“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare
During my time at Lawton High School, one of the classes I had to take for graduation was English IV. All of the other classes that I took were elective-based. I was at LHS all day only for English IV. My other courses included being an office aide for the main office, Varsity and Full Orchestra, Music Theory, and others. I loved the classes a lot, and I’m not going to lie, I was also there for Orchestra.
Anyways, let’s shift gears. My English IV class was interesting only because my teacher that year was also my English teacher that I had my sophomore year. His name is Mr. James Jones. I loved his class sophomore year because I loved reading the classics that we read. From The Metamorphosis by Franza Kafka, Lord of the Flies by William Golding even Macbeth by Shakespeare. I loved all of the literature requirements that I did during my sophomore year.
During my senior year, second semester, he was more deliberate with his seniors. Sure, he’s very chill and all, but he handed out lots of assignments. Sure, the readings that we did alright. Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, to Hamlet. The first semester was alright. I had a love/hate relationship with the second semester, especially English. I loved how we did more projects instead of readings, but the projects were time consumers for sure. We read one more classic, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. I love the book so much that I even took a lot of notes from the novel. We even had to do a senior research paper, not necessarily on the book, but on a topic that he gave us. The argument was social media. I came up with ideas and questions about what I wanted to come up with, especially since we had to use the novel as a source for the paper. So, the question I came up with is, “How does Social Media impact society?” Thankfully, I turned in the research paper and got an 88 on it.
(Let me mind you, I have an A in English IV, I just procrastinated a lot).
After that, we did another project that included poems and short stories. It was a literature quilt (it was on a poster board). We analyzed a poem that the whole class did call “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. Then we had to find other poems and how they shared a relationship either through author, theme, genre, etc. I had to find six poems and three short stories. That project took me a whole month, and surprisingly I passed it. It was worth three grades.
Then the last project was the “Senior Scrapbook,” which was a requirement for graduation. It became a tradition at LHS by Ms. Jennifer Keller, the other English teacher that taught English IV and Concurrent. She is the head of the English department at LHS. In the scrapbook, I did a lot of journal entries. Examples were, what theme have you seen at LHS? Another one was what teacher impacted you at LHS? etc. Then, we had to make up our poems and haikus. I loved doing the Senior Scrapbook because I finally got to put my memories in the scrapbook and be creative. I even printed out a lot of FujiFilm on my phone. I use a FujiFilm printer, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever owned. I loved doing the Senior Scrapbook project, and everyone loved how I went all out with mine. Even my English teacher was amazed at how much I went all in for the project. He loved my scrapbook a lot, and I passed the Senior Scrapbook project with flying colors. If anything, I would do the project all over again. I even made a scrapbook here at OU and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.