This week, we spent all of our time watching movies. My group decided to analyze the play Macbeth, so that is what we got to watch. When I heard we were watching the film instead of reading the book, I was really excited because reading Shakespeare can be difficult. As it turns out, I think I would have preferred to read it. The movie was placed in a more modern setting, but still used the old language, which made it harder for me to understand. Plus, the movie obviously goes quickly, while I could’ve slowed down and reread passages with a book to make sure I was following the plot correctly. Regardless, the movie was still good, even if it was slightly creepy at times. I’m really excited that we picked the feminist criticism because there is so much material to work with in this story. The movie really showed how much of an influence Lady Macbeth had. She was constantly hovering over Macbeth and persuading him to do things. The movie allowed us to see her subtle influences, like when she would make noise to distract everyone from what Macbeth was saying. The three witches were also fun to watch because they were way different than I imagined and were lurking in the background for most of the big plot points. Before, trying to understand what we were doing with this project was hard because we didn’t know what the play really consisted of, but now that we know more details, I can see how our project will start to come together. Even though we only have three days next week, it will be cool to get a start on our ideas. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079499/?ref_=fn_al_tt_6
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This week, we continued with my favorite thing - poetry. Okay, maybe I’m being slightly sarcastic. To be honest, we did something new this week which made it much more tolerable. We looked at two different poems, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sonnet 146 by William Shakespeare. Having two allows us to compare and contrast their similarities and allows us to think of the overall meaning in a new way. Writing the essay at the end of the week was slightly different, in both a positive and negative way. Comparing the poems allowed me to have a really solid extension of my thoughts as I could use multiple sources, but it made it harder to describe each poem individually. I know that poetry is still my biggest challenge in this class, but hopefully I will get better as time goes on. Speaking of Shakespeare, we started our new unit this week, which consists of our Shakespearean Drama Project. I chose Macbeth as the play I wanted to look at, along with Christina and Lindsay. We haven’t started reading or watching the play yet; we have only began understanding our critical theory lens. My group picked the Feminist Criticism as the lens we wanted to study, and I am really happy with our decision. Obviously, things have changed a ton for women throughout the years, so it will be extremely interesting to compare how the women of Macbeth are treated compared to now. While I don’t know much about Macbeth in general, I have heard a lot about Lady Macbeth. I know it will be very fun to analyze her actions and see how things may have been different if this play took place in present times. Here is an overview of her character http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/macbeth/canalysis.html The first week of tri 2 was pretty simple, which was a nice way to come back after the intensity of the tragedy blogs and the reflection paper. We started by learning about our upcoming SSR project. When the project was first presented, I really didn’t want to do it, simply because I was overwhelmed by the idea of it. I do this frequently; I am told to do an assignment that is unfamiliar, and I shut down, assuming that I can’t do it. So far, everything that has been thrown at me has been accomplished, so I need to get over being scared of unfamiliarity. After the initial panic, I began to think about the multiple things I could do with the Pecha Kucha presentation, and began to get very excited. I picked two novels related to race and identity, and I think that I will be able to do something great with this project, even if it will be challenging. The second part of this week centered around the practice AP test. After getting my score back, I felt pretty okay with where I am. I answered 32 out of 55 correctly, which obviously isn’t great, but it was much better than I thought I was going to do. When analyzing our results, it was amazing to see how my correct answers correlated with how I understood the piece given to us. If I really connected with one of the selections, I generally did pretty well on the questions. There was a portion of the test where I got six wrong in a row, which was because I really didn’t understand what that story was saying. I know that we have no control over what the AP test stories will be, so I will need to work on being able to analyze the pieces that aren’t as interesting to me in the future. Here is a link to some tips on taking the AP test. https://www.albert.io/blog/ap-english-literature-tips/ We continued to delve deeper into tragedy this week. With every activity that we do, we are shown a different side of tragedy. Each new angle is interesting, but we also tend to see a reoccurring theme. I’m excited to see how we tie the varying ideas together when we finish this unit with our papers. Reading Oedipus Rex was one of our main focuses this week. The whole time we read this, all I could think about were the