Advanced Essay

Mekhi Granby

Description of artwork My portrait of choice is a piece of artwork done by me. The picture contains 6 houses. The houses are colored in a dark grey. Each house has two windows and a door. Each house has a pointy roof in the shape of a triangle. The houses are square. Not all the houses are the same though. Out of six houses one of them is white. To me this house stands out the most because of the simple fact that is doesn’t look like the others. The background is different for each house. The first house has a blue background, second has a red background, third has a green background, fourth has a orange background, fifth has a different shade of blue background, and the sixth one has a purple background. The background is colored in the same direction of the houses. All though most of the houses look alike in shape they are not all in the same direction. This portrait can be perceived in multiple aspects. To me this picture shows symbolism, there are houses because home is where the heart is, one house is not dark grey because it’s not like the others it’s unique. There is a message that I get from this portrait. The picture is not 3-dimensional at all, the whole thing is flat or in other words 2-dimensional. Overall it is a very simple piece of art. The doors and windows have no color. The picture is sectioned off into six squares and each square contains a house.

Advanced Essay #1 rough draft It was 9th Grade, my first year of high school. It’s towards the end of the school year so I’m fairly adjusted to the school. 2nd period is art class and the students loudly enter the class. I take my seat, the classroom is full of portraits, sculptures, and murals. The teacher stands in front of the room and starts to announce the assignment. The task was to create an image of pop art. The teacher then showed some example images. From there I began to draw and the portrait was born.

This reminds me of my freshman year. When I first started 9th grade I hated it. I didn’t like anything about that school, things eventually changed. After a while I began to adapt, things weren’t as foreign to me as they once were. I then made friends and tried to make the best out of a not so good situation. My favorite time was lunch time, this became the home of where my friends and I laughed, made jokes, and talked about each other.

Advanced Essay #2

It is now my first day at my new school as a junior. I wake up early with a huge kool-aid smile, full of excitement as I can only imagine the day ahead of me. I head downstairs to enjoy the most important meal of the day. After that’s done I quickly bolt back upstairs to my room to discover my outfit of choice for this important day. I open my closet door to see a collection of shirts, pants, and everything in-between. I begin to sort through the clothes, searching for something nice to wear. I stopped searching for a second and started thinking of possible outfits. That’s it! I thought of a great combination and grabbed i instantly. I walk into the bathroom and set up the iron board up and plug the iron in. I start to brush my teeth while waiting for the iron to heat up. I finish brushing teeth and begin to iron my clothes. After I finish with that I’m basically ready to go, I pack everything I’d need for this amazing day and head out the door.

A piece of me

Within these experiences I’ve grown and learned how to deal with situations better. The experiences I’ve had with adapting to new environments and new people made me better with these situations. My 9th grade experience taught me that things get better over time, once I adapted things weren’t as bad as they once were. It taught me to make the best of any situation no matter the circumstance. These lessons have influenced and encouraged me to make better decisions, I may not always be in a comfortable or perfect setting; one has to leave their comfort zone in order to experience new things and my ability to adapt has made that task less challenging.

Feedback from Mr. TB:

Mekhi, you are off to a good start in English 3 this year. I like how this essay use your two different experiences of being new to school in order to analyze the larger idea of being resilient and adapting to life. Your descriptive scenes are well done, but I think your transitions between scenes and analysis could be more smooth—maybe you can take out the section headings? I like the personal tone, and I also wonder if you could be a bit more varied with your vocabulary and sentence structure (less sentences beginning with “I __”). Also, I was unable to find your introduction to the essay—did you have this in another doc? Overall, this is a good start to your writing career here at SLA.

Descriptive, Engaging Writing Descriptive scenes are short and carefully constructed in order for readers to connect with and understand the author’s experiences. 19 Analysis & Larger Idea Author makes insightful observations about issue and develops a larger idea. 17 Writing Flow Essay smoothly moves between scenes, analysis, and development of larger idea or insights. Extraneous writing is removed. 14 Mechanics Writing is polished and follows rules of Standard English. 18 Process Peer edit is completed in a quality fashion, there is evidence of revision, and paper is submitted on time. 20

Grade: 88