Jermaine's AP Blog

Today was another normal day in class. The najority of class was spent writing three body paragraphs on a prompt we were given. I was not in class yesterday, so I dont know if the prompt was discussed already. Nevertheless, I feel like i did a good job answering the prompt woth three paragraphs. It feels like it is getting easier to answer these prompts the more we do it but I still find that I have trouble finding the appropriate pieces of evidence to use. This will be fixed in time I am sure of it.

I was absent today

I was not in class for most of the lesson today. We had our second quarter honors day celebration and I attended it because i had AB honor roll. Before I left class today, we were talking more about claims and writing our own from a prompt. I understood this already so I did not feel like I was going to be too left behind. The celebration was pretty mediocre honestly. I am still greatful that they did it for us though.

I firmly believe that my purpose on this earth is to help others. I enjoy doing different activities for people like community service because I genuinely enjoy helping others. I strive to become a doctor in the future because it is a career where i can really help others. I can truly see myself happy coming to work everyday knowing that someone will need my help. I honestly cant think of anything else I would rather do with my life.

Today was another normal day in class. We were given a prompt we already looked at in the past and broke it down thoroughly. Since we already broke down this prompt before, I compared what i remembered from previously breaking it down to now and it feels like I have honestly gotten better. I was able to understand what it was asking of me and how to appropriately answer it better than last time. It shows I am making progress even though I could not really tell at first.

Today was another normal day in class. We started off class by finishing our group activity from yesterday where we took the multiple choice assesment and corrected our answers. The remainder of class was spent looking at an essay and a prompt to go with it. The essay was about vocational classes being a part of the American education system. My position was that these classes should be incorporated into the education system because they can help teach students valuable trade skills they can use if they dont plan to go to a traditional college. College is not made for everyone and these classes give students great alternatives.

Today was another normal day in class.  We took another practice multiple choice test. We didn't do to good again as a class. We still got a chance to improve our score because of the group activity we did afterwards when we corrected our answers. I think our problem with these questions now comes down to the wording of them.  We understand the strategy of process of elimination but it becomes really hard when we have to decipher the meaning of some of the question's complicated wording. I think that an activity where we take some of the complicated questions and learn to break them down will help us out trenendously in the future. 

I was absent today.

Today was a chill day in class.  Mr. Rease was absent today so the class just did the assignment provided and relaxed a little bit.  Mr.  Rease left us an assignment to create a body paragraph for the prompt we were given a few days ago.  This assignment was pretty easy because I just used the claims and evidences I previously outlined.  I enjoyed class today and wish we could have more days like today. 

Today was another ordinary day in class. The majority of the class time today was spent reading over past student's AP exam essays. The first essay we read was very good. It was well synthesized and used very good syntax and diction. We were given the grading rubric as well and we graded the essays after we read them. The first essay got a score of 8. The second essay we read was not as good as the first one. It had a few errors that made it difficult to comprehend and difficult to pull the claims and evidence from the writing. The class rated the essay a 4 . This whole process was really beneficial because with my particular learning style I sometimes need to see what good vs. bad looks like for the writings if I want to do good.

Today was another normal day in class. We mainly built upon yesterday's lesson today. We watched a few sources and built claims from them. These claims answer the prompt we were given yesterday in class. My favorite source was by far the one with Dwayne Johnson. He told us about how he thinks about the very rough times he went through and how they fuel his success today.  Watching these videos really gave me the motivation to work hard with everything I do.

Today was another normal day in class. We started class by discussing the difference between certainity and doubt. When you are certain about something, you have 100% faith in it, but when you doubt something you have no faith in it. We also discussed the relationship between certainity and doubt. Today I learned that you will always have some type of doubt no matter how certain you are about something. They have a complementary relationship because you cant have one without the other. Towards the end of class, we looked at an old AP exam question that asked us to discuss the relationship between certainity and doubt, and we discussed how to answer this question properly.

Today wasn't a normal day in class. It was a half day because all of the juniors got called out of class for a meeting. During the time we were in class we had small debates. We play a game of four corners and had to argue our position for whichever side we chose in the game. When we got called out of class, we had a junior class meeting about the upcoming ACT test we will take. An ACT instructor came and talked to us about how the test will change in the future and how important the test is for our future. I am putting in the work now to raise my ACT score because the benefits she talked about really caught my attention.

Today was a pretty mundane day in class. We read more about fallacies and why using them can be detrimental to an argument. The fallacies we read about today were basically the same ones we learned for the past two days, but they went by different names in the book. This was actually helpful to us because we could identify them without using the name originally taught to us which makes it a little easier. I honestly think I am getting bored with fallacies because we keep seeing them over and over again. Dont get me wrong, I have no problem learning about them or doing activities related to them, it is just becoming really repetitive.

Today was a really fun and interesting day in class. We got the chance to perform skits based on the fallacies we learned in class yesterday.  This was very entertaining because most of the skits were hilarious.  I'm order to perform the skits, We were assigned to groups and given a specific fallacy to demonstrate without directly stating it in our skit. It was kind of like a very elaborate game of charades. My group was assigned slippery slope and we performed a skit about a pregnant highschool girl and the consequences that arose from her pregnancy.  I feel that we did really good and I think we even had one of the best skits in the class. This activity helped me better understand what fallacies are and I'm glad we got to do it. I look forward to more activities like that.

Today we learned about fallacies in arguments. When developing an argument, you do not want to use fallacies because they take away the credibility of your argument. We learned about all types of fallacies and there were lots of them. I know we will need more time learning them to fully grasp the concept of them.

Today was our first day back from Christmas break. It was a pretty good day back and it was not very hard getting back into the rhythm of school life. In class today, we watched a motivational video where the speaker, Arel Moodie, talked about how effort is everything. He said you do not have to be the smartest or the most talented in the world to be successful, you just need to put forth the effort and success will come. I really liked this video because it gave me motivation to push myself harder in life. I dont want to be the person who misses out on opportunities because I dont put the work in for them.