First Class Back from Summer Break!(Aug 25th)

Today was our second day of taking classes since the summer break and my first English LE class this semester. During the summer I had been improving my book review quite a few times and would read through it once in a few days so I think it has become a lot better. Hearing the teacher talk about how it took so long to read through and comment on every students' book review made me feel grateful yet disappointed in those who did not apply the advice. Carefully reading through a few of my team mate's book reviews took a while and I can not even imagine how tiring and long it had taken the teacher to go through every single students' documents. Usually, when working on assignments for other classes, of course, I work hard on it and give it my best but never go this extensive when it comes to rereading and switching out certain phrases or highering vocabulary levels. I think this has a lot to do with everything being online and so easy to change. This thought made me realize the immense increase in the quality of my work when using the computer versus paper. I hope that one day, many tests will also be on computers so students can truly perform to the best of their ability. 

Our presentations were pushed back to next week and I had mixed feelings about this announcement. Everyone around me was very happy and had a sense of complacency hearing the news. When I first heard about this I was honestly disappointed because I had been practicing so many times so I can present as soon as possible. However, now that I think about it, this means I have more time to prepare and practice so I will not tremble upon words due to nervousness on the day of presentations. It has been quite a long time since we've done a formal, one-person presentation in front of an audience so my expectations towards my self are immensely high. I will take the next few days to keep on practicing and tweaking parts of my speech, and include body gestures in my practice (since I hadn't thought about doing that until today's class) so I am confident enough to practice after a long gap. Watching through people's presentation this term, and from previous terms, I feel that the class has become homogenous. What I mean is that to be honest, there is not a drastic difference between people's presentations (although many are very entertaining). I was thinking about how I can entertain my audience who is going to see numerous similar presentations, and maybe even convince them to particularly be interested in reading my book I am introducing. 

For the summer break homework, I had worked on my book review and submitted it to Turnitin, and I had recorded a video of myself giving a presentation. However, I had not been able to comment on my friends' videos. I had watched through a few of them and had thought of commenting, but when I saw that it had to be in a format of a video, I hesitated a little bit. I had written down what to say, so I will be recording my comment video first thing after getting home (since I am currently writing this blog reflection on the train on the day of class)!