To Stop Pretending: The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle ~ Blogpost #2

In humanities, we are currently reading books for Literature Circles, and the one I am reading is "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle", by Avi. Our assignment for this blogpost is to do three paragraphs on these questions: "1.The benefits of working with a classmate. 2. Challenges / obstacles which you overcame (tried to overcome). 3. New understandings that you gained about the novel." for how we Collaborated Constructively for our "Lit. Circle with a twist", which is a collaborative Literature Circle. So, enough of the introduction, lets go onto what the benefits of having a partner, challenges that faced my group and I, and how we collaborated.

There are pros and cons to having a partner, but I'll just talk about the pros. Having a partner, there are many benefits toward it. One example is that the work, will be split, so you wont have to do the WHOLE thing. Another reason is that it's just fun to work with them, unless they aren't your friend, which will end up with you and your partner disagreeing a lot. Mainly, the benefit for Collaborative Lit. Circles is splitting up the work. You don't have to spend hours looking for 2 questions, or searching through your brain for 2 connections. For this, you just have to do 1 passage, 1 question and response, 1 connection and 1 vocabulary word. Normally, we have to do double that amount. But, for this Lit. Circle, the worst thing you could have is a bad partner. A bad--- no, horrible partner makes you do all the work, and in my teacher's words, "sits there like a dying duck in a thunderstorm" which basically means fool around and make you do the work. From having a bad partner, you WILL , no doubt about it, get a bad grade. Thankfully, I didn't have any bad partners.

For my group and I, there were some challenges. One of them were that one of my partners, got disabled from his account. That meant he couldn't access the document we had to work on. We (my other group member and I) couldn't check what he was doing and help him improve his work. For me as an individual, a challenge was actually getting myself to start my lit. circle. It took me a lot to get myself to start the work, because I was distracted with chatting and other things I'd rather not mention. I finally got working, when my friend helped me with ways to keep out the annoying things that usually makes me off-task. When I actually started, it was pretty smooth and we didn't have any problems from there.

There were somethings I had learned during that Lit. Circle. One, is that the main character, Charlotte had enough courage to stand up to Captain Jaggery, which I thought was amazing for Charlotte, because no one would ever thought she would be brave enough to whip him across the face, just for Zachariah. I was also amazed that she actually agreed to climb up the mast, to join the crew to avenge the death of Zachariah. I understood that Charlotte, changed from a girl whose father chose the path of her life, to a woman who can make her own decisions. I learned that, Charlotte is a more confident woman, and the boat had changed her life completely.