Gabby driessnack
This week, we really focused on our theory projects. We watched King Lear the movie, which was kind of confusing. The actors and actresses talked really fast and the language was old fashioned, which was hard to interpret sometimes. Also, they don't say the characters names a lot, so it is hard to remember who is who. During the movie, my theory project group took cornell notes on a shared document, which was very helpful because I got to see what Lydia and Emmy wrote during the movie. This helped me understand the movie from different viewpoints.
We also got some time to read our books for our big SSR book project. The first book I am reading is The Awakening by Kate Chopin. She also wrote Story of An Hour, so I am familiar with her writing. The Awakening is a lot of extended describing, whether it be what someone is wearing or scenery. This makes it tough for me to focus because not a lot is happening. I am hoping that I can get more into this book soon. Something that stood out to me this week was Thursday's daily poem. I really liked the expanation before the poem. It was about a mother taking her child to the police station to get fingerprinted. She was focusing on the colors of her outfit for a distraction. I have never had a family member in jail or known what it feels like, so it was sad to hear what people who have to go through that think about. They have a tough reality, so they try to get their mind away from that, which is something I had never though about. On a side note Michigan got a lot of snow this week, causing us to have a snow day monday! On that snow day, Haley, Nick, and I got stuck in the snow for 2 hours while driving. Pushing the car in the freezing cold at night was so much fun! This shows a plot summary of Shakesphere's King Lear if you haven't seen or read it. http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/kinglear/kinglearps.html xoxo, Gabby
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We started doing the poem of the week again, and this weeks poem was "Sonnet 146" by William Shakesphere. Each day of the week, we dug a little deeper into the poem and found more elements that are evident in the poem. About halfway through the week, we started another poem, "Ozmandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. At first, I was really confused by this poem because I didn't realize that Ozmandias was a powerful pharroh that ruled an ancient kingdom. I thought he was merely a sculptor. Both of these poems are sonnets, meaning it contains three segments of 4 lines and a couplet, or 2 lines, at the ending. It is kind of a square shape.
I really enjoyed doing the creative writing activity where we switch computers with another person and they get one minute to write the beginning of a story. Then, you switch back and finish that person's story. I loved hearing what everyone started with and how they created a unique story out of it. My critical thinking theory group consists of Lydia, Tino, Emmy, and myself. We are focusing on the philosophical theory, specifically in the story, "King Leer", by William Shakesphere. We worked on answering many questions to give ourselves background on our theory and help us better understand it. This gives lots of background on philosophical theory: http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/philosophy-origin.html xoxo, Gabby As we started a new trimester, we began practicing for the AP test. This consisted of taking a practice multiple choice test, which I was awful at. My score was a 24 out of 55, but I'm not worried about it because I am not planning on taking the AP test anyways. I learned that on the test, you should focus on what the prompt wants me to do rather than my own interpretation of the text. I noticed that when correcting my test, I had large streaks of wrong answers, which means that I misinterpreted the text or tried to overanalyze it. This doens't surprise me, as I tend to do that. We also worked on starting a new SSR book project, which consisted of us picking a theme and 2 books that could fit with that theme. My theme is loss, whether it be loss of a loved one, loss of sanity, or loss of hope. This topic truly interests me, so I am excited to be doing a project on something I am actually intrigued by. This is a list of commonly used books for questions on the AP test. http://mseffie.com/AP/APtitles.html xoxo, Gabby Earlier in the week, we watched a TED talk that related tragedy to failure. Something that stuck with me from the TED talk was that "we live in a snobby society". People are constantly judging and ridiculing each other for their failures, and it makes people not want to try from fear of failure. This causes societal tragedy, since we are so judgmental and make others not want to try. We also learned a new note taking strategy, which is Cornell notes. This leaves a column for note taking during the lesson, a column to get the big idea from those notes, and a row to summarize what you got from it. This is better than just writing a few things down and looking back at them when you need them. Cornell note taking gives you the opportunity to better remember the lesson and put it in your own words so that you understand it better. This helped a lot while reading "Oedipus Rex" because personally, I thought the book was a little bit hard to interpret. After pausing a few times to summarize and explain what we just read, it became easier to write notes in my own words. My goal when taking notes is that I can know the material well enough to explain it to someone else after. If I can do that, I know that I completely understand the material and can remember it. This site will give a better explanation of Cornell notes: http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox/cornellnotes.html xoxo, Gabby This week, we focused on tragedy. Researching it in articles and finding our own definitions. I think that tragedy is really cool because it makes stories dramatic and emotional. Tragedy mainly focuses on the suffering of humans or humanity. One of the types of tragedy was Tragedy of the Commons, which I thought was a really cool topic. This is like economic tragedy, where you go against the common good for selfish reasons. I thought that it was interesting that harming the environment could be considered tragedy. As humans, we are constantly destroying our world to try and expand roads or buildings. If we continue down this path, the world will be completely destroyed. Another thing we learned this week was how to find authorizing, illustrating, and extending in an essay. We walked through an essay and highlighted the different elements in the piece. Authorizing is using quotes from the piece. Illustrating is when the author using compelling ideas. Extending is answering the "So what?" question and describing the importance. It is important to include all three of these in a good essay, and have a good amount of extending. This is