Journalism Class

For this blog entry I'm going to simply talk about the English classes that I've taken the past 2 years.

Here at good ole ALHS we have many opportunities to take all sorts of classes. There is a large variety of electives, one of the many reasons why students love it here.

For English, you are required to take English 9 and 10. And then starting in 11th grade I had the opportunity to choose what English class I wanted to be in. I chose to take American Literature II and College Composition my junior year. It is recommended that for junior and senior year you take a year of writing and a year of reading. College Comp. was a semester of writing and Am Lit II was a semester of reading.

I chose American Literature II because it covered a time period that interested me more than American Literature I. I chose to take College Composition because Mrs. Hallett is a wonderful person who I wanted to have as a teacher. Coincidentally She taught both classes. She made reading and writing a lot of fun by incorporating enticing activities and projects. There never was busy work with Mrs. Hallett; everything was worthwhile.

For senior year I elected to be in British Literature for 1 semester and Journalism for 1 semester. Brit Lit has been very interesting thus far. We have read some plays and some poetry and everything is different! It's like a breath of fresh air. We are currently reading Macbeth. Mrs. Elias is the teacher and she, like Mrs. Hallett makes the class fun. We act out scenes and write our own poetry. Every activity helps us understand the content a little better. This helps greatly at test time. Finally, the class that I'm writing this for... Journalism! This class has been a blast. Mr. Arra, married about a year ago, recently had a baby, and teacher for 10 years is really passionate about what he does. He loves his job and his family. I hate writing but ever since the start of the second semester he has taught me to love writing and has showed me different ways to accomplish different tasks. In this class we have written different length articles, movie reviews, choice reviews and blogs such as this one.

Long story short, I have enjoyed my experience with this schools English department and I recommend to all current and upcoming high school students to take as many English classes as possible. It is well worth it.