ohmygoshwearedone!

This blog has been time consuming, work, not fun, tiring, and annoying, but I am very glad we did it. Although it was not the most fun assignment, it helped analyze books, quotes, and compare the books we read to real life so that it did not seem like we were reading all of those books because we had nothing better to do.  It also improved not only mine, but everyone's writing skills.

From my previous blogs, which start from the end of January for me because I created a new blog due to technical difficulties, I learned not only literal things like Romeo and Juliet can be seen everywhere including the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but also interpretive meanings of seemingly meaningless quotes of Pip, from Great Expectations. One of my favorite assignments was actually one of the blog assignments, from the beginning of the year when we had to write an entire post in certain diction. Now I will never forget what diction is, even when I am 30 and am much more knowledgeable.  Writing about ideas from novels relating to pictures or other movies/books to just our impressions or thoughts, the blog has been almost like a refuge for our ideas that we did not say in class.  I have said a lot of things on my blog that I would not normally say out loud or in a discussion, like in the post about conflicts I said "standing up for what you believe in will mend any of the damage to society by people being robots and believing everything they hear and only following, weather it is right or wrong..." which I would not have said because it was about technology and if someone was really into technology I didn't want to offend them. But I also think that some of my best ideas originated from my blogs.

Reading other people's blogs and adding on to what they discussed or starting a new chain of ideas from their blog helped me a lot, and is possibly a reason for the blogs.  In general,  the point of doing all of the work that came with the blog was to get deeper into what we were doing in class that week and also to practice writing.  Not only did it do that, it was also a weekly assignment so we had to remember to do it every week, which is a skill we will need as an adult. With routine, comes improvement. My writing has improved tremendously since eighth grade, you being a good teacher a big factor, but also the continuous practice I got with my blog.   When you first announced at the beginning of the year that we would be doing one, I thought you were the meanest teacher, but thank you for doing that. It has helped me so much! When we first started doing them I didnt put much effort into it, and i wouldn't go very deep, but in the past few blogs I feel like I did a great job analyzing and thinking about what I was writing.  I think that the blog deserves a nice good bye, so thank you blog you should know that from the thoughts of Theodore Roosevelt, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing (quotelady.com)."

The most memorable assignment... :)

This year in general has been my most favorite year of all.  A lot of it has been about the new friends I have made and the fabulous teachers, but it is just the step above middle school that I needed. English has always been one of my favorite classes and I have enjoyed most of the projects we have done, but the one that I feel the most proud of is my Great Expectations essay.  I worked really hard and spent a lot of time making every sentence as good as I could get it.  All of that effort and relentless analyzing made me realize how good of a book Great Expectations is and how amazing a writer Charles Dickens is, even though I still don't like his style.  While reading Great Expectations, I really hated it and dreaded reading it every night, but after I finished it and wrote the essay on shame, it magically became better!

Besides all of the annotations, word power quizzes, discussion questions and other small assignments and quizzes, I got the best score on this than any thing else. I feel like I deserved it too because this essay came first before my social life when I was writing it, sad, I know. Writing it was really fun for me and I wish that the Romeo and Juliet essay was that fun to write, but it wasn't. It was probably the most boring classroom time in this class, but the best outside of class time (after we finished the book). Now we are doing poetry, which I don't want to do, but as Robert Frost would say, "nothing gold can stay..."

Poetry

My past experiences with poetry have been limited and truthfully, very boring , but in third grade I clearly remember keeping a journal with all of my poetry that I wrote and also some of my favorite poems by the famous poet, Shell Silverstein. I remember one of them being titled "I'm mad" which was all of my problems from that day including walking through a spider web and having my younger sister take my gardening shovel. I think that back in third grade poetry helped me relieve some of my elementary school stress, and if I started writing again, could be a good relaxation device.

