Nina Yang
W&C III
Ms. Guarino
05/18/2015
Time flies
There are only two weeks left until summer vacation. Good times always pass faster than what people expect. After I complete this academic year, I feel that my writing skill has improved a lot unconsciously. I not only simply improved on my grammar and efficiency of writing, but also on my persistence of doing things by writing blogs and completing the thirty-day challenge.
The efficiency of writing can really be improved by practicing to write. Before this year’s writing class, I normally spent about an hour to write a 500 words essay. Writing an essay was like climbing a mountain to me, both tired and unwillingly. I’m not saying that writing an essay is like a piece of cake for me right now, but writing blogs every week and other essays indeed shorten the time for me to write. Now, I can finish a five-hundred words essay in about thirty minutes. The most helpful assignment for me was the thirty-day challenge we had to write every other day. It was a serious challenge for me as a junior, but I was shocked after I only had to spend 30 minutes to write my last blog. The improvement in the efficiency of writing an essay does not only mean I increased the speed of writing, but also the quality of writing.
The thing bothered me the most while I was doing the thirty-day challenge was that I had nothing to write, and my topics were limited. At first, I only talked about some daily stuffs, which were kind of boring to read. When I looked back to my writing, I even wrote about the food I ate. Who would want to know what kind of food I ate? Afterwards, my topics got expanded when I was doing the 30-day challenge. Since I have to write 500 words every other day, there was not much things happened in school. The most important thing for a junior is to study. I almost knocked my head broken at the beginning of this challenge, trying to get something out of my head in order to write them in my blog. I began to talk about life, thoughts on a specific events, and things that more abstruse than daily incidents. In addition, my usage of grammar became much better than that of the beginning of this class. I used to say that “It’s a French song and the melody is bright.” However, since there are two separate sentences in one sentence, I have to connect them with a comma to prevent a run-on sentence. In addition, I pay more attention on tenses and subject verb agreements while writing an essay. For example, in one of my blog post, I wrote: “However, the decision about “take photos for spring” finally ended up with “ take a lot of selfies in the spring”. Since “about” and “with” are both preposition, they should all following by the “ing” tense of the words. I'm glad that I finally could only spend 30 minutes to write a 500 words essay that is pretty interesting to read, and I decreased most of my grammar mistakes I would made in the beginning of this class.
There are always tons of hard works behind a perfect scene. Without practice, I wouldn’t even realize the mistakes I used to make; without practice, I would still spend my entire study hall time on writing only one blog; without practice, I wouldn't know that I have the insistence to actually complete the challenge. I appreciate the advice and knowledge given by my writing teacher--Ms.Guarino, and the comments and suggestions from my peers. Thanks to all the hard work we did to made the year absolutely unforgettable.
Nina Yang
Ms. Guarino
W&C III
04/28/2015
Free life
“No school on Monday! Yeah!” This is the best news after prom, which we deserved a day off since we sold more than 250 tickets for prom. Since I have to take the SAT on this Saturday, I spent a whole day doing SAT problems in the library, and I think it’s going to take over most of my time in the next few days. I started to think about my life, and what do I actually want my life to be life in the future.
Why do we have to take different tests to evaluate ourselves and determine the futures of us? I always ask myself this question and get confused about life. Doing the same thing every day only for a good grade. That may not be what I want for my life exactly. After different arguing inside my mind, I realize that I’m just living in this kind of world. People compete with each other in a very direct and unscientific way. For example, in our school, we have different kinds of tests, quizzes, and even pop quizzes. Many of my friends always compare with each other with GPA and test grades. Moreover, when I was in China, it was a rule for school to rank our grades from high to low and posted them on the most obvious place in our classroom. Compare to Chinese exam-oriented education, the U.S’s seems not a big deal. However, I still cannot change it right now, but am I going to be like everyone else in the future? Graduating from college, finding a job, marrying with someone I don’t even know right now, and living like that for the rest of my life? No, I don’t think so. At least, these are the least things I would like to do, and I really don’t want to be restricted by life or myself. I felt anxious when I was thinking about the future of my life. I really like the movie “Life of Pie”, which is talking about a young man and his family was hit by a natural calamity during the voyage to Canada. At that time, he begins his navigation with a tiger for a long period of time. He learns how to survive on the sea, get along well with the tiger, and most importantly, he rethinks about his life. I’m kind of jealous about his free life but not the sad part. He is able to determine his life by himself and learned from the difficulties are the most valuable part to me. Therefore, my word on Monday is “gratis” in Polish, which means “free” in English. How do people understand the word “free” in their lives?
