Bowers,+Allen

=**A AWESOME PORTFOLIO By Allen** =

In my portfolio you will see how I have progressed in my writing skills during my first nine weeks with Mrs.Justice as my teacher. So far I have improved my basic skills such as grammar, structure, and creativity. I still have a lot to learn but I think within the next few years I can learn and master the basics. My strengths in writing include a decent since of organization and prewriting skills. When I say prewriting skills I mean to use skills such as brainstorming and to transfer it into paragraphs to make a nice essay with good structure. Organization simply means that I can organize my thoughts and ideas throughout the piece itself. I think the best way to improve on my writing skills is to take my strengths such as these and play them to my advantage. So in my case when writing a essay I would put all my effort into the body of the essay making it interesting and easy to follow. Along with my strengths in writings I have my weaknesses. My weaknesses are basically that I am inexperienced and I need practice in the subject in the //This I Believe// essay I had great creativity and made the essay very interesting but in all I think I used to much time prewriting the essay. With more experience in vocabulary and grammar and paragraph structure I could have made the story a little more entertaining or inspiring. In all that was the real goal of the essay, to inspire others to believe the same.

 I believe that leadership is the best possible trait that anyone can have. I believe this because if you can learn good leadership skills then you can lead others and yourself to greatness. I have learned this by being in marching band and also from NJROTC. I was taught that by the other good leaders such as teachers and high ranking students that I followed. I learned quickly that if you act as a good role model others usually follow quickly to better themselves and their own organization. For instance, last year I learned a lot from my previous section leader in marching band. I learned to be more responsible and that there are times to be serious and times to joke and play around. This experience has really shaped me as a person because before high school I was pretty much a class clown that got suspended simply because my teachers were fed up with me. I believe that everybody at some point in their life needs to go through an experience such as this.  I think the thing that had the most impact on me was embarrassment of messing up in public and getting criticized for it. To be honest, I think that's something you have to be born with; the ability to take criticism as a weakness and work your self to make it a strength. If you have this skill you can accomplish anything you put your mind to. Leadership means to me being a good role model to others that are in the same situation that you were once in before. For example, in marching band I have a freshmen baritone player (a low brass instrument a little bit smaller then a tuba) that has problems producing quality sound and holding the horn in the right position all the time. I talked to the director about this and he decided to help me out.  He asked me why I had pushed myself to do better when I was a freshmen. I responded by telling him that it was the embarrassment among my peers that pushed me every day to do better. So, accordingly, he video taped a performance of our show and showed it to the whole class one day. The same day I saw so much more effort from the student and he did almost as good as me (hint almost). Afterwords I talked to him and asked him what gave him the initiative to work so much harder and sure enough he started to talk about how embarrassed he was when everyone watched him perform on the field earlier in class. Then we had a conversation about setting goals higher then the best players and performers in the world, because that is where there personal goals are set. I hope that this essay inspires people to push to do better in not only sports but life itself. This I believe.

I think for one that homosexuality is wrong and against god, but I also don't think that he should be bullied for it because this is supposed to be a free country where you can practice whatever your religion may be. It would be like somebody coming up to me and bullying me about believing in the resurrection of Jesus or me going up to a atheist and threatening him with the idea of hell. In a way all the kids that ever picked on him about being homosexual would be against their own religions if they had one because they drove him to his death. I think that something should be done as in a “don't ask don't tell” policy like the military has that way you couldn't be criticized for whatever your beliefs are whether it be God, Buddha, or Allah for that matter (I apologize if I spell those wrong). I think that bullying should be more severally punished because it is very cruel in so many ways. That is all I have to say about that story.