It is hard to believe that four months passed so quickly! Here I am at home now with all my exams finished (but still working on school-work like this blog post due to my procrastination). It is just past midnight now, at the time when the bustling noise of life has finally settled down into a cozy silence. Before the busyness that will surely have me bursting out of bed tomorrow, I thought I would take some time to reminisce on what taking this course has done for me.

Honestly, I didn’t do as well as I had hoped to in this class. At the beginning of the semester I went through that wooden door in the Math Building marked 203 thinking that I would push myself to speak up in class, form defined opinions and analyze the text at my maximum capability but I admit I fell short of that goal. A favourite quote of mine is “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss at least you will land in the stars.” I think that in this case, I probably reached the tip of one of the trees in the UBC endowment lands.

That being said, I still learned. Going back to the first post I wrote for this blog, the epiphany I described there about slow reading is a lesson that has stayed with me. It’s just that recognizing I needed to think more did not directly translate to thinking more. I did try to reach farther in analysis for my second essay, but it was evident that what I did then wasn’t enough. I am extremely glad for the day I went to talk to Prof. McNeilly about the term paper that afternoon because I think I came away with a better idea of how to analyze deeper and express that in writing.

After four tiring but thought-provoking months in this class I am grateful to have grown mentally a little bit and I do love Gulliver’s Travels. That book is so much more than I expected and so funny. I hope I get to revisit it in another English class and it was a great way to end the semester. =)