When I was in Primary School, I thought being away from my parents was free at that time. It’s common for children to have an eagerness of being independent deep inside their mind. “Do not want to listen to my parents and do what I want to do”, I was thinking like that at that time. However, my parents just couldn’t leave alone for even one second, and I didn’t think I was “free” at all at that time. When I grew up a little, at the age of 13, I went to middle school. At that time, I thought if one day I could have a boyfriend with my mom’s permission, that would be free. However, my mom thought fall in love in an early age would definitely affect my grade, so I wasn’t free at that time either. Now, I don’t feel free because I have no choice but to go to school every day.
After all the nights that couldn’t fall asleep, thinking about freedom that I want for my life in the future. I realized that People may not feel free at any time of their life. However, we don’t feel free only because the knowledge and the age we have limited our understanding of being free. Once we grow up and stand into a higher platform, we would not feel restricted anymore.
Nina Yang
Ms. Guarino
W&C III
04/24/2015
Religion
In Taoism, which is a Chinese religion, people believe in a causal relationship that called Karma. Karma is a idea that the result is equal to what you did before that cause the result. Whenever I feel depress on something that happens contrary to my expectation, my mom would say that the good thing would coming soon and just be patient. I always believe in what she said that everything happens in this world should be equal. The numbers of Good things always equal to the numbers of bad things; it’s kind of like “God closes one door while opening another window for you.”
“The ball is coming, Nina! Watch out!” My Wednesday finally ended with winning a tennis game. Guess what the score was? Eight to zero, and we got the eight definitely! I finally felt worthy of taking 2 hours’ car ride to Massachusetts on a windy Wednesday. At that time, I felt everything was equivalent because if anything bad happens on you, the good one would follows after. Trust me! That was exactly what my mom said to me before. Therefore, after the end of the day, I decided to learn the word “equivalent” in Irish for my challenge of the day. The word “equivalent” in Irish is “coibhéiseach”. To my surprise, I first thought Irish people also speak English, but apparently they have their own language. More and more people right now tend to speak English instead of learning their own inherited language. Since many languages are endangered right now, I would probably learn those languages that is going to extinct and has less people speaking it in the future.
When the alarm was ringing the next morning, I had problem opening my eyes. Then, my roommate seemed to be awake by me because I could hear her yawning. I finally started looking for my phone by using one of my hands to grope it. Every morning is hard for us and even harder than any math exams.I still remember last time her phone fell on the ground and smashed when she was trying to turn off her alarm. Likewise, the bad things came in a roll this morning. When I was looking for my phone on my desk, my hand knocked over my water bottle, but I didn’t realize it. After turning off the alarm, I fell asleep again. When I woke up again, it was almost eight o’ clock. I was shocked when I saw the water spread out all over my desk, and my homework seemed like took a bath in the water. No doubt I had to dry them up first. At the time I got to my first class, it was 8:20, but to my surprise my teacher didn’t mark me late. Maybe because I don’t usually late to class, and this fact caused her mercy of not giving me a tardy. Until now, the good thing has not happened yet, but I hope it’s on its way! After the long long day, it was time for my daily challenge. Today’s language was Hausa, and I bet many of you have never heard this language before. I wanted to learn what the word “life” is in Hausa. The word “life” in Hausa is rayuwa, and “that’s life” is “it ace rayuwa”.
Religion takes over a big part of my life, and I’m kind of living upon it. Especially the sentence my mom told me which she also learned from Taoism: Everything happens in the world should be equal. In my opinion, people should have something that they believe in, so that there is actually something that restricts them from doing bad things. Besides, it’s also a hope and courage for people to live on for their wonderful lives.
