My 1st Semester Reflection

Learning by yourself seems like a easy, simple task. That’s just what I happened to be doing throughout all my years of experience with school and tough assignments that I had to grind my teeth for and finish. I could say that I was doing it with a group but I would only think of what I HAD to do. GLOW, GROW, and KNOW is when you would be able to sit with your group in Mr. Ziebarth’s AP language class.

Doing this exercise consists of your colleagues giving you credit on what you had done well on (GLOW) but while also giving you feedback on what you should do in order to improve your comprehension or writing levels(GROW). Using this new knowledge attained from your group members, you could apply it to your essay or piece of work and advance your work into a whole different level(KNOW). But rewind real quick, because that’s not really how the exercise turned out for me.

Probably the most affecting activity that I still refer to this day that I’ve done in Mr. Ziebarth’s class is called Glow, Grow, and Know but at first I recall saying “this is gonna be really pointless activity to do this in class” to my colleagues Cassie and Nicole. However, Cassie instructed me that this activity would end up really improving the way that I write formal letters and essays in the long run.

But knowing me I simply shrugged off her words and continued on with my day while ignoring the criticism of my colleagues trying to reach out to me. I’ve always known that I am a defensive and arrogant person that doesn’t take criticism too well and I see the advice as more as an insult than actual help whether it be in my athletics or social life. But kids as old as me only want to improve by themselves and that was me prior to my realization.

Around a month after this assignment, I was in the midst of an intense track meet against some vivid runners from all around Southern California during an All Comers Meet at Long Beach City College. I was about to compete in my 200x4 meter race with my teammates that I had been practicing with for the past couple of days. My coach, Coach Bivens, approached me with his usual intense appearance.

He put his strong grip on my shoulder and whispered in my ear that I would need to keep my arms high and legs at a constant speed in order to do well on this next race. However, there I was walking away from him without a thought in my mind about the advice or “criticism” he had just said about my sprinting capabilities.

But then my mind shifted from this way of thinking after this race due to me ending up getting second place after falling mid-sprint on the final stretch of race due to not keeping my legs at a constant speed…. I thought to myself after painfully crawling into my bed that night that I would need to take criticism as a way of improvement and then the next Monday in class, there we were peer grading our partner’s essays while giving each other advice on how to make our works improve in time for the AP test.

This made me think of how I could use this in my athletics expertise. Two periods later, I was training with my team but instead of just going through practice half-assed like I would usually do, I decided to go up to my coach and ask him if I could improve my running habits and he gave me help that I would’ve never thought of and the very next week I was up and sprinting all the way to first place at the Winter Qualifiers in Irvine.

My family consists of brilliant individuals that I’m often being compared to and my parent’s saying “Why can’t you be more like them?” from time to time. My siblings, cousins, and I are closer than the usual family due to our families immigrating from Vietnam to Southern California when they were still young.

Growing up together in a foreign country back then made our family being close-knitted since they could only depend on each other to survive in this new world. Now in 2019, growing up with our families consists of either become rich or you won’t survive and a way to do this is to become a doctor. My family always wants the kids to be successful no matter what the case but there is grace in their mindset.

My mother and aunt know that everything that we do now can affect us in the future so they want us to have a strict mindset without many distractions. To the older generation of my family, even the smallest things can create altercations in our lives.

This mindset has affected all of the children with a large percentile of us becoming successful and having a set life. But knowing me though, I respect and hate doctors since almost everyone in my family is aiming for that title and I wanna be of help to my family by supporting them in a different way. Lawyer appeared throughout my head several times before acknowledging that this could be a different way where my family could be proud of me but a decision that would also make me happy with my job in the my future.

A reading that really stuck out to me in this class was Lahiri’s “Rice” and the descriptive essays we had to write on someone that meant something to us. Reading this in depth piece of literature made me come to the realization of how even miniscule things end up leading to a considerable amount of topics at the end of the story.

