Personal Narrative: The Five W's In High School

My palms were sweating, my heart was racing, I had no idea what to expect or who I was going to meet. I was never the type of girl to embrace new situations, I hated change and I wasn’t very good with meeting new people. I figured once I got to high school it would be my chance to start all over, turn the page in my book of life, and flip over a new leaf. I wanted to finally be the girl that fit in with everyone. I had imagined myself going to parties with big groups of my new friends, having sleepovers and doing all of the things cool high school kids normally do. I was certain that my high school career would be just like one of those really corny teen movies and I would live happily ever after with the homecoming crown and the boy of my

After selecting my participants and having an initial assessment from the parents, I began to look at the process of selecting questions. I

In this day and age, students have an exponentially increasing amount of information at their fingertips. They think critically about and question what others - including school

Justification:There are a lot of sample questions for teachers to give students. Yet, there’s only one type of question, where there should be a few questions for each concept to ensure students’ understanding.

Historically, societal developments in school children have created generations of adults to misunderstand the basis and reasoning for specific answers. Reform in education is necessary. Students aren’t learning but they are instead remembering. Exams and tests are simply testing a student’s memory knowledge from a textbook instead of generating natural and insightful responses from a student’s point of view in their knowledge of a subject. One way to ultimately counter the idea of students revolving around a concept of memory in exams is to shape classrooms back to the original Socratic method.

Students will be challenged and asked questions that push them to refer back to what they’ve read. This stresses critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills that are required for success in college, career, and life (p.1)

Going through high school the days were all the same, except for game days. There was just something different about the culture of the school. You could almost feel the excitement in the air. Every “Good luck tonight,” that was received made it feel like the whole school was rooting for me. This was my senior year and tonight was an especially big game. The game that night would decide if we made playoffs and if I could step on the court as a Hawk again.

Through my time growing up in Corona Queens as a kid I had come to realize something, I was beginning to get shorter as time progressed, the odd part was that I was the tallest in my class, standing at 5,10 in the 7th grade I was considered tall for a kid my age, in addition to only being 12 but regardless as I kept on coming home, I only felt as if I'm getting shorter. one day returning from the library and my reading session about the book Nature I was still in shock about what Henry David Thoreau has said about "sucking the marrow of life", and as I was attempting to think of how I can accomplish what he said, I fell and nearly broke my skull. it was then that I realized that what seemed like a footstep to walk into my home was a 10ft fall.

us on what we have learned like essay questions or multiple choice questions. There are also

Unfortunately in modern time, students are more concerned to pass a test, than actually learning the material. It’s inconsiderate for schools to feel that throwing test after test will predict and showcase a student’s intelligence. “Most current U.S. standardized tests include only multiple-choice questions and provide no way for students to explain their thinking, says Swartz, of the National Center for Teaching Thinking. “So if a student answers (d) and that's correct, it still raises the question, ‘Is he

Inquiry-based learning is not a foreign concept to educators, it is a model of teaching that has been exercised in different forms and presented through various techniques for decades (Spronken-Smith and Walker, 2010, p.726). It is not unknown that there is an abundance of knowledge available at our fingertips, what is

A life lesson that I have learned over the course of my high school years, is you need to choose wisely which crowd of people to hang around. I’ve learned that not everyone is your friend, even if they tell you they are. There are people out there who will claim to be your friend, and will stab you in the back when you least expect it.

My time in High School was made difficult from the constant strife and conflict between my parents. This made my home an unstable environment not fitted for learning or growing as an individual. As I got older and closer to graduating High-School, I began to find my own voice with the help of my mentor Rahn Fleming, which occurred at the end of my junior year. As a result, I came in control of my life and the constant feuding started to die down. No longer did I have to worry about the next scheduled court date, or the next time I would come home wondering what may await. I felt like I was always walking on broken glass for the longest of time throughout my life, until I began to voice myself and what I wanted. My parents came to realize this

Since the time of Socrates, the pursuit of knowledge has been characterized by the skillful use of language and patterns of questioning to examine understanding and discover truth. Some twenty-four centuries later, language remains the primary medium and discourse the primary method of teaching and learning. While language is a valuable tool for exploration of most fields of study, the prevalence of oral communication in our lives often leads teachers and students to take language for granted. Educators would benefit from a more conscious understanding of the features and functions of oral communication in the classroom. Once we are made aware of the roles of

Tasks that include low-level thinking and assessments made up of multiple choice questions is another indication as to which years we are preparing students for. Tony Wagner emphasizes the idea that “preparing students for future work requires teaching them "to use their minds well" as opposed to testing them reductively” (Jacobs, 2010, p. 11). Unfortunately, I feel we rarely require students to tap into their creative and critical thinking skills that would put their minds to good use. There are numerous valuable tasks that would put their minds to much better use and would serve them in the future.