Language now is my most troubling hurdle that I need to overcome. There are too many new words, slangs and idioms that I do not know; therefore, I sometime do not understand what my teachers is teaching and what they want me to do for homework. It also takes me more time to read books and do my homework because of lack of vocabulary. I often feel stress when I confuse the lessons and when I don’t know how to do my homework. I usually have headache.
So I always wait until the last minute to doing my homework and my homework quality is always very low and lead to bad grades. I made many attempts to avoid procrastination but the methods doesn’t seemed to work. So I turned to my teachers as well as my parents and friends for help and we discussed about several effective ways to avoid procrastination
This whole journey was very reflective to me. Lets just say there were many things that did not work for me this semester, no matter how hard I tried or pushed. What definetly did not work was sending out emails to my peer mentors, that really turned out bad. I would send out emails to my mentees asking for their opinion on activities for us to do, and also to remind them of the planned activities. So realizing that emails did not work at all, I decided to do announcements at the beginning of class.
All this love that once appeared in my writing, gone. It disappeared. Then in seventh grade, I started to hate writing, it felt more like a task then as to express my thoughts and feelings. In eighth grade, I was afraid of people judging my paper. I started to feel that no matter how much time and effort I put in my writing will never good enough.
I even enjoy typing lab reports and explaining what occurs in my experiments, but I dislike writing in the realm of English academia. I would be able to fill dozens of pages with plans by essays were always a difficult to produce. For me, writing essays are like paying a bills you don’t want to pay or going to the dentist with a toothache. I think the problem began when my teachers would request for me to write about how I felt based on different prompts. I knew how I felt, but it was mentally difficult to transcribe my feelings so that others could understand them.
My understanding of literacy was off to a rocky start. I was never a fan of reading and writing. Growing up, I would prefer listening to music and watching movies. In fact, I struggled to speak properly. A classroom at Mill Creek Elementary was specifically designed for those who were having a hard time speaking.
During that school year, I came out of my shell. My teacher noticed that I struggled to read off the blackboard, not for lack of comprehension, but due to a visual impairment. I was petrified to wear glasses, worried that I would be ridiculed by my classmates. Mrs. Kapinos gave me a book to read about a young girl, like me, who was apprehensive about wearing glasses.
Since I joined the school in middle of the 2nd quarter, I had missed the important lessons in most of the subjects and especially the AP courses. I often worried about my grades in the AP courses and sometimes I was depressed and at times demotivated. Since the AP courses were compulsory for the 11th graders, I had no choice but to work hard and manage to cope with the studies. Nights became days during 11th grade year. I had to work extra hours during the nights as well as stay awake during the class hours to ensure that I don’t miss any lectures.
I started to feel sick and was unable to attend class, I was finding it hard to get my homework done in school, and everything started to feel like it was falling apart. The Behavior of the ParticipantsThe emotions that I was found to be displaying was sadness and anger. The sadness came from my poor choice to buy a new car fully knowing that I did not need to buy a new one. The anger also came from that choice as well. The anxiety I was presenting was rooted from the amount of school work I had due within the next week, which I was finding hard to do because I was not thinking clearly at all.
Sadly, my colleagues have often failed to fully execute the four phases well. For students who are weaker learners in Mathematics, the teachers have proclaimed “there is no time to finish the syllabus and they are so weak, how to revise on word problems when they already have difficulty with multiple-choice and short-answer questions”. This group of teachers has misunderstood problem solving as word problems, they have as much anxiety about problem solving as the struggling learners under their charge. I have my share of teaching mixed-ability and low-ability classes before challenging myself to teach “the top class in Mathematics”. I have never seen the need to finish the syllabus and complete revision as hindrances to teaching proper problem solving.