qReflecting on the third seminar, I realized I didn’t improve much from the second seminar since I spoke less. However, the few things I did say were still having some value. I talked about things like the more complicated relationships among students during 8 grade and how the school was getting worse. These are important issues, even if I didn’t talk a lot about them.
One reason I didn’t speak much was because the seminar was only one class period, which felt very short. The time passed quickly, and there wasn’t enough opportunity for everyone to share their thoughts. Because of this, I didn’t get many chances to talk and share my ideas.
Since I didn’t speak a lot, I won’t focus too much on my behavior in this reflection. Instead, I will write some of the things I want to say from Seminar 3 below.
Looking back at my overall Grade 8 journey, the most important thing was the increased pressure on my grades. Moving to ELL English class was really hard for me. Especially during the first SA, analyzing Macbeth, I had to do a lot of research and try to analyze the essay, which was very different from the ELA. Since I have never analyzed an English book before, and first book I am analyzing was written by Shakespeare which is huge transition for me. This transition was challenging, but it helped me learn and grow.
What’s that rogue ‘q’ doing at the start of your blog post?
Your last paragraph is an important and insightful criticism of the way a whole bunch of students were moved from ELA without any warning and thrust into a unit on Shakespeare. This really impacted everything we’ve done since. I have complained about that 😉 There’s no problem having students with strong English skills move to ELL. Arguably that should happen. However, that transition needs to be managed carefully. The same thing happened in Grade 7, but it was a lot less disruptive because unit 2 was based on Hound of the Baskervilles, which is a much more accessible text than Macbeth, with the result that most students managed the transition from ELA to ELL quite comfortably (and we didn’t have to spend a significant amount of unit 3 timetabled lessons in the theatre).