What I Have Learned!

Well for beginners I have learned too much to only write a 5 paragraph paper. So I guess I am going to have to summarize what I have and haven’t learned…well it’s mostly what I have learned because there isn’t really anything that I haven’t learned that is associated with the 9th grade Global Education English class.
One of my favorite learning experiences has been writing the blogs or the 1 or 2 paragraph responses to articles or subjects we have learned about! Honestly my favorite learning experience would be Weights class but it’s too irrelevant to this class and this paper I have to write. When I first had to write the paragraph or two for the articles I read I was like “wow, only a paragraph? This is going to take a few seconds!” But I was dead wrong, on my first article it took me almost a whole hour to write on paragraph and I still had another, how could this be? Well first I had to write a 1 SENTECNE thesis (seems easy but your wrong), then choose a side (ex: if I thought Iran should have nuclear power [actually weapons but they wouldn’t admit it] and say what we should do), and after all that we had to find some sort of support or reason that took almost as much time as the first paragraph. Well now I could take almost any article and read it (for some I might need a little more knowledge than others) and within a few minutes make a thesis and have my choices and reasoning sorted out!

Let’s say Osama Bin Laden was captured and the citizens of the United States got to choose what the government does with him, and Mr. Fielder has us write a paper to our state legislature about what we want to happen, here is what I would write if I had the choice to either have him be killed or tortured for life. (Notice this is a shortened version of what I would write because I don’t have all hour to write one example)

Thesis: If I could choose from death or torture to a man that killed thousands of our own people I would choose torture.

Paragraph 1 + Support: Does anyone think a man that killed thousands of our own people deserve to die instantly by a bullet without any pain or to be hurt for the rest of his days for taking friends and family of others. Some might say that its inhumane to torture him, but what it humane to kill thousands and destroy a whole country’s economy system? On the 11th of September in 2001 he decided to hire two attackers and take a airliners into the twin towers, and kill all the people in the building, later on he released a tape saying it was his plan to do all that.

Sometimes I would article (not by choice, obviously!) and have NO idea what it’s about or what its point was, until the Great Mr. Fielder introduced me and the rest of the class to “margin noting” and the great Q.C.V.I. (Questions-Comments/Connections-Vocabulary-Interesting Ideas) technique. For a few weeks we just read random (actually very connected articles, but they seemed very different from each other) and would have to do little summaries for almost every paragraph, then after we were done with that we had to write 5 Questions we had, 5 Comments/Connections we made, find 5 or more words we didn’t know, and write 5 interesting ideas. Sometimes I would spend more time on the QCVIs than reading a 5 page article and doing margin noting, I was hard but it made me understand the first time I read something not the 5th.

I also learned that there was a mass genocide in Rwanda, while I didn’t even know there was a country named Rwanda! First off the teacher told us we had to learn about Rwanda that is located in Africa…ok, nothing big, this is school, we learn new things but this wasn’t new. The genocide has been going around for years and almost one million are dead because of it, and yet again there seemed to be no media coverage about it. In many was a I was shocked and kind of surprised that it’s been going on for so many years but I never knew about it, I mean if a dog in Asia gets hit by a famous person car it would get more coverage that this.