9th Grade Algebra 1 Reflection

In math 9th grade year I was surprised to realize that it wasnt all to challenging
for me, I had never been to great at math. I always struggled at remembering the right
formulas to solve equations. But in algebra class I found everything was easier and all
made perfect sense. My grade stayed at a constant high B or A range throughout the year.
The main challenge I found with the class was the class its self. I was in a class full of
people who always goofed around and distracted our teacher from what we were suppose
to be doing that day. It was constantly loud and highly aggravating for me. But I managed
to ignore it most of the year and still continued to achieve good grades and understand
what we were doing at the moment. About half-way through the year though, things did
get a bit more challenging for the whole freshman class. Our teacher took a maternity
leave that lasted until the last week of school. Our long-term sub was not ready to handle
a class such as mine and she had a lot of trouble teaching the lesson over our extremely
rambunctious class and multiple times an administrator had to come in to attempt to set
things straight. My grade started to dip slightly, but I eventually could wrap my mind
around what the substitute was trying to teach us day to day and I managed to continue to
keep a constant A or B grade in the class. Once our teacher came back the week before
our final she went over everything the sub had failed to teach us and I managed to
understand everything and do well on the final test. I learned a lot in 9th grade Algebra
and felt as though my math skills were finally starting to strengthen. I believe our teacher
had a very effective way at teaching the skills and showing us simple yet effective ways
to solve problems. Aside from the actual class I was, I did enjoy the content of the class
much more than I had enjoyed other math classes prior to 9th grade year.
9th Grade Biology
I have never had a science class that I did not enjoy and biology was certainly no
less than what I had in the past. 9th grade biology was by far my favorite class of the year.
We did lots of different types of projects and our teacher used many different ways of
teaching us things about biology. All of the projects were very challenging and required
lots of time and hard work to complete, but every single one was still a ton of fun in my
own opinion. The minute I sat in the class, I knew it would be a lot of work. The teacher
was already talking about how much work we would have to do and that we would have
to write a paper on certain types of plants we had to identify. Sure enough thats what we
did. We had to find different types of plants around Kenosha and preserve a piece of the
plant by pressing it in newspaper and tons of books for a week. After that was done we
would have to identify the plant, then write a short page about it. It took a lot of work and
a lot of careful studying, most of all, it took a lot of time. Each plant took me at least an
hour to correctly identify and find all the information necessary to use in the project.
Another project that we did during the first expedition was the ecosystem research paper.
We learned about wetlands, woodlands and grasslands. First we had to read a lot of
documents provided in class and take notes on them. We had to start writing a rough draft
of the essay in our notebooks too. Many different things were included in the large
research paper such as normal temperature, plants found in that ecosystem, wildlife found
in that ecosystem, ect. Another thing that we did to prepare us for that paper was taking a
trip to Bong Recreational Area where we could see all three of the ecosystems and gather
data from or own experience. Once I was done with this project, I realized I really like

writing research papers. Another one of our assignments was to pick out a certain flower
or other plant that we liked and we had to create a large scale poster of the plant. I had
picked a tiger lily and had a lot of fun drawing it. The information on the poster included
identifying what type of plant it was and how things worked on the inside of it. This
project took a very long time to complete but in the end, I was happy with what I made.
Once we got to the second expedition about World War I, we started to study disease. We
looked in the Bubonic Plague and studied the immune and respiratory system. We
watched a couple films on the Plague and had to create a detailed poster for both the
respiratory and immune systems. The poster was a little hard for me to complete as
learning about the human body sort of bothered me at the time but I eventually started to
ignore my past discomfort as I worked on it. I learned a lot by doing that project and
spent a long time working on the poster. For our last project in biology we had to create a
huge product on a disease of our choice. The final had to have a model, a paper, and
something interactive to present to the class. I decided to research Tuberculosis and
created a model of infected lungs out of clay. My interactive portion of the project was a
brochure about the disease that was passed around the class. The paper took a very long
time to write. While we researched in class I took extensive notes about what I found
online and made sure I had in organized in the way I wanted to write my paper. Once I
met all the requirements and felt I had enough information, I began working on the paper.
Id say the project actually was a lot of fun and I liked the chance to learn about diseases
I hadnt heard of before. Overall, I thought biology was a really cool and interesting
class. I really liked everything we learned and had a lot of fun.
9th Grade English Reflection
English class in 9 grade was a very vigorous, and interesting class. I have to say
that it was one of my favorite classes in 9th grade. We did a large variety of projects using
different types of things such as computer programs I had never heard of, reading books,
writing short stories and fun papers. One of the first things we worked on was writing a
biography about one of our classmates, it was an interesting way to get to know someone
new in our class. We went to a nearby park to interview one of our classmates, we had to
ask them simple questions such as what music they liked and why they went to harbor
side. Then we took the information we found and put into a paper. Another fun little
project we did at the beginning of the year was a little introductory paper about ourselves
using self artifacts. We also had to make a collage of words and pictures that showed our
own personal interests and character. During our first expedition, we began on a project
that was intertwined with our biology class at the time. The project was called Cadence
and we had to create a few magazine pages on a certain ecosystem. We worked in a group
of three or possibly more people and the final product was to come together to have all
three of the major ecosystems we learned about in biology. Cadence was a very hard
project. We used a program on the Mac laptops called Comic Life and it was my first
time working with the program. The project took a very long time and was one of the
most challenging things that we did during the year. We also read a utopian novel around
the same time we working on utopian towns in our history classes. We had to write daily
reflections and answer a few questions about the story every now and then. I read the
book Uglies and didnt find it all to interesting, it was too easy for my reading level. To
finish that novel off we had to write a short book report on it. During the next expedition
we started to work on propaganda from the World War I era. It was fun to look at all the
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different types of styles of persuasion the posters used back in that time. We read another
novel during this expedition about the plague and had to take tests at the end of each
week on the book. Around this time we also did something that was my favorite memory
of the class. Our teacher had us write two short stories. One of the stories was a historical
fiction that was suppose to have something about both World War I and the plague in it. I
wrote a short story that was in the format of letters written between friends and had a lot
of fun with it. The other the short story we worked on, although much later, was a twist
on the Cinderella story. I put a lot of work into the story and ended up not having enough
time to finish it completely the way I wanted but it was still a lot of fun. We put the
Cinderella story into Comic Life to print it out as an actual book, which I thought was
really cool. Once we got into the Civil Rights movement we had to work with a partner
on a small project. My partner and I did a time line and some brief history on Malcom X.
To finish off the year we worked with our history class to create a small skit on the Civil
Rights Movement. My group did a skit on the diner sit in. Overall English class was
definitely one of my favorite classes of the year. We had a very good teacher and the class
was a lot of fun to be in.
9th Grade History reflection
There were two major expeditions freshman year, the first being the community
expedition. In history class this was taught through looking at local towns development
through the years. We studied a little of Kenoshas history and took a walk around the
area downtown and observed how old some of the buildings were. The other town we
looked into the history of was Chicago, mainly the Chicago fire. We read the court case
on the incident and learned a lot on what happened and why it happened. Next, we visited
Pullman in Chicago to see what a Utopian society was like. We learned what was positive
and negative about the town and what eventually lead to its downfall. This fieldwork
lead into our next project which was to make our own perfect utopian town with a
partner. We had to create a visual project that depicted a town that had all the things
necessary to have substantial life and would not end up falling in the future. That marked
the end of the community expedition in history class. The next expedition focused mainly
on World War I and the Great Depression afterwards. While looking into World War I we
learned about trench warfare and how unsanitary the style of war was. We also learned
how the war started and why the US got involved. We mainly looked at articles and
watched documentaries for both World War I and The Great Depression. The last thing
that we learned about in 9th grade History class was Civil Rights. We did a lot of
document reading while learning about this also, but for our final projects we had to put
together a small skit about one of the main events during the Civil Rights Movement. My
group did a skit on the diner sit in. Overall history in 9th grade was an interesting class
and managed to keep my attention throughout the year unlike most other history classes I
took prior to 9th grade.