Year End Reflections

I asked my students to write year-end reflections today. Looking back, this school year has been filled of mixed moments - moments of genuine joy when I see students learn about themselves and moments of frustration when I struggled with some of the student's indifferent attitude. This year's experience has significantly shaped me as an educator and as a person. I am determined to become an educator that will empower students with useful skills for life and create meaningful experiences and connections for them.

Below are some blog entries from my students:

1. It’s the end of the school year, something amazingly surprising. It almost seems like it was yesterday when we were picking lockers and meeting all the teachers, when we were all following each other because we didn’t know what class or hall was each and were very lost. I still remember that day, and when I look back at everything that happened this year I get shocked and can’t believe that this year is already going to close. And although I don’t have a very interesting social or drama life, for me, this year still contained many experiences and memories that I will remember. Some of these experiences I know shaped me and will determine my future, and others that are more personal will remain as precious memories but still affected the person that I am today.

I think that the experiences that I said will shape me and my future all start with Ms. Chang. Since the beginning of the year she has been an amazing teacher and my thoughts on her definitely never changed. The MUN that she organized for the class made me discover my passion for human rights and debating and later made me enter the real MUN, and so far I’m completely loving it and getting unimaginable success when I thought I wasn’t going to do good. I think being in MUN is the greatest academic achievement and experience of this year that will definitely define eight grade for me, so in the future whenever I think of eight grade or the year of 2016-2017, I’m going to think of my first time being in MUN. Honestly, I don’t think that MUN is going to be a temporal thing in my life, especially with all the success and fun that I’m getting out of it, recently I’ve been thinking of becoming a delegate or ambassador but I still haven’t decided that for sure because I have other dreams and aspirations. My biggest achievement of this year also had to do with MUN, so far I have only gone to three conferences and I have already won two awards, a verbal mention and a best delegate, which was honestly one of the happiest moments of my life that I thought I was never going to have.

I feel like I’ve been talking about MUN for a long time now so now I’m going to move on, but to resume this, thank you Ms. Chang for being a great teacher, my favorite, and doing all of the projects that made me learn something amazing about myself, I will sure miss you, you taught me a lot of great things that I’ll need and use in the future. The final thing that I’m going to be talking about is three things that I learned this year, it was quite a lot of things but I’ll pick three of the main ones. This year I learned a lot about acceptance and self-identity, about friendship and that you always need to look at the bright side, have hope and always give your best. This was a school year that I will definitely remember. 

2. My reflection this year is to live your life like you want to live it. You should never regret anything in life. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience. Something that I will remember forever is the happy and sad moments that I have been going through with my friends and classmates. Something that we did this year that I will remember for the rest of my life is when we went to the amusement park with all middle school and high school. In general, in life I have accomplish so many things that I am proud of, but this is the main one: I work so hard to pass eight grade with good grades.

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. The most challenging part of this year for me was the debates we did with Ms. Chang, because I am a very shy person and I’m a nervous person when it comes to talking in front of a crowd. If I could change one thing that happened this year, would be my language. Something that was hard for me at the start of the year but is easy now is my writing, now I can express myself easier in my writing. In an area that I feel I made my biggest improvements was in English because Ms. Chang help me to better my English. A person at our school that has made the biggest impact in my life were my friends and Ms. Chang because they help me to better myself in a good way. Something that the teacher could have done to make this year better was to go to more field trips. My advice that I could give students next year is to work harder. Don’t allow someone to make you feel like you’re not good enough. 
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