Small descriptions and really reaching far outside of the common area was what lead up to the totality of my descriptive essay but that’s also what I believe could make me a lawyer. Sticking to the area where I’m most comfortable could lead me becoming lazier and lazier as the days go by. That’s where writing my descriptive essay comes in. Writing this essay was like entering a whole new territory as I had never gone through the process of going into such depth on such a basic concept. (my best friend playing soccer) Although it may have seemed like any other essay but it changed the way I looked at my upcoming life.

Coming to the realization that details that may not seem important now may end up changing my life later whether it be years from now if I am able to push through school and my tough times, I may end up becoming a registered lawyer. But that’s only if I start focusing on things that may seem as a little as a quiz in my mathematics class or working on an entertaining video for my video production class. (which I’ve been doing now for 4 months)

After reading “Rice” by Lahiri, I realized that there were so many ways to describe a person other than just talking of them but also going into depth with their actions and words. Analyzing them was a way to really express the descriptions that fitted them perfectly. I walked out of that class confident with the idea in my head that the descriptive essay would be just like any other essay.

I got home after my rigorous track practice but being exhausted, I walked to my desk and started to think about who I should write about. I sat there for a solid two hours pondering who was that alluring to even have that many things to write about. I had no inspiration to write because I didn’t believe I was gonna find a person that intriguing as the person in Lahiri’s “Rice” until my best friend crossed into my mind.

I finished typing out this description of Tyler in no more than two hours and printed it out so that we could turn it in the following week. For the rest of the week, I didn’t really look twice at it and I just turned it in without any feedback. We got our scorings back around a week later and I scored the lowest score possible while everyone scored much higher than I did in my group. I was ashamed of my scoring so I knew I needed feedback from one of my colleagues. I turned over to Cassie and asked her what I should do in order to improve my essay.

Cassie read over the essay twice and then told me that I wasn’t truly speaking from my heart and brain but just spitting out random facts. This is where the Glow, Grow, and Know came into the picture and Cassie was the judge who helped me tremendously.

We had to turn our Description Revision about a week later and I strived this time to make an engaging, convincing essay about the true greatness of Tyler’s soccer skills. It was one of the very few times in my life where I was never more confident in one of my literature works (due to me lacking skill in writing essays). I aimed to stun any reader but mostly Mr. Ziebarth. We got our scores back again and I didn’t do as well as I aimed for but it was a much more pleasing score than before.

It may have not been in literal terms my “best work” but it was more impactful than many of the works I had done before because it made me think about how I needed to speak more from my heart than bland, fake statements.

New York Times Contest Entry:

In my AP language class, we prosper in the way that we are able to reach out to our colleagues and ask for advice using a concept called Glow, Grow, and Know. This activity has a key factor with criticizing our group members but in our world today, there are countless people who often reject the literal meaning of criticism.

But in order for us to learn and improve not only our lives but our communities as a whole, the people and even ourselves aren’t always doing the correct things from littering to even bad mouthing a friend. However, it is a known fact that no one is perfect and that there’s no way possible way to fix that but there’s always a way to grow and learn from your past mistakes and a way to do this is to be open to advice from others. Some people can take criticism as an insult but in reality it can often be a blessing from another person so that you can.

Criticism isn’t just used in your worksheets that are graded from your teachers that give you advice on how to solve your calculus problem correctly because there’s actually a whole new dimension on using criticism to help yourself outside of a teenager’s workplace. Much of the millennials (including myself) may not see it but learning doesn’t just come from a classroom but also from small areas of your life from your video games to your father telling you to drink less coffee since it can make you shorter (common misconception).

But it is the way you can utilize repetition and criticism to make you more flexible with the way you live. Utilizing this profound way of thinking could be just taking the criticism into account and deciding whether to use the advice to improve your life or just flat out ignoring it since it is just bad advice.

This article from New York Times shows that the US will need to adapt for climate change and that these ways of adaptation can be impactful in the ways that we live as as a whole in the United States from here on out. This is a piece of advice so that the United States could improve the world ecologically instead of further advancing into climate change.

But in response to this article, there would be a number of our population that can’t distinguish between whether climate change is real or not, leading to the conclusion that we would have no need to adapt. This could prove to be fatal but they should be hearing out the advice and really trying to adapt instead of pushing this concept aside.