It was a time to...

I am going to start with the fact that yesterday, my 5^th grade class of 2008 had a reunion at our elementary school. I saw my best friends (and maybe not so great friends) that I had grown up with, people that I had not seen in seven years: was it really that long ago? Elementary school was a time to struggle to learn how to read a clock and struggle to learn long division. It was a time to have so many tamagotchis that the class had to put them in a box before going into the classroom (3^rd grade version of cell phones?). It was a time to talk to friends about was what we should play during recess or which Webkinz we had. And yesterday, we talked about college.

Flash forward to middle school. A whole new world. Let me just tell you that I went to a private elementary school, and then I went straight into Carnage Middle School, quite a change. I knew only one person going to that middle school, and honestly I was scared. But, I managed to meet new people and make friends. Middle school was still a strange and awkward phase of my (and probably everyone else’s) life. Middle school was a time when the core classes were still simply called science, math, social studies, and language arts (none of this IB Biology, AP Statistics, IB Twentieth Century World Topics, and IB Language and Literature nonsense). It was a time to take really weird electives like “Math Art” (for one project we sewed geometric shapes onto pillows), and go on weird field trips to the landfill. It was a time to read every single Series of Unfortunate Events books (yes, all 13) only to be extremely disappointed by the ending, but then discover the Harry Potter books and become happy again. It was a time to go to socially awkward dances. It was a time to figure out how to not be a child anymore.

Flash forward, again. High school. Maybe it was not quite as big of a change as it was from elementary to middle, but still very different. For one thing, the school was huge (3 buildings, pods, trailers!) How would I ever find my way around!? I can still tell you the first class I ever went to and what I did in it: Art 1, we made folders for ourselves. I can also still tell you what my second period class was, because it was English with Mrs. Genesky J (fun fact: I sit in the same exact spot this year that I did in 9^th grade). Okay so freshman year. It was a time for learning this new place. It was a time to take new and different classes. It was a time (for me) to constantly hurt myself in sports and walk on crutches for the majority of the year. It was a time to grow.

Sophomore year: honestly, I feel like I can sum up that year with one word, APES. It was the first AP class I ever took, and it was hard. Sophomore year was a time to really start working. With Chemistry, Algebra 2, and APES, life was great (not really). And yet, sophomore year was also a time to make a big decision about the next two years of my life. My parents took me to a meeting about some “really rigorous program” that I should do. For some reason I thought that sounded great, so I signed up without exactly knowing what I was getting myself into.

Junior Year: I would probably say that the transition to junior year was harder than the one to 9^th grade. I did not know very many people doing the IB program, and it was so different than what I was used to. Junior year was a time to figure it out. It was a time to be handed extremely vague rubrics and be expected to figure them out. It was a time to write IAs and Written Assessments all while being really confused about what they were for. It was a time seminars every day, jokes of the week, constantly going outside during class (4^th period Bio), and most importantly, it was a time to become family with everyone going through this too.  

Senior Year: I really feel like senior year just started. It seems like I was just in the auditorium waiting for like 10 hours to take my senior picture. Senior year was a time to keep working (while constantly hearing “It’s your senior year! It shouldn't be hard!). It was a time to rewrite IAs and Written Assessments because we didn't know what we were doing the first time. It was a time to have some of the best teachers I’ve had in high school. It was a time to be criticized by others about having an inflated GPA but knowing we worked for it. It was a time to take that very time consuming extra class called applying for college. It was a time for final sports seasons and senior nights. It was a time for running to class like freshmen to keep our senior exemptions. It was a time to be with the group of friends that I became close with over two years. But it was also a time to realize that the end is coming.

I know I complain about high school and that I say I’m ready for college, but honestly, when we are all standing there at graduation in our caps and gowns, I know I will be sad. I have made great friendships and learned more than I’m willing to admit, so I will be sad, but I can still say that I am excited to move on to the next phase of my life.

A Look Inside the Mind of Whitman

When I briefly looked through the pages of Whitman’s notebook without trying to really read anything, I noticed that everything seems unorganized, like spur of the moment thoughts. There are many question marks to show that he had many ideas but questioned everything. Also, many things are crossed out and new words are rewritten in place of the crossed out ideas. I would describe his writing as scribble that was not intended for anyone else besides himself. Even without reading the words, it is easy to tell that this journal displays Whitman’s raw thoughts and the development of his ideas.

