Kadin Cariaga-Sayegusa

Dr. Malashewski

IB English HL

12 December 2023

Before entering the IB program, I was approaching literature at a rudimentary angle. I would

read at the surface level, and not make much of any insightful thoughts or ideas. Afterwards, I have been

taught to look for the deeper meaning of literature and to think about works of texts as more three

dimensional rather than linear as I have been traditionally taught. The IB program also forced me to read

literature as well as annotate it in order to keep my thoughts on paper as well as to build on those ideas

at later times. The work that exemplifies this change was actually the summer reading, How to Read

Literature Like a Professor. This book has been the most helpful to me as it gave me the tools to look for

and analyze symbols that are commonly found in works of literature.

Some reading and writing skills that I have refined are analyzing and annotating. Throughout the

course of my high school career, I have had trouble developing my analytical skills as I had been

summarizing literature. IB has forced me to improve my writing and I have seen my writing get

progressively better the more and more I write. A reading skill that I have refined is annotating. Like

analyzing, my annotating skills were subpar before this school year. I had sometimes even skipped over

annotations as I never really felt the need to, however due to the extensive analysis of literature, I needed

a place to keep all my thoughts in order. Annotating really helped me gather my ideas and expand on

them better.

Some evidence of my writing improving are my dialectical journals. My grades for the first few

I’ve ever done were not perfect, they had their errors and I never gave new ideas or perspectives. As I

wrote more and more, my grades on them improved and now I tend to use my dialectical journals more
for bigger assignments as the ideas I started in there can get built on into a thesis that shapes my writing.

What best demonstrates my development as a learner is my performance in the socratic seminar. In the

socratic seminar, I demonstrated my knowledge of the book, There There, and elaborated on the

symbolism and underlying tones of the novel. I did very well and achieved a perfect score on it,

something I would not have achieved at the beginning of the year since I would not have been able to

identify these symbols without constant practice from the many books we have studied this semester.

I would like to improve my analytical skills. Although I stated before that they have improved,

there is still room for additional improvement and in some cases I have struggled to distinguish between

when I am analyzing or summarizing. I will do this by focusing more on the formative assignments that

help with this skill and speaking with Dr. Malashewski on how my writing can be improved. One goal I

have for next semester is to attend office hours for English when I need the help, or even when I don’t

but am unsure on how to improve my writing. I will do this as I never know what my strengths and

weaknesses are in a piece of writing until it comes back graded. If I can identify these weaknesses

before I press the submit button I know what to put my attention on during the revision process.