Acknowledgements

               There are a ton of people who brought me to where I am now and I can't leave this class without mentioning the reason I passed. First, I'll start with my classmates. Elizabeth, who was always willing to talk to me during class when we had to share ideas, and constantly breaking my morning when she reminded me about the in-class essays every week. You showed me how much I was forgetting to consider and made me see the simpler side of language. Because of last year, I thought it was impossible to get ideas across without using complex diction and I was insanely lost. Shambhavi, who set an example with her analysis during our discussions, you made me realize that it’s ok to express ideas that aren’t obvious to everyone else because there is not one right answer all the time.

               This is going to sound weird, but watching movies was also a huge part of my success in this class. Christopher Nolan inspired me to think much deeper and really honed my analysis skill when I was watching and rewatching Inception and Interstellar. Those movies require big brains to thoroughly understand. Hans Zimmer, his score composer, knew exactly what tone the music was supposed to be and for this reason his work was very inspiring. The way he put in tone to his work helped me understand how I should be putting tone into my work too, even though it isn’t music all the time. This duo changed me in amazing ways.

               I’d like to acknowledge the effort of Virginia Woolf for writing Death of a Moth, it gave me a sense of urgency to make an impact on the places I go. Her depiction of humans being small and insignificant motivated me to rise above that. I cannot begin to express my thanks to Susan Sontag, and Deborah Tannen. Though I didn’t favor their pieces, they certainly gave me a scope on where my beliefs lay and drove the voice in my blogs and essays.

               Speaking of which, I’m extremely grateful to Mrs. Valentino for making blogs an assignment, constantly giving us feedback on our essays, and teaching us how to bring out our voice in writing. It  would not have been possible without her support for me to be scoring more than a 3 on my essays (not exaggerating). The blogs really gave me a place to be myself in writing, a calmer environment where my ideas could surface and my potential could be seen. The comments on our in-class essays helped me so much, going back, I can see so much improvement from my rhetorical analysis essays where I went from half expressed, incomplete ideas, to fully formed ideas with body and boldness.

               11AP is one of the classes that teaches you more about yourself through its rigor while simultaneously preparing you for the future. I don’t think any other class could have brought out me as a person as much as this one. I definitely have been impacted by this class and to my surprise, I will be missing it a lot.

Till next year English