~English Reflection Work~

This I Believe Essay

For the English Reflections unit we were assigned to write a This I Believe Essay, based on the NPR series. We started the unit by reading other This I Believe essays to understand how they are formatted and worked on some brainstorming exercises with peers and alone to figure out what our statement would be. After some deliberation and several changes I ended up writing. This I Believe essay I was extremely proud of around a topic very close to my heart.

The Immense and Beautiful Power of Creativity
Saumeya Suseenthiran

I believe in the power of connecting through art. For as long as I can remember, I have had an intense passion for creating art, and my father has a deep love for taking photos. His passion for capturing beauty through a lens passed down to me in a different way.
When I was four years old, an after-school teacher told my mother she should sign me up for art classes. My father encouraged her to do so, wanting me to have a creative outlet similar to him. I discovered creating art was something that brought me intense joy, and finishing a piece and having it resemble what I visualized was exhilarating. It was something my father and I bonded over. He derived happiness from snapping moments and polishing them to remember forever.
He taught me how to stand on my tip-toes and look through the small window on the top of his humongous Canon while it rested on his tripod and capture sights from our constant travels. I dragged him to Color Me Mine, shoved a plate in his hand, and taught him how to paint butterflies along its edges. I knew the words aperture and shutter speed at the age of 8, and he knew my favorite colors were lime green and violet. I would come home from art classes holding some watercolor hibiscus or rose I had painted, and he would show me photos of these flowers he had taken himself asking me to recreate them. He told me that my art would be in galleries one day, and I told him his photography would be alongside it ; a father-daughter exhibition.
I enjoy reminiscing on what he has given me: our shared relationship with art when I was growing up. Art gave me a way to communicate with him, something we struggle with. It created a language between us that was essential to our relationship when I was a child. He gave me the knowledge that creativity has immense and beautiful power and I’m unequivocally grateful for it.

Honors Memoir Essay Work

In English 4 Honors we were required to read a memoir and write an essay on it. The essays could be written in various formats but i chose tow rite about the authors style and vulnerability. My memoir was Born a Crime by Trevor Noah a very interesting composition of heart-wrenching and hilarious stories by the well-known comedian. The essay is attached below: