This is it- the last class of my freshman year of high school. When the bell rang and school let out for the last time, I was in my Honors 2 classroom with my group of friends, excited about the summer and JP2024 (One more day when I’m writing this! So close!!!). So how did this last class turn out? What happened here during the last trimester, alongside my struggles in Chem 2 and domination of Trigonometry?
The class was pretty difficult, but not to the point where I’d call it a hellhole. There were two units: Memoirs and Poetry, each with books and pieces that we had to read and eventually ended in us creating our own memoirs and poems (Oh, gosh, you don’t want to read mine) but let’s discuss each unit in depth and see what they had to offer.
The first unit was the memoirs unit which began with us reading memoirs and studying each of the memoirs, which honored two people: Malala Yousufzai’s I am Malala and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. Each one of them had crazy stories from their lives, but quite surprisingly we didn’t read their entire memoirs- that amounted to 300 pages of reading, which is too much work for the insignificant brain of a teenager. Instead, our teacher had us read little snippets and chapters throughout each memoir, which was really fun to do because it cut out the boring parts (maybe boring, not sure) and had us read the interesting parts, such as this one time apparently Trevor Noah pooped on the floor, then his family found it and started doing a ritual around it. True story, by the way. Go read the book if you don’t believe me.
We also had a number of writing projects for this unit, which included an analysis essay (which will probably bore you so I’ll skip that) and a memoir chapter that we made out of our own lives. About 99% of Memoir Chapters were pity stories about how we got bullied in 3rd grade (Mine was also about that) and how we are still affected about it today, probably all just to make the teacher feel bad and give us a good grade- I don’t know, but everyone who wrote a bully story got really good grades. There were a few other memoris that didn’t include getting bullied, and that included one of my friend’s made-up-not-real stories about how a girl rejected him in 7th grade, and another one about how my friend blew an airhorn into an old lady’s ear and made her pass out (seriously, we had to make a lesson to base your memoir off, to indicate how that experience made you grow. How does getting an airhorn blown into a lady’s ear— WHAT??? REALLY?)
The second unit was poetry, but the majority of it- and I mean vast majority was based off… obviously, the play Romeo and Juliet. You’ve probably already heard of it, but no spoilers, go ahead and read it all yourself if you haven’t. The play is really hard to understand sometimes, so we were also given a book to cheat and figure out the meanings, because sometimes the things they say just sound like gibberish. We also had to write our own poems, which would’ve been completely and entirely fine, but of course we also had to present it to the class, which sucked for me because I have serious stage fright and I know for a fact if I ever mess up or lose my train of thought, it’s game over and I’ll likely just fall apart. To my relief, we only had to recite a single poem, meaning once we recited our poem we were entirely done. Not to my relief, our teacher put us in a random order, and I went close to the last in line, which meant I had to sit there for a whole hour, nervous about how I’d do when I presented. At least in my Honors 1 final presentation I finished early- then I could just sit there and zone out for the next three hours, which I do quite often.
There were a lot of different poems that people made, and I mean a lot. Some of these were about time passing by and love, stuff like that. One of my friends made a very clearly BSed poem about Chat-GPT, which got so many laughs and was so funny that I remembered it more thoroughly than I remembered my own.
Oh this! Oh thee!
It’s 11:59 PM and the assignment is missing!
Oh my! Oh me!
What do I do?
Well, have no fear!
Chat-GPT is here!
Simply type in the prompt
And the answer shall come
It may not be the best
But at least the work is done
Now go to sleep, child
For another day shall come
My poem was about work ethic and academics, which can be summarized in the phrase that I used in my performance: “I put blood, tears, and sweat into my work, and I mean the blood part literally.” (I’ve used that phrase on quite a few people. I actually got it inspired from one of my other friends who pointed it out to me, and I could not stop thinking about how cool that sounded.) The reaction ended up creating some anticipation in the room, and my teacher legit said: “This is going to be interesting. You know it’s going to be interesting if he mentions blood.”
I knew my tone was going to instantly fall apart as soon as I was on stage, and I was sure that’d affect my points on the assignment. As a result, I decided to do a few things that would make me a little less boring. I had put the line, “HEY!” at the start of my poem, and decided to yell it out to grab everyone’s attention right at the start of the scene, hopefully buying a few points and taking off any penalties I might get for stage fright. Then, during the poem, I’d recite a line which basically said, “A lot people don’t work that hard.” I’d then give one of my friends who was guilty of that crime an extremely hard glare. (I made sure I had his permission before I did that, and he jokingly said he was really proud of the insult I was about to give him.)
Did it go as well as I wanted it to go?
Well, the “HEY!” at the beginning didn’t go so well. I don’t know what happened, what was going on in my throat at the time, but my voice suddenly chose the worst time possible to crack, and… according to everyone else, I sounded like a dog barking. (Shut up, I have more guts than you for doing that in front of 30 people) The hard glare went a little better. As soon as I glared, the whole class turned to him and half the attention was now on him. That made me a little more relaxed, because I wasn’t the only one under pressure anymore. So yeah, it appears the formula to getting rid of stage fright is taking someone else down with you.
What are my final thoughts on this class?
Honestly, pretty hard. Although my grades were really high and I was carrying, I could totally see why people would find this a hard class. Don’t take Honors English unless English is genuinely your strong suite, because a lot of people had a really difficult time acing it. With this, my freshman year and course review is over. Sophomore year Course Reviews next… see you there.
Cody Nguyen