About the Max Shack
When people see this website I want them to see a reflection of me, and my mind. My writing is meant to be a reflection of self, and I hope that my works can display that to anyone who reads them. In order to reach this goal, I just did what I would want to see on a website. Through the menu, it is easy to navigate to all sections of the website, and its actually able to be explored by a reader. Additionally, this experience is improved with the simple colour palette, and scattered images. If a reader wants to dive into little bit more about me, they can find my About section which gives more personal information that you won't find in my blog posts.
My Self Reflection
This is it. This is my final entry on this website. It's been a long journey over the last 4 years of English, and there have been plenty of highlights throughout. Now that I'm reaching the end of my English works, and this course, I realize that I've come a long way in developing my English skills, and abilities. Whether it be improving my knowledge and use of literary devices, my ability to create, or my ability to produce a piece of work that I'm proud of, I feel as though I've been able to dramatically improve my writing abilities. Along with that, this is the first year I managed to not do a review on Red Rising.
Slowly throughout my adventure through literature, I've found that each year's course has taught me something important. This has taught me to always at least find one important takeaway from anything that you do. If you had asked me last year what the most important thing I had learned was, I would tell you that it's understanding the true context of a topic, and digging deeper into what the author and text really mean. This was something that I hadn't learned until I got really invested into Tupac Shakur and his work in The Rose That Grew from Concrete. While this year there wasn't a text that I got that absorbed in, I still took the lesson to heart, and did my best to implement what I learned.
Now before I go into detail about what I would consider as my singular most important lesson of ENG4U is, I'm going to go into detail about five of my works that I believe to have lead to that important teaching.
In my opinion, the diagnostic assessment is the most important throughout the entire term of English. It allows you to gain perspective on your skills in relation to a new skill level, and compare to previous progress in the past. The reason that this assessment is so important, is that I had went in to this term confident in my abilities to do well. I had just come off a really difficult term, and I had enjoyed English and thought that it would be something more comfortable. However, I quickly realized that being comfortable, and sticking to the minimum isn't how you succeed, it's how you fall behind. While a semi-decent piece of writing, I didn't put too much effort in, and it resulted in (if it was graded) the worst mark I would have gotten in English. This was a wake-up call for me, reminding me that I needed to work for the success I had seen before.
While the last entry was my first assessment, this was my first essay in the course. I enjoy essays to some extent. They are a simple arrangement of information that deliver certain details to the reader, suggesting ideas that the Reader may have had, or want to learn about. I found this an interesting yet difficult piece, as it required a deep inspection of characters, and what was said. However, this depth is what lead to a highly detailed essay on the character of King Lear. The amount of time spent on Shakespeare in the course, combined with a refined skill of diving deeper into a text allowed me to create a piece of work that I felt was great. However, even after receiving a decent mark, I felt as though I could do better, and that I didn't do enough to earn a better mark.
While I've done many adaptations of Lord of the Rings already, this one is definitely one of my premier works revolving Tolkien's universe. As I've stated in my previous year's reflection, I enjoy adaptations, as they allow you to express a scenario or interpretation in a different way than you experienced while reading a text. I'm quite familiar with Tolkien, which allowed me to implement deeper levels of meaning within my words, foreshadowing to future events, and writing in a similar style to an author who I enjoy reading.
Yes, my other essay on this list. This time on the comparison of nature poetry from William Wordsworth of England, and Chief Dan George of Canada. It was rather interesting examining the two pieces as they both managed to tell the same story in two completely different writing styles. Once again I had found myself using the skill of diving deep into context behind an author's words and extrapolating my own meaning from them. This was one of my favourite essay's done as it had the same feeling as previous poetry essays that I had done in the past. However, again I found myself not doing as well as I had expected in my second essay, as I hadn't performed as well as my first essay. This lead me to further strive for better works, and continually trying to push my writing to the limit.
At last, my final entry into this list is my culminating project on The Fellowship of the Ring. This, in my opinion was one of the most important pieces of work that I've done in my time in any English course. This allowed me to work on a topic that I was very familiar on, while being able to further combine my skills of interpretation, comprehension, and critical thinking on the matters of literature. However, during this project I leaned into getting the smaller, more minute details that I'd messed up on previously. This, combined with the time crunch of needing to complete the entire assignment within a singular day lead this to be not as good as it should have been.
When looking at what I found important from all of these pieces, you will see most of them have some aspect of negativity towards them. That's because the further I'd progressed in the course, the more and more I'd been chasing that grade number going up. It stopped me from seeing the small things that were standing in the way, and enjoying what I did. At the end of the day, what that taught me was that in the chase for perfection, you sometimes lose focus on what's important. It's important to take a step back, evaluate, and see what you can fix. A good pilot is compelled to evaluate what's happened, so he can apply what he's learned. The same principle applies to writing. In my case, I was more focused on the results of the work than the work itself. At the end of the day, I'm proud of the work that I've done even though some of it may not be up to par, because its the mistakes and blunders I've made along the way that have turned me into a better writer. Improvement is about progress, not instant perfection. It's about becoming the best version of you, one step at a time.
Overall, this website was meant to be a way for me to look back at my work, and see how far I've progressed. This website has grown with me as a person, and I see it as a written reflection of my literary mind. Growth is not always easy or comfortable, and it requires us to take a step out of our comfort zones in order to emerge as someone more capable than before. The skills, and lessons that I've learned will help see me through all aspects of life beyond secondary school. Whether it be an important email, analysis, essay, or application, these teachings will help guide me through whatever there is to come. It has been a long and winding journey for the last four years of English courses, and its been extremely rewarding and satisfying seeing me progress from writing about Chad the 7 ounce gorilla to writing fully-fledged essays at a university level.
However, all of this wouldn't have been possible without the guidance, and challenges from Mr. Cohen. The knowledge and skills that your classes have imparted to me have helped me excel academically, and will help me continue to do so in my personal and professional life. You managed to make English an enjoyable experience for me, and likely many others in the class, and I want to thank you for being an incredible teacher.
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