Nina Yang
W&C III
Ms. Guarino
04/14/2015
My treasures
“I’m going to sleep through this whole weekend.” My roommate said that to me before she fell a sleep on Friday night. “Good for you! But I got work to do this weekend: Learning more languages and become a linguist in the future!” I said so with my eyes looking up, dreaming about my future. After shooting a “Stop dreaming” glance at me, my roommate turned her back to me and fell a sleep. Because of her glance, I decided to set an alarm for my challenge, preventing myself from sleeping and dreaming too much next day morning since morning is the best time to learn. I didn’t feel regret of choosing this topic. Instead, I feel that I made a good choice for my thirty-day challenge since its results are obvious to see after the thirty days are gone. Besides that, I’m finally able to say that I complete a challenge by myself.
Day 2 and day 3 of my 30-day challenge were on weekend, but it didn’t mean that I was going to be a slacker and skip the time to learn. Instead, when I woke up 2’o clock in the afternoon on Saturday, I realized that I have my challenge waiting for me to complete. When I was confusing about the question “Why didn't my alarm clock wake me up?”, my roommate came in and screamed on the top of her voice: “Your alarm rang like crazy this morning, everyone on campus was waken up except you!" The least thing I wanted to see yesterday finally happened on me. I finished my “lunch” in a hurry, and started to think about what today’s word going to be. I was thinking about learning a German word yesterday, so I decided to learn a word about treasure time in German after all this mess happened on me. Time is always a valuable treasure to everyone, and we shouldn’t waste our time. “wertschätzen” in German means “value”. The letter in German is pretty different from English in writing. Every word in the new languages for me seems interesting and fancy. On the next day, I spent my whole day in library to study for the SAT I’m going to take in May. At the end of that day, I decided to learn a word from Spanish. Since I was in the library all day long, I would like to learn “study” in Spanish, which is “estudio”. It’s not that different with English word “study”, and you can probably guess what the word means in English. Now I understand why many Americans learn Spanish. It’s because that there is not only a huge amount of population who speaks Spanish in the U.S, but it’s also kind of easy for an English speaker to learn since they are quite similar.
People are always asking “Why is Monday so far from Friday, and Friday so near to Monday?” This is exactly what I’m thinking when my alarm rings on every Monday morning. So I got up from my bed, went to the breakfast, and then went to class as if I was a zombie. All day long, I was thinking about “I’m a zombie”, so it made me curious about how to say “zombie” in other languages. To my surprise, in Turkish “zombie” is called “zombi”, and it’s almost the same comparing to English. After these days doing my thirty-day challenge, I felt that my distance with people become closer than it used to be since I’m learning different languages right now. When people are speaking French or German next to me, I’m able to recognize them immediately, and I would tell my friends what languages people are speaking next to us excitedly.
It’s the fifth day of my 30-day challenge now. Looking back at my words, they are like little stars that I collect everyday, and I feel kind of proud of myself for my persistence of this challenge. Some of the words are funny to learn, and some of them are intellectual to learn. However, they are all going to be the treasures of mine when the 30 days are gone.
Nina Yang
W&C III
Ms. Guarino
04/10/2015
Living without regret
Many people are asking about what life is. As a student, my life is to eat, sleep, go to school, and hang out with friends. Is it the kind of life I want? I don’t know, and I have no choice but to go to school everyday. The one thing I know that the purpose for me to go to school is to learn something from my classes. The one thing I’m sure about is that if I did not learn stuff every day, I would be regretful once I grow up. Therefore, avoiding from being regret, I will be working on my thirty-day challenge starting today, which is a challenge about learning a new word from any language other than Chinese that can express my feelings or thoughts. This challenge is also going to helpe me rethink about my day and prevent me from living in regret for the next day.
The purpose of my challenge is clear: learning new knowledge everyday to keep me from being regretful later. But how would I do it and keep myself doing it everyday? Every night before sleep, I would think about what happened to me that day. Maybe it’s something I learned in class that makes me feel intelligent, or it’s something that between someone and me made me feel upset or angry. It’s a time for me to do self-examination and self-reflection that I wouldn’t do before. It’s a great time for me to think about that did I spend the time wisely today? What should I do or shouldn’t do tomorrow that can make my day better than yesterday? It’s not only a time for me to learn new things but to do self-questioning. I believe that by doing this challenge, I would form a good habit to increase the quality of my day without wasting any time.
