Reflective Essay: Mr. Gallagher The Strang·er

It’s finally over, I have survived English class. I have to say that there were more difficult times than goods ones in English this year. I remember all the all-nighters that I pulled and managed to stay awake the next day for at least half my classes, as well as facing the bumpy road of my grades going up and down, but the class discussions and blogs helped to make English class more bearable.

There were many assignments that Mr. Gallagher assigned for the class to do, and many of them were unknown territory to us. I remember the first essay that the class wrote but it did not turn out very well since a lot of the essays had low marks, it was a punch to my stomach. But what hurt the most are the essays where the class had to explicate an idea from a work of literature. The class and I stumbled a few times trying to write explication essays which turned out in failures but eventually we came through. However, I do remember skipping homework from other classes to focus the entire night away towards writing my essays. I am not blaming anyone since I choose to skip that class work to improve my writing skills because I want so badly to have a better command of the English language and have a better writing style that incorporates rich vocabulary. I have to be better than my brother in some area of school, he has math, and I want English.

One of the class activities that helped made the class bearable was listening to Mr. Gallagher’s comical remarks and to watch him in our impromptu acting. I remember such a time when no one wanted to be Hamlet, so Mr. Gallagher stands up and say “Alright, I’ll be Hamlet” and joined us in our impromptu acting; it was a bunch of laughs. It was also a hoot when he danced to a cell phone’s ringtone, and it was quite entertaining to say the least. I also remember the time he spent talking about how he came to be a teacher at Malden High, and it was a very relaxing experience since it allows the class to rest a bit from class discussions.

I appreciate the different type of assignments that the teacher assigns to the class which adds to the diversity of my homework. The blog assignments can be double-edged sword. I like how the blog allows for flexibility, since there were times that I ran home immediately right after school to type some essays out. Yet there are the blogs that had time expirations and so there is no excuse for not passing it in on time. This year is the first year that I have done blog posting for a class and most of the time it was fun doing since it integrated the computer into the class, which gave me a mix of different types of homework I brought back home to do.

There is also the Red Shift “Fill in the Blank” that I liked. It was a creative assignment which I had fun doing since it allows me to be in control unlike the other class work I did for my classes. What are also fun assignments is the analysis of art works. I remember the thousand words writing for the Fall of Icarus, and the Tom Phillips: Explicating A Humument. I did pretty well in those writing pieces but what is important to me is that I liked doing it. The assignment that helped me out the most was the college essay, which was a nice touch since it counted as a grade as well as helped us in the college process. I worked hard on it and it was like killing two birds with one stone.

But, overall, being in Mr. Gallagher’s class has improved my writings skills dramatically. When I was posting the past couple of essays I have done for the class, I cannot help but feel proud of myself for how much I have improved in English. The essays which I have written went far beyond what I normally write, in quality and in length, such as the 8 page research paper on the subject of bells for the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.