What a marvelous teacher Ms. Clifford was! I matured as a student in English class, in various ways. I would like to reflect my recent studies and show how I matured, and how my thinking changed.

Our first book was “Two Weeks with the Queen”. One issue in this story was homosexuality. Reading this book, first I thought homosexuality was “weird”. As the story continues, I thought differently. True love has no target. Love is not only for men and women. Woman can love each other, men can love each other. What’s wrong with it? From this book, I was able to realize that homosexual people are not to be excluded, and is not supposed to be a target of racism.

In May and June, we had a competition about creating a 50 word story. I gained the experience of writing a 50 word story. First when I heard “50”, I thought I could not make a story. At home, I studied and browsed for 50 word stories. Gradually “How do I write a story in 50 words?” changed to “A story can be formed in 50 words.”. Though my story didn’t make the finals, I think I have done a good job and did “create a story”. My 50 word story can be seen here.

Our second unit, was about Apartheid, racism, and separation. To be honest, when I first heard of the word “Apartheid”, my reaction was “What the heck is Apartheid?”. I didn’t know the word, until we started to start to study about it. We watched one movie, “Power of One”, which is a movie about racism. I gained knowledge the most from the book “Journey to Jo’burg”. I always had a question, “Why do black people get discriminated? That’s actually the same as white people discriminating themselves from black people.” My perspective didn’t change, but I started to think a little differently. “Why do people discriminate each other depending on their skin color? Everyone is supposed to be fair.” As a student of an international school, I have been reminded from this unit that racism is totally inappropriate, and we are supposed to be a large society, the world, and live peacefully with one another.

We had a project about writing a magazine article. My theme was writing a magazine article about “Being a Gaikokujin in an International School in Japan”. In case you don’t know, a Gaikokujin is a Japanese word that can be translated into “foreigner” in English. For this project, I was able to identify the true thoughts of foreign students and what they want to say to us, who are Japanese students. I basically got to know that people thought differently, and they did not have any specific feeling altogether. Some people said they were annoyed because they didn’t understand the language other students were using. Some said they didn’t care because they recognized the Japanese conversations as “something else” which made them not think about it. I was speaking Japanese sometimes as well, so I am aware that not everyone is satisfactory of what we are talking, and as a International School student, I thought that I will stop the habit of the use of Japanese in school.

In conclusion, from our experiences and from our studies during English class in 7C, I have been maturing and thinking differently about various issues such as homosexuality, discrimination, and racism. Once again, I would like to thank Ms. Clifford for being an awesome teacher.