When I actually tried to read the words on the pages, I was able to make out some of them. In the very beginning he labels a page “brochure” and says, “two characters as of a dialogue between A. Lincoln” and someone else that I cannot read. He then says “lessons for a President elect.” He also starts writing a lot about “The Ship of Libertad” (Libertad=Liberty in Spanish) and with it, he says, “welcome the storm, welcome the trial…I shall see what the old ship is made of…anybody can sail with a fair wind, a smooth sea.” I think this metaphor reveals the probably personal struggles of Whitman in his life and shows that he has the strength to fight through whatever problems he faces. To me, he seems very insightful, and through his writing I think he hopes to explore all aspects of life.

There are also many drawings in the back of the notebook which I find to be interesting because I wonder what he needed drawings for. There are two that grabbed my attention the most. One of them is of a person whose face is drawn very darkly. The second drawing that stands out to me is the last one where a skull is drawn for a head and the person in the drawing has a sword stuck through his chest. Again, I am not sure why these drawings are included.

When I read the translation of scribble into readable type of what Whitman had actually written in his notebook, I understood it much better. I had not been able to read the part about religion, but it is actually very interesting. He believed there was a political and philosophical divide in his nation. He also wanted to include everyone in his new “third religion.” This shows that he really cared about his country and wanted everyone to set aside their differences and come together.

Apparently Whitman’s use of the word “Libertad” is actually a mystery. The theory that I really like is that Whitman believed freedom was not only confined to his own nation and that everyone deserved freedom. The ship metaphor is actually supposed to represent Lincoln’s presidency and the rough waters he would have to face. It parallels with Whitman’s midlife crisis as well.

The pictures in the back of the notebook are actually not by Whitman, which makes much more sense to me. I did not understand why he would have made any drawings because he was a poet, an artist with words, not images. The last image (with the skull and sword) may actually be an allegory of America. It shows the strange state of the country, poised between life and death.

The American Dream

  

   
How would you describe the “American Dream?”

The “American Dream” is an idea that America will provide all people with an opportunity to achieve success. However, whenever I hear “American Dream,” I have this picture in my mind of a man in the 1950’s who has a good job and is able to provide for his wife and children as they happily live in suburbia. Of course, this is an outdated representation of the American Dream in our more modern culture. I think that now the American Dream is really more for everybody. Everyone can work hard to achieve whatever their goals are, but their goals do not need to be so similar. One person’s goal could be like the original American Dream (job, family, suburbia), but another person’s may not even include having a family and only include service work to others. Anything that somebody is happily doing and working for can be part of his or her own American Dream. 

Another development is that today, many people from other countries move into America to achieve this American Dream.This means that the American Dream can also encompass recovery from a poor situation in another country.


What is your definition of wealth?

My definition of wealth would be a large quantity of something that is valuable. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is a large quantity of money or material possessions (interesting that money comes to mind first?). However, there can also be a wealth of emotion. Somebody could have a large quantity of happiness, which I would consider very valuable. So, wealth can be material or emotional, which brings into question, is one more important?


What are Americans’ attitudes toward wealth and poverty?

There are two very different views on wealth and poverty in America, but I do not want to get into that, so in general I would say that American people want to be wealthy, and they do not want to live in poverty. Also, and probably because of this view, many people choose to ignore the impoverished because they are looking up to what they want to be, focusing on themselves and not others (a side effect of the American Dream?). As a society, we tend to applaud the rich and successful people, watching them on television and reading about them in magazines, as we disregard the less fortunate people.


What is your attitude toward wealth and poverty?

My opinion is that it is extremely hard to live in poverty, and as a society we need to focus more on finding a way to diminish the amount of people living in poverty in America instead of focusing so much on trying to gain an extreme amount of wealth. It would be beneficial for many underprivileged people, but it would also help the economy and everyone in general.

I also think that many people focus too much on the material side of wealth. I’m not one to say that money doesn’t buy happiness, because it can buy some great things that definitely make me happy, however there is a problem. When people focus all of their attention on wealth, they forget to actually form true relationships, and they may have an unfulfilled emotional side of life. Wealth of happiness (not superficial happiness, but true satisfaction) is just as important as the security of material wealth.

Post 12

Freebie

Practice IOC

The voice recording would not post, so I emailed it!

Here is the passage I analyzed.

          Enter MACBETH, Doctor, and Attendants.

    MACBETH
    Bring me no more reports; let them fly all.
    Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,
    I cannot taint with fear. What's the boy Malcolm?
    Was he not born of woman? The spirits that know
    All mortal consequences have pronounced me thus:
    "Fear not, Macbeth; no man that's born of woman
    Shall e'er have power upon thee." Then fly, false thanes,
    And mingle with the English epicures!
    The mind I sway by and the heart I bear
    Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.

          Enter Servant.

    The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!
    Where got'st thou that goose look?

    Servant
    There is ten thousand—

    MACBETH
    Geese, villain?

