AEP Blog 1.1

We are finally in Grade 12, and after spending over two school years of online classes, we are finally back in real classrooms. We were Grade 9 the last time we had face-to-face classes, and now we're already in our final year. Next year, most of us are going to college. It's sad that next year our happy, young years are going to be over as we'll start having to be more responsible in college, but it's interesting thinking about what's ahead. Either way, it's nice finally being able to have an actual class of AEP. Being in an actual classroom makes it much easier to focus on the lessons as I'm no longer logging onto the Google Meet after just waking up - it's also a impossible to have other applications opened during class.

Now moving on to some more AEP focused matters. So far, AEP-12 as a whole has been great. During the first week, Miss gave us a rundown of what we'll be doing this year. We've got to write reaction essays to articles of our choice and then do something creative afterwards. I really like the freedom that we have of reacting to anything of our choice as it's a lot easier to write about something you're interested/passionate about rather than something that has just been given to you as an assignment. I share the same feelings for the create part, being able to have many possibilities of what you want to do makes it a lot less stressful and a lot more entertaining. The scrabble game was a lot of fun too, despite the fact that all of us did really bad, it was nice playing in person for once.

We also did a Miro board activity of putting all the key-points on writing a reactive essay into a box. It was pretty eye-opening seeing all of us working together in person, and creating the board also helped get a grasp on how we should write our reaction papers. Doing things like this in class makes it feel much more interactive and helps me focus better. The transition to a different Wordle website has also been good so far. The current website makes it feel a lot more competitive and makes you much more active while trying to find the word. In my opinion, if Miss wants it to be more competitive she could award the winner merits or some sort of points, although I don't think I'll be winning anytime soon.

I think this ties in with what Miss said, something along the lines of "merging online and offline together" I can't remember exactly what she said, but it was something about using the best of both worlds (the best tools/aspects from online and offline) and mixing them into one. Again, another positive change for AEP. Using things like Wordle and Miro from last year was productive, and continuing to use them in the real classroom should be even more productive. Another online-related topic is the active Google Meet session during class. There was one day where I had to stay home and I'm surprised with how fluid the Google Meet went. I was able to hear Miss and understand the important parts of the lesson just fine.

Even though AEP-12 has been great, I haven't. I am extremely terrible and unbelievably bad at writing. To make things worse, most things that I'm interested in, the things I should react to and base my projects on, aren't really that appropriate for the subject in my opinion. Most people are writing about nice topics like: transitioning to electric cars, the future of AI, etc. But I don't think writing about the next game I'm looking forward to or writing about the new Challenger 3 tank really hits the spot with our AEP class. I'm pretty sure that all of the things I'm into are in the same boat, nothing I'm into is really that educational or school related. All of the things I enjoy are just unrelated and useless rubbish, not interesting or life-related in any way.

There's also other subjects in the way, for the past few days I have had to have been studying for four quizzes. Although on Friday, two of those quizzes got out of the way. Along with this, there's also a load of homework I have to finish - I guess this is just what it's like in your final year. Because of this, I've barely been able to make good progress on AEP and have been submitting most things late since I've really got to focus on the major subjects (A thankyou to Miss for being lenient with the deadlines). Hopefully over the course of next week I can pull things together since these AEP projects seem like they could be pretty fun if I can find things I'm interested in, although I doubt I will.

Despite being bad at writing, I'm looking forward to seeing an improvement in myself over the year. I'm hoping that all of these projects we'll be doing will help us get better at writing as we'll be doing quite a few of them. Although, I've been looking forward to getting better for the past 5 years... (my fault, not AEP) Anyway, I think in my career, being able to write long essays isn't really one of the main points. I think most of the writing I'll be doing is just report writing which is pretty straightforward, just write down what happened. However, I may be wrong.

Overall, AEP-12 is looking bright. Being able to write about whatever you want makes things a lot easier, and I'm glad we're still using some of the virtual sides from learning in class as they were pretty useful. However my side of AEP has been pretty sluggish so far, which is completely my fault. Nevertheless, I'm still motivated for AEP-12 and hope we have a good year.

That's all for now, have a nice day/night and see you next blog.