What I Said I Would Do
What I Did
In my learning plan, I said I would read five books. I had specific titles I wanted to read, and ended up reading two of those. These two books were Rumi’s Little Book of Love and Laughter by Coleman Banks, and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. I also read Sita by Devdutt Pattanaik, which was not on my list. I had planned to respond more than I did. I ended up having a lot of time to read in school during free classes, and a lot less time to write outside of school. I felt that reading these books was a really valuable aspect of my cultural learning, in addition to english. Reading fictional books set in the culture was helpful in understanding the culture further. I responded to each chapter in The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, and some chapters in Sita. After a few chapters of Sita I knew what I wanted to write a final paper, so I decided to do a larger paper at the end rather than doing lots of small responses. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up doing anything with Rumi’s Little Book of Love and Laughter.
I planned to do narratives regularly, but ended up only doing one at the end of the year.
I feel that I was very successful in producing poetry. Originally in my learning plan I said that, “I will also be writing poems about little things in my day.” When I said “little things” what I meant was a cup of chai, or passing an elephant in the street. I journaled a lot about my emotions and things when I got overwhelmed in the past. This year that shifted to poetry. I ended up writing a lot about different things I was feeling rather than things I was experiencing. In my writing process I would start by writing poetry in my journal. I would move those poems to a document. Then I would weed out the ones I didn't like and thought shouldn't be edited. The ones I liked got moved to a document for editing. Once they were edited I moved them to another document of finalized work that was ready for others to read.
Lastly, I kept a blog. This overlapped with my culture study as it was documentation for that as well.