The Most Important Skill

I really cannot believe that over one quarter of the school year has passed! I think that the most important skill I've learned so far has got to be analyzing things.

 When we corrected other students' papers in middle school, we mostly just looked for spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, made sure the paper made sense, and fell under what we believe sounded like a "smart" paper. We also would read stories and poems, but we didn't really go over symbolic meaning, but more the literal meaning. We definitely didn't talk about theme and tone.

 This year I can read another students paper and can analyze it for DIDILS and TWIST. I can also read a passage or poem and find different meanings and found that there are many different ways to interpret things. More specifically, I learned this when analyzing and writing To Kill a Mockingbird papers. Also, when we had The Knife, "Lobsters", and "Shoulders", where we had to annotate, write statements, write questions, write theses, and have discussions.

I believe this is a great skill because not only can we help each other write better papers, but we can understand ourselves how to make our own papers more meaningful and learn from other students' papers. I feel much more confident writing papers even in this short amount of time and I can only imagine how amazing our papers will be by the end of the year!

In the future, we will be able to read a magazine, a newspaper, a book, anything and will be much more insightful and understand what we are reading better. I believe this is also a good qualification for many jobs and something important to know, unlike other crazy things we learn in school!

Something Interesting

Since I was absent for the "Lobsters" discussion, I will be writing about The Knife discussion. I entered The Knife discussion thinking about things like the author first making the readers think he was a murderer and then finally letting us know he was a surgeon and all of the different similes Richard Seltzer uses. At the end of the discussion I had many new ideas about the passage. A main idea that interested me was that the author related a surgeon to a poet and a priest. Also, the seriousness of a surgeon that he showed.

My new ideas about the poem are that the author uses similes to relate to religion. Also, the surgeon is like a God the way he can save lives or in one little mistake, take them away. A surgeon intricately and artfully carves perfect surgeries, like a poet and their masterpiece's. The surgeon is disgusted with his profession, yet in awe with how beautiful it is. I like having discussions like this one because they really do get me to think in different ways.

So Many Paragraphs, So Many Skills

Over the last few weeks, I have listened to many five part paragraphs. Some of the most common problems were with the concrete details, commentary, and embedding quotes. Many classmates had chosen quotes that didn't directly fit with their topic or chose three quotes that didn't relate to each other so their topic was too broad. Plot summary was the biggest issue with the commentary and was sometimes difficult to understand if it was actually well written commentary. Embedding quotes seemed difficult to some people. Classmates got confused on the transition point and introducing the quote. Students also seemed confused about placement of quotes. Following the proper format and making sure you have everything in the checklist was a difficult and very important task.

For the next 5 part paragraph, I need to improve my commentary. My commentary was borderline to plot summary and I felt that trying to distinguish  between them was the hardest part about writing this paragraph. I wrote about how my quotes showed my theme, but I now believe I will write about that in a more insightful way that connects to other things and really shows my thoughts. Another thing I can do to improve for my next paragraph is really thoughtfully think about and choose the very best quote to prove my topic and make sure all three quotes are more spread out throughout the book. I enjoyed writing this paper and look forward to getting a chance to show how I will improve my next one.