32Q Reflection When I think of my first semester of sophomore year, I’m not going to lie, it wasn't my favorite semester. However, my mom has always taught me to always to see the positive in something even though it may not be obvious. I’ve realized that I have grown a lot in many ways, academically and a lot socially. I’ve opened my eyes to things I need to improve on, instead of punishing myself for my faults in school, and I’ve been taught that your lows can always improve. That's what I find that's so special about Animas, of how much faith the teachers have in us.
Throughout my whole childhood I have always been lacking the ability to be a good writer. None of my sentences made sense and they would run on almost for half of the paragraph. Ever since I came to Animas, I have challenged myself to grow as a writer. Sophmore year was the year when I felt like I have accomplished my goal, that was the best feeling ever. The first or second week is when I felt successful as a writer through my writing about beautiful language in humanities class. I felt I was very descriptive and I used proper grammar. Taking something that you learned in almost a half hour and writing about it and being vulnerable on how I feel about beautiful language is something I have never felt before. After this experience I have noticed that my writing has been improving a lot. The process might be slow but something I’ve learned from my freshmen teacher is to go slow to go fast. As long as I believe I can improve I will always show improvement.
Art has never been a serious thing for me, it's more like a hobby. In the process of creating the Siddhartha art piece my partner and I were making, I questioned a lot why I don't invest my time in art more. Throughout my life I’ve heard people tell me that I am good at art but I am a person that doesn't take praise well. I like to think low of my work because in a way I feel awkward when people praise me. When doing this Siddhartha art project my mind set definitely changed about praise and being a potential artist. In the art project I was challenged to try new things like using charcoal and drawing hands well for the first time. I know I’m not as good as picasso or Van Gogh, but I know I am still improving. Through this project I have grown as an artist by creating a beautiful art piece, I’ve also learned to persevere a lot through this project. My partner and I worked on this project for almost a month, we put every sweat and tear into this project by taking it home, taking our own humanities time, and so on. Although, since we persevered our art project turned out to be better than we imagined and we have learned a lot about persevering through hard projects. This year I have really struggled to have confidence in myself, not only in the work I produce but also my life out of school. Something that is what makes me me is what I lack in confidence the most, and that's my religion. I am confident in what I believe in but I’m not confident in sharing what I believe. Ever since I started sophomore humanities I have been more open about my religion. Through my humanities paper heros journey through music my task was to choose a song that was a hero to me. When choosing a song I was hesitant because I wanted to choose a song that was a gospel song but I didn't want to be judged. I overcame that fear which gave me so much more confidence to share what I believe in and not be scared. It turned out to be the best thing I have ever wrote because I got to be vulnerable and be honest.
I have struggled to time manage a lot through this semester. Even though I get all my work done, I feel that if I didn't procrastinate at all that I would produce better looking work and would understand the content. One project that I feel disappointed in because of my actions of not using time management is my Journey of an Artist essay for the hero's journey unit. Instead of focusing on the essay I focused on my art project and I didnt split up my time so I can put hard work time into both of them. Which affected me a lot, so to turn in work I typed an essay in one day without putting all my effort into it. It turned out ok but not as well as I wanted. As I’m improving on my writing I like to set goals for myself so I can grow more and more, in this writing piece I feel like I did not meet my expectations. In order to improve on time management I need to use my planner and write down specific days I need to do this and split all my work evenly. If I can work on my goal I will learn how to manage my time.
One thing Animas tries to encourage to do is critical thinking. I believe that challenging yourself can help you move forward in a goal or anything else. Critical thinking is something I never thought I would lack in but I always need to improve on something. Through the domestication project I lacked a lot in critical thinking. For my question I researched I decided to research how dog size correlates to aggression. At first I thought it was a well thought out question until, the exhibition came. I realized that a lot of people have the same question as me and that it wasn't unique. If I did some more critical thinking I would have a well thought out research question that challenged me. Some ways I can improve on critical thinking is to come up with multiple ways I could do this project so it's challenging for me and I can learn way more than I have.
Question: How can my attitude improve my social skills? The reason why I am thinking of this is because I am a shy person but I feel if I have a negative outlook on everything how can I be more social, I won't be interested enough to talk. So if I have a positive attitude I can collaborate more and talk more.