Expect The Unexpected
How I Learned That English Class Isn’t The Worse Class To Be In!
Throughout my years in elementary and middle school I hated english class. I hated everything there was about english class. I hated reading assigned books, writing a ton of essays, and participating in class. It was easy to just pass english and that’s what i did. I would barely pass the class when i was in middle school. That did not change when I became a freshman in high school. My english class my freshman year went terrible for me. My teacher was a psycho on making us read 30 to 40 pages a night and annotate every page. She gave us an essay to write three times a day. One night she assigned the class to read and annotate the book we were reading called the Great Gatsby. Not only did we have to annotate the entire page but we also had 50 questions to answer as a study guide for the chapters. English my freshman year made me have the urge to drop out and not get my high school diploma. I know I couldn’t drop out so i stuck with it and passed the class with a D letter grade. My sophomore year was the year everything changed for me. I was assigned to have philosophy as an english class and the teacher that taught that class was Mr.Kwon. Mr. Kwon was not like all my other english teachers, he was different. He was the one that gave me hope on actually getting a good grade in english. He was a caring and a well spoken teacher in my high school. He cared about students on the path to failure in his class. He would always go out of his way to help us with anything we needed help in. He taught me how to be an active reader and speak publicly better.
Mr. Kwon wanted all of his students to be better students in the classroom and out of it. He was such a caring person for his students because he would always make sure his students were on top of their school work and kept us in check. He would single out students all the time if they weren’t doing their work and always made sure that we were doing the right things outside the classroom. Making sure we stayed out of trouble. He would say ” In order to be successful in live effort needs to be applied. Slacking off in my class screws you over not me. I’m here to help you.” He wanted us to succeed in his class rather than fail. Even though his class was hard because of all the reading and annotating we had to do it, It was to help us be better in English. He wanted us to really think about the text we were reading and analyze it while annotating. That’s how I got better as a reader because of how I was actively reading and analyzing the texts. Actively reading ment that every time I read anything from a book to a passage on paper, I write notes on certain things I feel are in important. ThenI underline a text and analyze it by going through it and seeing what the meaning of it is. He made me a better english student because of his personality. He was a tough teacher but that’s because he cared for his students and wanted us to be successful. He’s personality is what made me strive to get an A in his class and I did it. I got an A for the first time in english and I at the time I couldn’t be more happier. I was in a class of 30 students which was one of my largest classes.
Mr. Kwon’s room was set up differently from other classrooms. The desks were set up facing each other and then space in the middle for him to walk through and talk. His classroom was always filled with students every time of the day. So it was hard to get a one on one session with him. He would try his best to meet with everyone. He would have office hours twice a week and that was so helpful because if you didn’t understand something, especially from the text, he would help you try and get it by going into more detail about to help you better understand. The thing that made Mr. Kwon the most different from all my other teachers was the socratic seminars he held for a class decision. The way this was set up is that we would set the desks to a fish bowl structure and an opened ended question would be asked from him and students would have to discuss about what the question means and go further into it. Their was one class we had were we had a question that asked is revenge worth it. The whole class had a heated discussion because everyone had a different answer. I said that revenge isn’t worth it in the end because it doesn’t make you any better than whatever that person did to you. These seminars helped the class with public speaking. Everyone had to participate or he would give them a zero for participation points. The way that these seminars helped was that as we spoke more and gave our ideas out we became more comfortable in speaking publicly. This gave us an edge on speaking in other classes and having us be more confident with our answers. To this day everything that Mr. Kwon has taught me I still use today.
Mr. Kwon could not compare to any other english teacher I’ve had because of all the helpful things he taught me that stick to me today. One is active reading and the second was public speaking more effectively. He gave me these skills and I still use them till this day. Not even my prep school english teacher could compare do to his kindness for his students and teaching style. He taught his class as if students should be running it with him. We have to start off every class with one of his students starting a discussion question. Or sometimes we’d have to pick out a quote we found interesting in our reading and start a discuss off of that. Because he taught us differently I learned more and it gave me the opportunity to stick with me for the rest of my life. I still use active reading with whatever readings I have at school or if I need to analyze a text. I use this more often when I’m assigned to read a lot of pages for homework. When a teacher assigns me homework like this I annotate each page with helpful notes that I can go back to and find an answer to something. For example there was a reading assigned in my modern storytelling class and I had no idea of what it was talking about but my annotations helped me answer questions on the reading. I use public speaking in a class discussions I have and it gives me an edge on my participation points. For example in my new english class I participate in any activity we do. I answer anything being asked from the teacher to my best ability. I try to make sure that I participate on things i’m unsure with sense.
Mr. Kwon changed my mindset from a fixed to a growth mindset on english class. I always thought that english class was useless and not important to me. But he changed that with the way he taught his lessons with socratic seminars. These seminars helped with public speaking skills because it forced you to talk to the whole class at once. also having his students adapt to active reading by having us annotate readings and then expanding on texts. Mr. Kwon was like no other teacher I’ve had throughout my educational career. Every teacher before him made me hate english because of how hard they made class and the homeworks assigned. All those other teachers didn’t have his caring personality. They didn’t have the same objective as Mr. Kwon had and that was to make sure that we pass his class with us working hard to achieve that. Also to learn something out of his class that benefits us in the long run like active reading and public speaking. He’s had an impact on my views on english class which are now positive rather than negative. I never had a teacher like Mr.Kwon after his class but I know that everything he taught will last a lifetime with me.
