WEEK XIV

For the last blog, I just want to say that this year was full of mixed emotions: fun, stress, laughter, laziness, etc. It was a bumpy year in our english class, but in the end it was all beneficial and memorable. The things we learned and the themes we found apply to life, and as we strive to graduate we must remember everything we’ve learned. I will miss this english class because it was the most enjoyable one out of my four years. Hopefully I will be able to express this through my memoir project. I never enjoyed poetry before and I must admit that throughout the entire first semester I did not like poem responses at all. However, today I enjoy it due to the amount we worked with it in class, and somewhat show interest in some of it as well.

Thanks Mrs. Elliott!

WEEK XIII

This week was quite a short one. We spent most of the week viewing Edward Scissorhands, a rather bland movie that I had already seen before. However, this was a nice strawberry on the cake of english class, because it topped the year off with something relating to the theme “The Monsters we Create”. The movie greatly represented this theme because the protagonist is judged due to his appearance, and is thought of to be a monster in the eyes of others. However, he is quite nice and friendly, as we learn throughout the plot of the movie. It shows that there are monsters we create that are not truly monsters, and we much use our eyes to see through the facade that we place them in.

WEEK XII

This week we got free time to work on our portfolio and essay revisions. It was a rather carefree week, until the day that the assignments were due. However, due to the time we received in class it was quite easy to meet the deadline. Andrew and I were able to finish our Independent Study Project in 4 days, and it was quite an accomplishment. We had plenty of information on the author Gwendyl Brooks, as well as deep analysis’ on three of her finest and most famous poems. I was quite happy with the results of our project. I spent the remainder of the time in class further organizing my blogs as well as working on my essay revisions to try to improve my grades.

WEEK XI

This week was another relaxing week as we took a break and finished viewing Tess of the Durbervilles. It was nice to take a break and watch a movie, but it was also beneficial to see the adaptation of the story and how they portray certain scenes in the novel. Some scenes were not done as expected, such as the dialogue between Tess and Alec. Others were very well done and greatly reminded me of the particular scene in the novel. We did not do any further activities regarding the movie due to the amount of students whom were missing due to AP testing, and it was nice taking a break to view the movie.

WEEK X

This week was quite rowdy due to AP testing. We did not do much except begin our senior memoir project. A memoir project is nice to do because it counts towards school work and is also beneficial to all of us to remember the great times we had throughout our K-12 careers.  We had to do specific activities such as remembering past events in our educational career, and listing 50 things that we wanted to do in life. Although I missed some important activities due to AP testing, such as the letter to a place on campus, I will do the activity in the future. Overall, this week was smooth and relaxing, and we were introduced to our next big project in class.

WEEK IX

This week was quite interesting, as we went back to the idea of independent interest. We listened to Armstrong’s blues songs that were mentioned in the prologue of Invisible Man. Through the lyrics and atmosphere of the song, we were able to effectively analyze the tone that Emerson was going for in Invisible Man. It was interesting listening to an old song that had such emotion in it.  After listening to two blues songs, we were asked to write our own blues song.  Blues is often said to be the origin of all types of music, and writing lyrics to a blues song was quite difficult. It was hard to find the right words to express the right emotion that the blues genre has. Overall i enjoyed this activity- it allowed us to further analyze Invisible Man and taught me plenty about music as well.

WEEK VIII

This week was the beginning of a long journey: reading the novel Invisible Man. I will be honest and say that I was not very excited to start a new novel. I also was sad due to the fact that the life unit was over, and we were starting on new themes. But, life goes on and you cannot always get what you want. We spent most of the week analyzing the significance of the prologue in the novel as well as researching and acknowledging the author. We learned about his past and his life, giving us background on why he wrote such an influential book during the time of segregation. We analyzed the significance of the Battle Royale scene in the novel and how it put African Americans in a lower perspective than anyone else. Overall, this week was dedicated to introducing the themes of Invisible Man. It was not my favorite type of study, but it was necessary to the understanding of the novel.

WEEK VII

This week, we did more individual work on the same topic. This time, we had to each write our own piece of writing with the theme of life and death, instead of analyzing another piece. At first, I was not too excited because creative writing was never my forte. However, I did like the theme and thus had a good time writing my analysis of the theme itself. Instead of writing a poem, song, or short story, I decided to do a free write on life- a stream of consciousness on life. What was only supposed to be a paragraph long turned out to be two pages. I still cannot believe how much I wrote just rambling on about what I thought about life and humanity. It was quite fun and gave me a good way to express what i really feel on the subject, something I personally did not know before this assignment.  I think this was one of my best works in english class this year. Even though I did not have much time for revision, my ideas impressed me and while re-reading it, I was happier with it than anything else I had written this year.

WEEK VI

This week was quite interesting. Each student was required to pick a song to analyze the lyrics and how they relate to what we were studying. The song i did was by the metal band All Shall Perish. Their songs are quite noisy with screaming everywhere, yet the actual lyrics were quite deep to my surprise. They talked about society’s reliance on money, and how we cannot let our lives be guided by money and payments. As humans, we should leave these trivial things behind and just live life without worry. I was surprised at the lyrics and how deep they were, despite the fact that the band’s genre is quite distasteful for many. Many other students had nice songs and short stories as well that proved different points concerning life.  This activity was a great way for us students to delve into the theme of life ourselves before studying it as a class. It allowed us to introduce ourselves to the topic, and this greatly sparked my interest in the topic as well.

WEEK V

This week was an enjoyable one, I must say. The most memorable thing of course was the in class story entitled Time Flies. It was quite comical and satirical, showing the daily life of two flies in a realistic, sitcom type of fashion. However funny it was, it had quite a deeper meaning: one we would be exploring for the next couple weeks. The flies’ epiphany that they would only live for 24 hours brings about the idea of death, and how short life really is. They wasted much of their time arguing that they were unable to enjoy life to its fullest. We as humans must learn to avoid this, and enjoy life to its fullest instead of worrying about other things. A well written story, and plenty interesting to the entire class, i believe that this was a great story to introduce this unit in the class. It definitely caught the attention of everyone, both comically and thematically.