similarities to the Shakespeare plays that I have read in the past. As they are all tragedies, I guess this makes sense. They all have a crazy, unimaginable situation that somehow manages to hook you in as a reader. I’m quickly realizing that the more I am exposed to tragedies, the more I like them. Not only did Oedipus Rex remind me of Shakespeare, it also reminded me of the Arthur Miller piece we looked at earlier. Miller talked about flaws in a character, and I was able to see some of his ideas in Oedipus. His obsessive quest to find Laius leads to his failure and unhappiness, which is what Miller would consider the tragedy. I liked being able to connect the two pieces together, I think it really solidified Miller’s thoughts for me. Overall, I hope that our tragedy study continues to hold my attention as it has so far. I enjoy making these connections and putting everything together in this way. This unit has completely shifted my perception of tragedy, which is one of my favorite parts of learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex When I heard that our next unit would be focused on tragedy, I expected this week to be much more sad than it was. I believed that we were going to be exploring all sorts of upsetting and horrible texts, but this was not the case. We focused instead on what a tragedy actually is, and that turned out to be very surprising. The first part of the definition is the part that everyone knows: a sad, emotional story. That part wasn’t new; it was the second part of the definition that really shifted my perspective. When digging a little deeper, we learned that a tragedy also comes when the audience enjoys watching the suffering take place. This whole idea blew my mind. How could we enjoy watching other people suffer? As this revelation was so mind boggling for me, of course I wanted to learn more about it. We did two different activities throughout the week that really helped us explore this idea more. The first included taking detailed notes when looking at different websites, and the other had us read an article and discuss it with a partner. After this, we did blog posts for both using the illustrating, authorizing and expanding technique for our responses. I really enjoyed this as it allowed me to organize my thoughts very clearly. We have always been told to expand on our thoughts when writing essays, but these three steps made it much easier than anything we have learned before. I am excited to see where the this tragedy unit will take us as we get closer to the end of the trimester. http://literarydevices.net/tragedy/ This week was very similar to last, as our main focus was again our literature presentations. I was really thankful that we were given extra time because Jess and I definitely wouldn’t have been ready to present when we were originally supposed to. This presentation was a very different experience for me because I didn’t really know what to expect. We were only given a simple outline to follow for our presentations; we weren’t given the specific, detailed instructions that we were used to from previous classes. It ended up working out fine, but at first it was a little overwhelming, especially since we had so much material to cover. I generally feel like I am a very good public speaker. Being a leader in different groups has taught me how to present well, and to exude confidence, even if it’s fake. Even though I think of myself this way, I was very nervous for this particular presentation at the beginning of the week. This was the point of the process where we had all of our information, we just didn’t know how we were going to share it, and that freaked me out. I truly believe that you can only present well if you really understand the material you are covering. At first I was confident that we were going to fail because instead of calmly organizing our thoughts, Jess and I decided to panic a little bit. Though we didn’t have the best start, we worked together and figured it out leading to a strong presentation. This week showed me that if I stay calm I will succeed, especially if I'm out of my comfort zone. http://www.inc.com/ss/jeff-haden/20-public-speaking-tips-best-ted-talks Our whole focus this week revolved around our literature presentations. In the beginning, it was really nice just to select our short stories and read through them. I enjoyed all of the stories, and it was fun to analyze the ‘Big Questions’ we were asked. The hard part came eventually, when Jess and I started to think about how we wanted to present the information we found. Even though we were only given a small chapter to read through on our element of fiction, and a few stories to look at, it seemed like we had a ton of information to go through. Throughout the week, we were able to talk to other groups and get an explanation on how to present our information clearly. I think we have a pretty solid idea of how we want to set up our powerpoint, now we just have to find a way to make it flow well. One idea we really want to focus on is making our presentation visually appealing. I know that I have definitely sat through my fair share of boring lectures, so I want to make sure that ours holds everyone's attention. I think the best way to do this will be through plenty of pictures and visuals. I also want to avoid writing out large paragraphs by using simple bullet points and not robotically reading the powerpoint to the class. The extra information given is what makes the presentation good, and hopefully we will be able to provide that. I am a little nervous as