happened on the Silk Road. We didn’t get a chance to discuss the influence and consequences of the Silk Road, but in the Northwest School we did. In our Humanities lectures, our teachers analyzed the changes that the Silk Road made to the world, such as promoting people’s desire of discovering and people’s minds of doing businesses with others. We also learned some disadvantages about the Silk Road like the spread of plagues and diseases around the world that brought some countries into disasters. I was surprised by how much more I was learning on the same topic here than I did in China, so I am feeling very excited for the next big topic that I will learn at school in the future. In this summer, I want to prepare for my study next year. With Heather and the librarians in a book store’s advice, I am going to pick two books that I will like from the bookstore and read them during the summer. That will be a great challenge for me and my classmates, but surely this will help us on improving our English skills. I am determined to achieve this goal during the summer, and I also hope to learn some topics on human technology development throughout the history in the next coming year. I hope I can keeping learning with passion and confidence, and I want to thank all the teachers and school staff who helped me in my school life in this last school year.