Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Helen's Self-reflection

Helen Hu
Self-reflection
This quint is the last quint of our freshman year. With the excitement and nervousness, I am looking forward to our next year in Northwest school. Since I came to our school, I have changed, which shows in many small ways. For example, I used to avoid what that I was afraid of, because I thought my parents were always standing there and watching me, so they could handle everything when there was something wrong with me. When I felt upset I stayed at home from school or when I had questions I let my parents communicate with teachers. However, I realized that I have no more reason to rely on my parents after I came here. I gradually adapted to solve situations by myself, like communicate with school and teachers or to apply for the activities I am interested in. I know that I need to go through the mire by myself in after coming years and accommodate to the U.S in which has a different culture than I learned in my hometown. This change shows how my mind has been influenced since I came to NWS. It helped me to become more independent and mature, which is the positive side of my changing. The negative side is sometimes I feel so stressed and tired from doing everything myself, although I know I will gain from this growth. 
The experience here is more comprehensive than in China. I experienced a lot of new things and received a more open education way. As a learner, I think the more successful setting is U.S, but I learned academic more stable in China. If I learned both of these two education ways, that will make me perfect. We had a bunch of exercise to do every day and studied independently before every topic in china. To make sure the speed of learning went pretty fast and stable, Chinese students endured more pressure than U.S students. In contrary, Americans did not learn in that way but a more creative way. Teachers here gave students more choices with what they were interested in. Like we had many art classes and sports which we had to choose for our grade. The classes here were very attractive that made me want to have classes every day and make me study happily. Therefore, the ideal education way for me is to coordinate two ways together to make students study better.
The part about going into the community to learn made me excited most in the past school year. For instance, going on a field trip, watching play at theater or doing community engagement. In China teachers focused more on how to make students’ score better, but did not let students do as much creative activities as here did. So I felt very fresh about the outside activities here. Besides the fresh feeling of that, the result of outside classes made me learn a lot and remembered them deeply. For example, the play, Othello, we watched together during humanities class time gave me a more direct feeling about the famous literature and how it related to the play, Macbeth, we were reading. Furthermore, outside class time made students relaxed. Thus it was a good alternate work with rest for students and made us more efficient in learning. That outside experience gives me more impetus to know and I feel really excited about it whenever I hear that we are going out for class. 
About Humanities
1.                Reading books have been my greatest success as a learner in Humanities.
2.                I have set a goal to myself that I should expand my vocabulary with deep memory in my head. From reading books and articles, I have collect my vocabulary and I think I achieved my goal with feeling more and more comfortable and fluent while I was reading books. Besides memorize the words Heather asked us, I also reviewed the words we learnt in the class and lecture, which made me master more vocabulary.
3.                My goal for summer is to finish 4 books that I chose in the bookstore. I will make a table and supervise myself to read at least 20 minutes per day.

4.                I want to study more books and master more skills in reading and writing. 

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