Weekly Review: Almost There


This week, I felt my strongest work was my revised project. I originally thought that because I was just explaining my reasoning for why I thought they'd make good reading for students, I didn't think I needed specific quotes. However, after getting some feedback, I realized that choosing quotes that prove what I'm saying about why each piece would make a good lesson makes my overall argument stronger. The feedback I got on this project has been really helpful, and it's made me appreciate that cooperative aspect of this class, even though it used to embarrass me to have others reading me work. I read a lot of great projects too, and those helped me get some ideas on how to better word my analyses to make my points more clear. I weeded out unnecessarily complicated sentences and broke them down into smaller ones that got to the point more quickly. As we approach the end of the semester, I can feel my anxiety getting worse and worse. It's becoming difficult to manage, but I'm very motivated to pass this class so I've been just barely overcoming the urge to shut down. I'm doing well in my other classes, but I still have that perfectionist streak that keeps telling me that if I'm not performing perfectly I may as well give up and not try at all. I'm keeping in my head one of the old growth mindset mottos I read a while back, which is "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be done." I'm just trying to make sure what I need to do gets done, and stop worrying so much about being perfect. It's been working so far, and remembering that motto is surprisingly soothing. It gives me an attainable goal, and I'm more motivated to finish because of it. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 14 Analysis: Close Reading of Letter to A Prisoner

In this poem, Senghor writes to one of his comrades named Ngom in a German prisoner of war camp. He tells him about what he's seen in wartime Paris after being released from the camp himself. "I write you from the solitude of my precious - and closely guarded -/ Residence of my black skin." (Senghor, 682) This line expresses how he feels as an African man away from his culture. He admits that he is isolated, but rather than use that word he uses a similar one: solitude. Though they both mean being alone, they have very different connotations. Solitude implies that it was a conscious decision, giving him agency in his distance from the people around him. He feels that as a black man he cannot relate to those around him, so he closely guards himself and his identity. "Fortunate are my friends/ Who know nothing of the icy walls and the brightly lit/ Apartments that sterilize every seed on the ancestors' masks/ And even the memories of love." (Senghor, 682...
Read more

Reading Analysis: Literary Analysis of The Dead

A major theme in "The Dead" is, unsurprisingly, death. The inevitability of it, the way it affects the living, and the way it connects us as human beings are all touched upon in the story. One way the theme of death is conveyed in the story is symbolically, in the snow that is present throughout the story. We see it introduced from almost the very beginning of the story, mentioned as Gabriel enters the scene. He is taking off his coat as he enters the house, and it is covered in snow and ice. This is symbolic of how we can try to shield ourselves from death as Gabriel shields himself from the snow with his coat, but it will still impact us regardless, just as Gabriel is still covered in snow. In the following conversation about the snow with Lily, he comments that there is probably going to be snowfall that night. This is foreshadowing about the looming existential crisis Gabriel is going to have involving death. At the end of the story, when Gabriel begins to think about ...
Read more