It’s kind of hard to believe that it has been 5 weeks since I entered into Grade 12, not only my final year of High School but also my final year of PLP. Awaiting me at this halfway point is a new project which focuses on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

Rather than jumping straight into the famous play, this week focussed on comprehending texts, vocabulary, and the history of women’s rights. We started off focussing on our writing ability by working on comprehending literature. This was done through multiple tests in which I received some pretty mixed results. Its definitely made me realize how much work I have to do on my reading and comprehension. I will fully admit to have been slacking off on my reading skills for the last few years. Although I see myself as an avid reader, I feel that I have not pushed myself to read literature which challenges me. Ms Willemse described reading challenging material like going to the gym, because just like increasing your fitness, you need to keep reading more challenging books to slowly increase your reading ability, including reading comprehension and vocabulary. In my opinion, I have a fair bit to go until I am at a level I am happy with it.

That’s only part of what we have done over the last 2 weeks.

For the second part we were focused on women’s rights in history. This is the more historical side of the project, but we not only looked at the history, we also discussed recent current events and points of view. It was definitely eye opening for a lot of us to see how recent in history a lot of the legal changes for women’s rights have taken place. The right to vote was originally given to women around 100 years ago, but it took much longer for all women to get it. This is because certain minority groups, for example First Nations Peoples, were not included in the original changes. I can easily see this tying back to Taming of the Shrew after reading the first 2 acts at the time of writing this post.