With a helpful purpose, I started my thirty-challenge. The first day of my challenge is a Friday. Everybody loves Friday because it’s like a superhero that save us from stress and works. My word today is a French word. French sounds super fancy to me, and I hope that one day I could speak French as fluently as I speak Chinese and English. Since it’s a Friday, I’m learning the word “to rest” in French. “To rest” in French is “Se reposer” Different from English, French people do not say “I rest”. Instead, they say, “I rest myself”, which is “ je me repose”. It’s pretty ornate, right? We can rest for two days after the end of work on Friday. I’m so excited when even thinking about it. I don’t have to set an alarm for tomorrow morning and worry about whether I finish all my assignments or not. It’s the time for people to rest from the afternoon of a Friday.
The first day of my thirty-day challenge had passed by learning a French word “se reposer” . My challenge is not hard, but I think I could gain a lot of useful stuff from doing it. I’m not only able to learn incredible knowledge, but also to form a good habit. A habit for me that to live without regret.
Nina Yang
Writing Comp III
Ms. Guarino
05/11/2015
Let’s sum up the 30-day challenge!
Scientists indicate that it would take approximately 3 weeks, which is about 21 days for a human being to form a habit. To be honest, I didn’t believe this statement at first because I thought I was a lazy person who could only insist on eating and sleeping. I still thought that was true until I did the 30-day challenge, which actually changed my mind completely.
When I was six-year old, I began to learn the piano. I gave it up when I was twelve- year old because I had to go to a boarding school, so I couldn’t practice playing piano every day. Besides, I began to learn dancing when I was five-year old, and I also gave it up when I was fourteen- year old only because my father thought it was too hard for a young girl to practice doing the splits every day. These “give ups” were things that made me feel I can’t insist on doing anything. I rethought about these “failures” that happened on me, and I also blamed my parents who didn’t force me to keep on learning these hobbies. However, I finally realized that it was my own problem, and it was my responsibility to control over on my life. If I said no to my parents and insisted on doing them, I would not be as regretful as this right now.
After Ms. Guarino assigned the 30- day challenge for us, I highly doubted myself on my insistence of doing the challenge thing. Since Ms. Guarino is the first teacher who has ever assigned homework as a challenge for me, I thought it’s going to be a great chance for me to actually complete something, which I have never done before. My challenge was about memorizing one word from a different language every day, which could summarize and made me rethink about my day. The purpose of this challenge was to make a self-reexamination, and to prevent myself from living in regretful the next day. The hardest part for my challenge was not only doing the challenge every day, but also writing the 500 words blog post every other day. To write 500 words blog post every other day was like a huge challenge for me as a junior. First of all,I have to not only prepare for my SAT, but also pay attention to my academic grades. The time arrangement for me was really important. Therefore, if I had to submit the blog post next day, I would attempt to write it during the free period so that I didn’t need to spend so much time on it during study hall. What’s more, after this challenge, I really felt that I need only half of the time to complete the blog post compare to the time I needed at the beginning of the challenge. Second, at first, I didn’t have many things to write about, and my blog post was a bit of boring. Then, I found out that I was not writing a diary or some academic writing. The blog post was where I would like to express myself about my thoughts about life, or my feelings to a specific event. The topic for my blog post was not limited at all, and as long as I wrote about the words I learned for the previous days, that blog post should not be a tough thing for me. As the result, the challenge was also like a problem for me to solve, and I think I solved it perfectly. My blog posts then contained various topics. For example, on my 7th blog post, I talked about what “free” means to me. I said,“When I was in Primary School, I thought being away from my parents was free at that time. Children always have an ‘independent’ thought deep inside their minds. Do not listen to their parents and do what they want to do. I was thinking like that at that time. However, my parents just couldn’t leave me alone for even one second, and I didn’t think I was “free” at all. People may not feel free at any time of their life. However, we don’t feel free only because the knowledge we have and the age we are have limited our understanding of being free. Once we grow up and stand into a higher platform, we would not feel restricted anymore.” I also talked about life and problems in life sometimes.
I felt like the 30-day challenge broadened my sight of seeing the world around me. I not only increased my knowledge on different languages, but also formed a habit in critical thinking that made me to rethink my day and myself. More importantly, I finally did something that can prove my insistence on doing things.
