Promises -AEP- Chloe - Blog 1

 

Coming back to AEP classes as an eighth grader was definitely something I looked forward to. I just didn't know it would happen so soon! On Monday, the second of August, I woke up to find AEP as the first two classes of the week. It was pretty exciting knowing I would be having a relaxing morning filled with activities that included no stress. Even so, I could already tell that this year was much more prepared than the last, since Miss Disa had already begun posting assignments and instructions even before school started. I gathered all of my materials for school: my two binders, a cup filled with writing tools, a water bottle, and my sleek computer. 

Good first impressions are always important, so I made a point to be about five minutes early. It was around 8:26 in the morning when Miss Disa noticed me and told me what was planned on the agenda for today. We'd take it easy, beginning with "Typeshift" to wake up our minds and then we'd begin with the real assignment. I quickly opened a fresh, new tab and headed on over to the website. 

The letters, surprisingly, were a lot easier than I remembered (or I was just lucky). In forty-one seconds, I had finished the exercise. This made me quite proud, since I remember "Typeshift" as not being one of my strengths. Upon finishing, I noticed some old classmates of mine logging in: Meral, Shasmeen, and James. It was nice knowing others stayed in AEP and didn't switch to other classes like ESL and Filipino. I wave of relief washed over me, but also a tinge of sadness. No one new had joined AEP and I was a little disappointed since I love starting new friendships and beginnings. Oh well... better luck next year! 

Back to the agenda, Miss Disa started talking about the workload we'd be handling. The class started with page eight of our first unit. It talked about family and the different vocabulary you can find in one. In total, there were about twelve things we needed to answer. Although that may sound short, it took forever just to finish the first eight questions!

We needed to look up all the words' definitions listed and explain the differences between them. Some of the words we were dealing with were: friend, mate, flatemate, aunt, step-sister, and lots more! Doing half of the work was easy. It was simple enough to look up the meanings of the words, but a bit harder to differentiate them on a five minute time limit. Did I mention we only had five minutes to complete this page? No? Well, that was another problem of mine. 

You see, whenever I type about something, I like making my points very clear by explaining them  descriptively, which is one of my weak points. I type so much that I end up not having enough time to  to finish the task at hand. Although this has been happening a lot, I do believe that I've managed that bad habit a bit better.

So, knowing that, I speeded through the different definitions and checked off every question until I finally reached number eight. I have to admit, I was very stressed out when doing this with the time limit and all. It just seemed impossible. 

Fortunately, I wasn't the only one experiencing some issues with the time. My classmates and I struggled to just get around to copy the definitions without them being marked as plagiarized. Overall, it took about a whole AEP session/ forty minutes just to finish all twelve questions. I was really thankful that questions nine through twelve were simple fill-in-the-blank questions with multiple choice answers. Otherwise, things would've gone downhill for me. 

After that little fiasco was over, we decided to move on to page nine. However, we would be doing this one as a class, not individually. I was ecstatic to hear this because group works in AEP rarely happened last year, so to finally have one this year was like a dream come true! Our teacher instructed us to open this new website called "Miro.com." There, we could collaborate and write our exit tickets. It's honestly a really fun website and one of my favorite ways to learn by far! I'd definitely suggest for other teachers to use it in the future.

Moving back to page nine, the instructions, this time, were much simpler than page eight, since all we had to do was underline all the words associated with family. The excerpt was honestly really interesting, since it talked about what happens to families with widows, why writing wills are important, and included lots of other interesting topics! Miss Disa then told us we would be having a race to see who could underline the most words in the article connected with family. We each had our own color to help identify who underlined which word. Mine was a lime green color. 

As soon as she said we could start, everyone started reading the passage and underlining frantically. My tactic was to just keep underlining words that made sense in a family setting like widow, divorced, separated, relationship, etc. Meanwhile, Miss Disa had set up a timer to help us stay on track. It also played music, which is another reason why I like "Miro.com" so much! The music really woke me up and filled my soul with the energy I needed to finish. 

Finally, when everyone was finished and couldn't find any more words, I saw lime green marks covering most of the words in the text. I counted and found myself having fourteen words! I was pretty shocked and felt very proud of myself. Miss Disa pulled up the answer key and I thankfully got all of my fourteen words correct. I won by a landslide and was rewarded with five merits and a virtual confetti blaster provided by our teacher. I was exhilarated! Winning the first part of page nine really boosted my enthusiasm and prepared me for the next task to come.

Continuing on with the next half of page nine, the task seemed fairly easy at first glance. We just needed to match some of the words with their right definitions. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, for me, the main issue was trying to draw straight lines. All of my lines kept looking squiggly, resulting in confusion and overlapping of lines. Since they weren't straight at all, the definitions kept getting a little mixed up. Even more so, my classmates were also in quite a pickle, since some of them drew lines at the same time or didn't know that the answer had already been found/claimed. Overall, the exercise was not necessarily tough to understand, but rather, difficult in terms of answering altogether. I also got one of the words mixed up with another definition. Whoops! I think a bit of organization is needed in order to better avoid these problems. However, as a first attempt at group work, I'd say we didn't do half bad!

As we finished page nine, class was almost ending. So, I headed over to "Miro.com," which is pretty much our new "Padlet," where we write our exit tickets. I chose a purple sticky note, since it's my favorite color, and wrote about my learning experience. For example, I learned there are many words that are connected and can be described with family like separated and unmarried. Along with that, I didn't even know that widower means a male widow/person whose spouse has died and hasn't remarried. Up until today, I didn't even know there was a difference and just thought widow and widower were the same. AEP classes are really opening up my eyes to all the words we use around us one session at a time.

Looking back, I can see that I was very productive and, even when things got tough, I pushed through until the end. I'm very proud of myself for accomplishing everything that needed to be done and also managed to somehow overcome my stress, problems, and slowness. It is truly amazing to see how far I've come from being a seventh grader to an eighth grader. I hope this evident progress still continues with me for the rest of my time here in AEP. This year seems promising and I hope it stays that way.