This I Have Learned

 This I Have Learned. A little too open ended for me. On a more surface level note, I think I have learned how to contribute to a harkness/seminar circle even when I’m really not sure what to say! But looking at the bigger picture, I guess this means I learned how to step outside of my comfort zone. 

If I’m being honest, once I saw who was in this class at the beginning of the year, I was slightly terrified. Being in a classroom surrounded by people who held the reputation of being some of the smartest people in our grade was very intimidating. However, I do think it taught me an important life lesson which I was already familiar with but had never felt myself applying. It sounds dumb, but I did find part of myself through this 12 AP Lit class. 

One word I will take with me to college and for the rest of my life is complexity. Sure, I knew to look for the “meaning of the work as a whole”, but never had I tried to look deeper into a poem, or passage of some sort, trying to find a more complex, even deeper, meaning of the work. This can be applied in my everyday life as well. Through friendships, relationships, and through the rest of my schooling. I hope to take this word with me wherever I go because it is something I have learned to apply not just analyzing poems, but in everyday life. 

So for that, I am thankful for this terrifying, intimidating, yet welcoming English class. Without it, I wouldn’t have realized how much I hate poetry, am bad at attempting to get the sophistication point on ICE’s, can’t copy and paste from Chat GPT, but most importantly, what works for me: being the last person to talk in a harkness to try and make sense of other people’s ideas, and try to find my own complexity within the classroom.