Herrera 1

Luis Herrera

Ms. White

AP English

16 May 2022

Reflection

There are a total of 4 things that I put into my portfolio since I decided to only put one

thing from each year. The first thing that I decided to put on my portfolio was my Bio Poem

from Freshmen year which I wrote in Creative Writing in Ms. Spacht’s class. The reason that I

decided to put my Bio Poem is because it is one my best pieces of work in my freshmen year that

involved writing. I was not very good at writing in my first year of high school. As I was looking

back at what work to put into my portfolio, I was cringing at the work that I was doing during

freshmen year. I did not have the courage to put work like the PAs into the portfolio as they were

not the quality that I wanted them to be at. The second thing that I put into my portfolio was my

IRR rewrite from sophomore year in Ms. Harris’s class. To be honest sophomore year was the

year that I do not remember much of. This is the only paper that I remember writing the only one

that I did decent on. I decided to put this into my portfolio because it is a rewrite, and I wanted to

showcase the work that I did in trying to pass this essay. I did not pass this on the first try, but I

was willing to keep on trying to pass in the rewrite. I do not remember if I passed it or not, but it

looks like I did. The next thing that I put into my portfolio was the Frankenstein notes that I took

during Junior year in Ms. White’s class. I decided to put these into my portfolio because I

wanted to put something different other than a piece of writing. The book Frankenstein was an

interesting one and was one of the books that I enjoyed reading in school. This was another
 Herrera 2

reason that I decided to put it into my portfolio. It was also the only book that I understood and

took some better notes on than other books that we read in the past. The last thing that I decided

to put into my portfolio was the very first Poetry Response that we did in Ms. White’s class

during my senior year. I am going to be honest and say that I did not try as hard as I wanted to in

my senior year. This is not the best of writing, but it showcases the downgrade of quality of

writing that I have done. It shows the amount of improvement that I could have achieved if I

only tried a little harder. I think that I have definitely evolved since freshmen year. Although it

my not show in writing or work from previous years, I have improved in my writing skills since

freshmen year. During my first year my writing was very repetitive and not very fluent. As I was

going back through my stuff in freshmen year I was able to go through my essays and edit things

that would not have seen at the time. I was thinking to myself “I could do so much better than

this”. Now I am not completely lost in the process of writing an essay and I know the process of

writing a proper essay. I know what I have to do, but I do not put it into practice. I am hoping to

fix this issue as I go into military education and university.