Master Piece essay

                                                                                                                                             Sheckherd 1 

Lukas Sheckherd

Dr. Preston

AP English Lit and Comp

9 June 2015

            This class was a new experience for every one of us.  You gave us freedom of our education and helped us truly look into paths for our future.  A majority of the students this year go to work with something they absolutely were passionate about.  Although I thought I had found mine in filming again, I realized I was sadly mistaken.  Although my masterpiece wasn’t something I ended up being really passionate about, I still love what I took out of this class and will use to tools to find my passion and pursue it to the fullest. 

This class has been something I never thought I would get in the high school education system. This class was as rare as finding a needle in the haystack.  I never thought I would be completely trusted by my teacher from day one.  It was a phenomenal feeling and sense of control over my learning.  I got to read books of my choice, ones that interested me, not books that I was forced to read that made me hate reading. I’m starting to read on my own again and that’s something I lost at the beginning of high school, because I was forced to read things against my will. This is something I will appreciate for the rest of my life.

Working one what people were passionate about in these masterpieces was enlightening to me.  Seeing a new side to each person I never saw was amazing and although everyone had different topics for their projects, just watching people talk about them showed me a new side.  When Miles told the bagel and lox story, I was dying of laughter because it was such a relatable reaction for me. I believe a lot of them had the same theme.  That theme being unity. Will’s project, Sean’s project, Terry’s project, Haley’s project, even mine had a theme of unity.  Whether it was unity with the people around you, unity with nature, unity in the world, or unity through social media, we all were unified with someone or something.

I believe my hero’s hasn’t quite begun yet. It begins in eleven days when I start the next big chapter of my life and set step at United States Air Force Academy.  I prolonged this call because I wasn’t sure this is what I wanted, but after seeing the environment I will be in, I accepted it.   I do not know if I will be a hero, but I will see.  I think this next step of my life can be represented by three different books.  Answering the call and choosing to go there can be related to The Hunger Games and how Katniss volunteers as tribute.  Going in not know what to fully expect, what I am going to face, or what I will get out of it can relate to Gregor the Overlander and his sense of adventure in trying new things.  Finally The Percy Jackson series shows the hardships I have endured to get where I am today.

I know you gave all of us your trust this year and each person honored it to different level.  I know I may have seemed to honor it at a half empty level, but I like to think of it as half full.  I took what I needed out of this class and it has helped me immensely this year.  It helped me love learning again, not being taught, but learning and teaching myself new things.  So thank you for everything.