    Servant
    Soldiers, sir.

    MACBETH
    Go prick thy face, and over-red thy fear,
    Thou lily-liver'd boy. What soldiers, patch?
    Death of thy soul! those linen cheeks of thine
    Are counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?

    Servant
    The English force, so please you.

    MACBETH
    Take thy face hence.

          Exit Servant.

    Seyton!—I am sick at heart,
    When I behold—Seyton, I say!—This push
    Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now.
    I have liv'd long enough: my way of life
    Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
    And that which should accompany old age,
    As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
    I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
    Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
    Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
    Seyton! 

Criterion A: Knowledge and understanding of the text or extract

I would give myself a 6 for this criterion. I definitely understood the text and the context, but I think I could have talked about it more and portrayed it better. I also used examples for everything I said, but I could have explained the examples more in depth and explained how they relate to the text as a whole.

Criterion B: Understanding of the use and effects of literary features

I would give myself a 6 for this criterion. I talked a lot about two literary features, characterization and diction and how they work to illustrate the theme. However, I did not explicitly explain how they affect the reader.

Criterion C: Organization

I would give myself a 4 for this criterion. I stated in the beginning exactly how I was going to proceed in the IOC and that is what I did. I did not add anything extra that I did not mention in the beginning.

Criterion D: Language

I would give myself a 3 for this criterion. I talked really slowly in some places or paused in order to figure out what I was trying to say. I also noticed that I used some of the same descriptive words over and over again. I think I used language to adequately get my point across, but it could have been more fluid and less repetitive.

Never Let Me Go

There are not very many similarities between the two covers. The first similarity that I can find is that the largest words on the covers are in the title “Never Let Me Go” and they are both in all capital letters. The next largest are the author’s name, “Kazuo Ishiguro,” also in all capital letters. Also, even though the pictures on the covers look completely different, they both show a forest.

There are many more differences between the two covers. The first cover has many more words. It states that it is a “Man Booker Prize Finalist” and gives a review from The New York Times. It also has the words, “A Novel” underneath the author’s name. On the second cover, there are fewer words, and the title seems messier because it is not in a straight line. The pictures on the covers are also very different. On the first one, there are more colors, and the colors are brighter. There is a girl sitting down in the grass looking over her shoulder. On the second one, the color scheme is blue/gray and looks very bleak. There is also a body made of barbed wire.

The cover of the first one immediately makes me think it is a love story. The title combined with the colors and the picture of the girl make me think that the girl wants someone to hold on to her. If I had never read the book, I would not think that there was anything particularly different about this book compared to other love stories. However, the review from The New York Times calls it “melancholy and alarming.” This would make me interested in the novel, but I still would not realize what the book was about. Now that I have read the book, it seems that the picture on the cover is focusing on the social relationships in the story, and it is saying that the book is about humanity.

The cover of the second one immediately makes me think that the book is more of a science fiction book. It has a dark cover that kind of looks like metal, and the body made of barbed wire only shows the organs which makes me think it is more sinister. It is interesting that it shows only the torso with organs and no head or any other part of the body. It emphasizes that in the book, the organs are the only important part of the person (clone). It is very hard to guess what the book is about just by looking at the cover, but I think I would have been able to figure out what the book was about earlier on while reading it if I had already seen this cover. Since I have read the book, it is obvious that the cover is making a connection to the fact that the people in the book donate their vital organs. This cover is focusing on that (creepier) aspect of the story and is saying that the story is about the people dealing with this part of their lives.

These two covers, although completely different and suggesting very different stories, do effectively communicate the ideas of the book. The covers appeal to different people and therefore the book is able to obtain a wider audience.

Stories of Psychopaths

This Ted Talk was given by Jon Ronson, who is a writer and documentary filmmaker. In his Ted Talk, Ronson discusses how the line between crazy and sane is unclear. He argues that we try to define people as psychopaths without paying attention to the normal parts of them, and that we should not “define people by their maddest edges.” In his Ted Talk, Ronson tells a story of a man he met named Tony. When Tony was 17, he beat someone up pretty badly, and then in order to get out of going to jail, he faked being crazy. It worked too well, and Tony was put into Broadmoor Hospital (an insane asylum). He tried to tell them that he was not actually insane, but, as he told Ronson, “it’s a lot harder to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.”

