Looking Back on One of the Weirdest Semesters in High School

    This has officially been one of the most unique yet peculiar semesters of high school that I have ever experienced. Online schooling is obviously not the best way to learn, but I could still benefit from the situation, especially from my 12 AP English class. 

    Let me first start out by talking about the multitude of books and other pieces of literature that I managed to read and talk about in my previous blogs. I read everything from an Ancient Greek play, Oedipus, to novels about dystopian worlds like The Road and the Trial. Through this, I really expanded my knowledge about literature, as I never would've been interested in reading plays. I also explored different genres, such as war novels like Catch-22 or tragedies like Death of a Salesman. As a reader now, I feel that I have opened up my capabilities to understand literature, specifically about the theory that all stories stem from one singular story being repeated and interpreted from different perspectives. I had never imagined that there could be such strong connections between literature pieces that can be interpreted to fit numerous contrasting narratives and principles about the world. I thought this was so interesting that I want to keep learning more about the theory behind literature and why authors choose to write the things that they do.

    As I write more and more blog posts, I feel that my confidence has increased tenfold in my own writing. At the start of the school year, I did not have much faith in my writing. However, through the many writing assignments in English and this blog, I have converted that negativity into positivity. Writing my college essays this semester has also helped me develop my own voice further, contributing to my ability to write in a tone that sounds like me than the lifeless words regularly found in high school writing. I recommend that everyone out there practices writing anything about themselves or their lives because we often neglect to do that in our busy lives. It's surprising to see how hard it is to write about yourself, primarily when under a time constraint. As I found out, it starts out difficult but gets way easier over time. I found that I can be introspective. I can now easily reflect and write about my past events and actions, such as in this blog post.

    Looking back, I am proud that I could expand my horizons in both reading and writing, which will definitely come in handy in the future.