where the author provides their insight, not what it says in the piece. this site talks a little bit more about tragedy of the commons http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html xoxo, Gabby During the beginning of the week, Lydia and I worked on finishing our prezi and making sure everything needed was on there. We put pictures on each slide and focused on what we were going to say. We ended up presenting on Wednesday, not Thursday, which is good because then Lydia did not have to do it by herself. On Thursday and Friday, more people gave their presentations. I thought that it was very interesting to see that people read the same stories, but had different viewpoints about them. Each presentation related the elements of fiction to the literature in different ways, which was cool to see. I thought that everyone in our class did very good, even though I was on a field trip with business management on Thursday and did not get to see those presentations. After giving our presentations, we were asked what we thought that we excelled at personally. This was hard for me to think of, because I did not want to sound cocky and I do not usually dwell on what I did right, but rather what I did wrong. I know that I am very hard on myself so this was a good opportunity to put some positive thoughts into words. I thought both Lydia and I knew what we were talking about and overall did a fine job explaining our two elements of fiction, structure and point of view. xoxo, Gabby This week, we switched up our SSR books and picked out new ones. My new book is Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther. I already like this book so much more than my other one. It is about a boy named Johnny, who died of a brain tumor as a teenager. The story goes through Johnny's short-lived life and how he impacted those around him. I have not gotten very far into this book yet, but it is already intriguing and easier to understand than The God of Small Things. I think it was just very hard to keep up with and I did not understand any of the culture references in the book either. This book feels more like an actual story and is particularly interesting to me because I love anything having to do with medicine, since I want to go into nursing. We have also been working hard on our elements of literature presentations, which we will present next week. Our prezi is coming along very well and I think that Lydia and I know a lot about the literature pieces we read and will do well. It took us a while to close read all the stories for our elements of fiction, because some of them were really long. We also had to read them a couple times to pick out all the different elements that corresponded with structure and point of view. After that, we just had to put our presentation together, which is almost done. I really hope that we do not end up having to go on Thursday, because Lydia would have to present by herself since I will be on a field trip to Northwood with my Business Management class. xoxo, Gabby We are spending a lot of time clarifying what exactly we need to do for our projects, because there was a lot of confusing surrounding it. We have been doing close reads on poems, which is taking detailed notes and observations while reading the poem. It helps us break the poem down and understand it easily, but it is very time consuming. I actually have really enjoyed all the poems we read that have for structure and point of view. We still have not made a claim and connected evidence in our poems to the topic of structure or point of view. I think this project will end up being helpful because it gives us practice close reading poems and finding literary elements in poems and stories. I am still a little confused though and I know some of my classmates are too. I just do not really know what the presentation is supposed to look like or be formatted like. Is there a specific outline we are supposed to follow for our presentation or is it completely up to us?
We also did a lot of SSR time this week. I am still struggling a little bit with my book, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. It jumps around way too much and is very hard to keep up with. All of the names in the book are Indian, so I also struggle with remembering who is who and who does what. To me, a lot of the parts in the book do not make sense. xoxo, Gabby This week, we focused on the poem "Bright Star" by John Keats. At first, this poem kind of confused me, but after we went over it a few times and tried to dig below the surface, it started to make sense to me. We discussed how each of us relates to a character in the poem, the speaker, the speaker's love, or the bright star. Personally, I thought I could relate to the bright star the most because I listen to people's problems a lot. I also am always observing people whether I mean to or not. In the poem, the star does not play a big part, but rather listens and observes from the sidelines. We also got into pairs and worked on a project about literature. We picked two topics about literature and made claims about them after reading a poem. Lydia and I picked structure and point of view. After reading our poems, we wrote about the structure and point of view in the poems and made claims about them. We are going to make a presentation about what we got from the poems and our claims. This week was a little tough because of fog delays and cancellations. This is a website that explains structure in poems and helps you pick it out. http://learn.lexiconic.net/elementsofpoetry.htm xoxo, Gabby This week we focused on the poem, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, by Emily Dickinson. This is a very deep poem, every time we talked about it, we seemed to find a new meaning. We also looked at imagery in the poem. The types of imagery are visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, organic, tactile, and kinesthetic. We discussed what the speaker might be going through and how the events in the poem can represent what she is mentally experiencing. Imagery is very important in a poem because it helps the reader relate to the context. If the poem is describing a certain smell, it makes it easy for us to imagine that smell too. Explication of a poem can show you specific details that may not have jumped out at you when initially reading it. We also discussed the author of this poem, Emily Dickinson. Emily's poems were found in a drawer and published after she died. None of her poems had names, so they were named the first line of the poem. Although Emily is now dead, a part of her is kept alive because her poems are so deep. It gives you a good idea of who Emily was because her poetry shows such a unique side of herself. This is a good step by step example of how to explicate a poem. https://engl.utoledo.edu/english/?page_id=733 xoxo, Gabby |
Gabby DriessnackSenior at MPHS. Archives
March 2017
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