we haven’t done a real presentation in the class before, but I generally don’t mind public speaking so hopefully it will go well. Here is a website that gives some tips for designing visually appealing powerpoints. http://www.proofhq.com/blog-marketing/10-tips-for-designing-presentations-that-dont-suck-pt-1-007623/ These six weeks went by extremely fast. It feels like we just started, but we are actually halfway through the trimester. For pretty much this whole week, we had workshop time to continue our Unit 1 projects. I mainly used this time to finish reading my first short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” I enjoyed this story much more than I thought I would. I don’t really know why, but I have this skepticism about short stories. It just seems like a great piece of literature should be longer than six or seven pages, but that obviously isn’t true. Sonny’s Blues was a fantastic story, and I could easily see why it was used to show Characterization. Sonny and his brother both have deep story lines that shape who they are and what they do. After enjoying characterization so much, I’m excited to move on to Point of View. As the marking period ended this Friday, it meant that it was time to write our SSR book essays. I was worried about it all week because I always do very poorly with timed writings. This time was no different. In my general writing process, it takes almost an hour just to get all of my ideas out, and then another fair bit of time to go back for organization, so this forty minute assignment was difficult for me. I know that this is something that I will have to work on for the future. I think the next six week essay will be slightly better as I now have an idea of what to expect, but I know I will probably have to redo this past essay. Here is a link that describes the different kinds of Point of View that I will be looking at next week. http://users.humboldt.edu/tduckart/PoV.htm This was the week of fog. We had a fog delay on Tuesday and then a fog-caused cancellation on Thursday. While this was great for my sleeping schedule, it made it hard because we missed a fair amount of class this week. Regardless, we still accomplished a few things in the short time that we were given. Most of our time was spent working on the unit that we began last week. I am working with Jess, and together we decided to pick Characterization and Point of View as our elements of fiction that we wanted to study. We didn’t get extremely far into our topic, but we were able to read our Characterization chapter, and begin one of the short stories that goes with it. At first, I was a little skeptical of reading the chapters that we were given. I thought they were going to be like any average textbook, where they just give you lots of useless facts and boring information. This was different however, as I found myself really agreeing and connecting with what the characterization chapter was saying. One of the main points discussed was about characters who aren’t perfect heroes, and how they are more likely found in literature instead of the average story. I found myself thinking of my favorite characters, and how they all have flaws that they learn from. That is my favorite part of reading; watching these flawed characters and how they react. It makes them feel real, like a friend, instead of just someone you wish you could be. After reading this chapter, I very excited to read the next one, and to compare our findings to the short stories we will analyze. This website shows different examples of characterization. http://www.literarydevices.com/characterization/ In the past week, we have covered many different topics. As always, one of our main topics was our poem of the week. On Monday, when I first read "I felt a Funeral, in my brain” by Emily Dickinson, I really was not grasping the idea of it. I was frustrated, and I was dreading looking at it again on Tuesday. It wasn’t until Wednesday that something completely shifted for me, and I began to really enjoy this poem. In class we broke the stanzas down and we talked about how each one was an aspect of a funeral, and how that relates to a mental shift. I don’t know why, but this was my light bulb moment of the week. Somehow, this discussion made something click for me, and I finally felt like I could connect with what the author was saying. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, poetry is going to be my struggle, but this week showed me that if I’m persistent and patient, I will eventually understand. Another one of our main topics was introducing our next unit, which covers the idea of story vs. literature. An article we analyzed talked about the differences between the two, using the example of books and movies. I’m a firm believer that you should read the book before you watch the movie, as I believe that you should gain your own perspective of the book before you watch somebody else's through film, and I know the importance of the details that are often lacking in the movie. Working through this topic and reading the articles definitely reaffirmed what I had previously thought, and that was a cool connection for me. I am very interested in continuing this topic as I always enjoy seeing varying perspectives. This article does a great job of explaining why you should always read the book. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/6-reasons-the-book-is-almost-always-better-than-the-movie/ |
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April 2017
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