2nd last March blog

This week I have:

• Worked on my Spanish presentation
• Completing talking assessments for Comms
• Researching possible history questions for my personal essay
• Reading "The Heart of Darkness"
• Trying to find a short story or poem I can write about for Lits
• Revised Spanish conjugations

Good and bad things about these tasks were:

Spanish: I enjoyed coming up with a topic I wanted to talk about. It has been great practise with my speaking. I have also realised a few things that I forgot in Spanish and have revised them. It has been quite hard to spread myself evenly though. I enjoy writing stories in Spanish very much, so tend not to work on my listening as often as I write. This week I will try to concentrate on all of the relevant areas evenly.

Comms: I am three quarters of the way through the assessments using programmes. I have found this interesting because it shows clearly how different people choose to present themselves using varied tone of voice, body language, and speed of voice. It has shown me that this all makes a slight difference. I found the Al Gore documentary slightly more difficult to assess because I found him quite confusing. But eventually I learned to look at it objectively and not emotionally. I am used to watching a TV program without much thought to the reasoning behind every detail. It was really interesting to observe his methods closely. I find myself being able to assess speakers and TV programmes a little differently now!

History: Researching an essay question for history is actually quite hard. I have so many periods in history that I find so interesting but that would not quite be as suitable to assess as others are. So I've begun to be objective and compromise between finding a subject I feel real passion for and one that a good argument can be created around. I am narrowing down the search. So this Friday I want to be able to show Evan some examples of questions I'm interested in and see what he thinks. Until then, I want to take his advise and read as much as possible on the subjects to find suitable candidates.

Lits: Ok finishing "The Heart of Darkness" seemed like an impossible task at first. However I've now really gotten into the story and the literary techniques. So much so that I'm thinking of doing something quite challenging for my Lits personal reflection essay. I have been thinking of doing "To Kill a Mocking Bird" which is one of my favourite books. This week I will discuss that with Madeleine and find out her opinion on the book. Just out of interest I will research other good short stories as a back up. This unit has given me confidence in my writing. It's made me consider that perhaps writing a book one day would be quite enjoyable.

So this coming week I have some organisation to do and have to make sure I spread myself evenly and give myself enough time to do what I want to do. This is good practise for the final weeks of the course where we will be in the same situation. I've realised after getting quite stressed with balancing study, family things and a relationship that being disciplined is the only way to get through things efficiently. I have learned to cull time wasting parts of my life and just get into what I want to achieve.