#8of8

My final literacy sponsor is one that made me enjoy English class again. Up until my junior year, English was a class that I never really enjoyed. This was based on many of my literacy sponsors from my younger years, for example, speech therapy, being afraid to speak in class, and also the extra help I needed in reading. English was never one of the best subjects for me in school. I always found it to be frustrating for me and just something I never truly enjoyed. I always did fine and got good grades because that’s just who I am. No matter how much I dislike a class, I’ll still work hard to get a good grade in it. My junior year English class was one of my favorite classes in high school. Mainly the reason I really enjoyed it was because of the teacher. He made the class really fun and I always enjoyed going to his class. For junior year English classes, everyone has to read The Great Gatsby. I knew this was a requirement and everyone who I asked about either said they loved it or they hated it, not really anyone in between. Even my mom said she didn't particularly like the book and so going into the book I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I ended up loving the book! My teacher was great at explaining the hidden symbols and the different literary aspects of the book. For example, the weather that occurs in the book is suppose to be representative of Gatsby’s mood and color symbolism plays a major part as well. The color green symbolizes The American Dream and the color white symbolizes innocence and fairness. Overall, I had a really good experience with the book and still remains a book I really enjoy today.

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https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-great-gatsby/f-scott-fitzgerald/bruce-dean/9784871878401

My senior year English class was also one of my favorite classes in high school. Again, I had an amazing teacher who was awesome at explaining different books and short stories we read and made sure we really understand what the book was trying to say. One of the big requirements all senior year classes have to do is write a research paper. Whenever he mentioned it, I got pretty apprehensive about it because papers or essays were not something I particularly enjoyed. They stressed me out and since this was gonna be a research paper, it was gonna be a lot of work. Once I picked a topic and started researching. I really started to enjoy writing my paper because I was very passionate about my topic. He also created a process for us that was very manageable and made the whole paper a lot easier. For the process, obviously we had to research our topic first, once that was done we had to develop a thesis statement and write five main points you were gonna talk about. After that, we had to create rough outlines with our thesis statement and then for each main point, had to write sub points and then evidence provided. Then we could starting writing the actual paper and we to have a couple rough drafts and have a classmate read it as well. The paper took over a month to complete and was definitely a lot of work and consumed most of my time for awhile. While the paper was a lot of work and stressed me out at times, it is a piece of writing I am very proud of.