Ronson interviewed Tony (for a book Ronson was writing) while Tony was still in Broadmoor, and Ronson felt that Tony seemed pretty normal. Tony’s clinician told Ronson that although they did accept the fact that Tony pretended to be crazy in order to get out of his prison sentence, they assessed him further and decided he was a psychopath because “faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath.” There is a list of clinical traits of a psychopath created by Robert Hare. Tony told Ronson, "You know what, one of the items on the checklist is ‘lack of remorse,’ but another item on the checklist is ‘cunning, manipulative.’ So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft. They turn everything upside-down." Eventually Tony was let out of Broadmoor (after 14 years) because they decided they could not hold him indefinitely just because he had a higher than average chance of relapsing into criminal behavior. Ronson says Tony is a “semi- psychopath. He’s a gray area in a world that doesn’t like gray areas. But gray areas are where you find the complexity, the humanity, the truth.”

Later in the Ted Talk, Ronson tells another story of how he interviewed a man named Al Dunlap who worked in corporate business. Hare had told Ronson that there are many “corporate psychopaths,” so Ronson convinced Dunlap to go through the Hare checklist with him. Dunlap did fit many traits of the list, but there were also many traits that did not fit Dunlap. When Ronson was interviewing Dunlap, he realized that he tended to disregard Dunlap’s normal answers and to focus on his “crazy” ones. Ronson then discusses how some mental disorders are over-diagnosed because of this reason. For example, many children are diagnosed with bipolar disorder because they have temper tantrums. This is where he realizes that we should not “define people by their maddest edges.”

The purpose of Ronson’s Ted Talk is to discuss the blurred line between sane and insane.  He suggests that too many people are diagnosed with mental disorders because a list of traits is used to identify insanity when in reality humans are too complex to be categorized so easily. Maybe many people do have psychopathic traits, but their “normal” traits override the bad ones.

So, why should we trust what Jon Ronson has to say? Ronson wrote a book, called The Psychopath Test, that explores psychopaths. He has also written other books, articles, and films that investigate madness and obsession. Ronson also discusses how he went on a psychopath spotting course run by Robert Hare and became a certified psychopath spotter.

Ronson structures his argument by telling two stories that support it. The stories are of high quality because they are about experiences he personally had. Since Ronson told two stories that support each other, they make his argument more effective and credible. Ronson also strengthens his argument with factual information like statistics. For example, he says “one in a hundred regular people is a psychopath.” Ronson effectively argues his point, but in order to make his argument stronger, he could have brought in the opinion of other experts or proposed and broken down a counter argument.

Ronson also uses tactics to evoke emotion from the audience. First, he makes jokes throughout his Ted Talk in order to keep the audience interested and probably to keep the tone lighter as he talks about a darker topic. It makes people more comfortable and connected to the speaker, which in turn, makes the audience more likely to agree with the argument. The second way he evokes emotion is not through his speech, but through music and visual images. As he tells his stories, he has music and pictures in the background that go with what he is saying. They help the people in the audience really feel like they are experiencing, first hand, what is going on in his story.

I chose this Ted Talk because I find psychology to be very interesting, and anything having to do with the way the human brain works intrigues me. Also, we have just finished a unit in English involving insanity where we watched a video about the over diagnoses of multiple personality disorder, and I am sure the fact that I have just finished watching Dexter contributes to my continued interest in this topic.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity is a movie about a woman, Phyllis Dietrichson, who convinces an insurance salesman, Walter Neff, to give her husband accident insurance and then murder him so that she could collect the money and then Phyllis and Walter could be together. In the end, Walter kills Phyllis and then Walter admits to all that he has done. Could there possibly be any heroes in this movie?

There are two heroes in the movie Double Indemnity depending on whose perspective is considered. In the first perspective, that of Mr. Dietrichson, the hero is Barton Keyes, the expert claims investigator, and Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson are the villains. Walter and Phyllis secretly designed and carried out a plan to kill Mr. Dietrichson and make it look like an accident. They did this to get together and to gain money. Barton Keyes did not accept the official police report that Mr. Dietrichson accidentally died. He continued to investigate, and he found out the truth, that Mr. Dietrichson was murdered. This means that Mr. Keyes would be the hero to Mr. Dietrichson because he got justice for Mr. Dietrichson. Mr. Keyes would also be the hero to the justice system itself, considering that he kept pushing the case until Walter felt so pressured that he admitted to doing the crime. In the end, the correct person was caught and justice was served.

The second hero of the movie, from the perspective of Phyllis Dietrichson, is Walter Neff. Phyllis feels trapped in her marriage. She says her husband is mean, yells, and is even abusive when he is drunk. She says “he keeps me on a leash so tight I can hardly breathe,” and that he will not give her a divorce. For this reason, to Phyllis, Walter would be her hero because he saved her from her husband by killing him. Of course, she is ultimately betrayed by Walter because he kills her at the end, but then it could be argued that since they were both about to be caught, by killing her, Walter saved her from going through the humiliation of being exposed as the horrible person she really was.