Also at Lincoln elementary school, my teacher would let us pick our favorite poems that we wrote or that we read out of our poetry book and read them in our circle time.  I would always read poems by Shell Silverstein because his poems were simple yet pleasing and funny. His interesting and random content made poetry fun for us, but now that I look back on them they definitely say something else. His poem Where the Sidewalk Ends  for a child was about, literally, where the sidewalk ended and the world dropped off into nothing, but now it is about a place where everything is better, but to get there is a challenge but the chalk arrows will always give a comforting sense of direction.  I agree with all of the pleased kids, that he is a good poet and my favorite so far.

Whenever I think of poetry I dread it. Most likely because of my horrible job in the poetry out loud competition, I really don't like poetry.  Memorizing words is very difficult for me and that is what I think of when I think of poetry. Writing it is not bad, it is actually pretty fun, but reading and analyzing it seems to ruin it because it is suppose to be what you get out of it without going deep into it as a school assignment.  If we could just spend a class period where we get an object or an idea and write a poem of our choice about it, that would be good. Or if we go outside on a nice day... even if I don't like it I can still make it fun for myself.

Conflicts, conflicts, conflict

Throughout the entire play, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, conflicts are apparent in the characters, but take many forms.  One of the most important conflicts is a the Person vs. person conflict between Romeo and Juliet's relationship, and their families. Because these families have been feuding for many many years, for their only direct offspring to fall in love with each other is unheard of and revolting. For example in act 2 scene 1 Romeo sneaks to the Capulet party and kisses Juliet, starting the illogical cycle of love between the two and the fury of their parents. This conflict escalates to suicidal thoughts and actions if they can not be together and creates death-like tones and portrays that love is up to the heart to decide and can not be swayed, even my death itself.

This idea is very prominent in society today, with all of the modern music about being in love, and more and more independence being shown though.  This independence and the following of the heart is very valuable to society today as we become more sucked into the world of technology and pop culture, being different and standing up for what you believe in will mend any of the damage done to society by people being robots and believing everything they hear and only following, whether it is right or wrong. This is important to my life as well as many others because doing what your heart tells you usually ends up good, and standing up and going a different way than others before you will make the world a more interesting and better place for everyone. A lot of this depends on personality, but can be acted upon by anyone, all it takes is a strong feeling and bravery.

Romeo and Juliet is everywhere!

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is very similar to Romeo and Juliet in the way that Toula, a Greek woman falls in love with Ian, a non-Greek school teacher, the way that Romeo falls in love with Juliet. Toula's family is strictly Greek and will only let her marry another Greek. Her father trys to set her up with men when he finds out about Ian, like Capulet did with Paris and Juliet. Toula's aunt very similarly resembles Juliets nurse because her aunt helps her go to college and be with Ian, two things that her father strongly disagreed with, like the nurse delivering messages to Romeo. Ians best friend is like Mercutio because he trys to get dates for him before he met Toula. Ians family and Toula's family are very different, but their love brought them together.

Romeo, Juliet and I

Romeo and Juliet has many very different characters who all act differently, which is why it is my favorite book we have read so far. Romeo's friends and cousins are all very supportive of his broken heart, where as the feuding family, the Capulets, treat their daughter Juliet more protectively than the Montegues.  Out of all of the characters in this book, I feel like Romeo is the least like me because he is mopey and dramatic about everything and always thinks that every girl he meets is love at first sight. Juliet is more like me in the way that she is quiet and obedient, but the character who I can relate to the most is Mercutio. He is Romeo's best friend and there for him when his heart is broken, but somehow makes him feel better by making fun of him. This is like me because I am a good friend but like to make fun of my best friends.  Mercutio is encouraging Romeo to go live a little and meet some pretty girls at the Capulet party, which is something that I would do for my friends. Mercutio and I are also similar because we both make up stories off of the tops of our heads, mine are usually embellishments on stories or excuses not to do chores, and his are random things to get depressing memories our of his mind. Mercutio is also my favorite character so I am happy to think that I am like him.

The first couple of nights reading, I was confused and didn't pick up on any puns or significant lines in the dialogue, but lately I can annotate for these things better.  Reading in class has helped me a lot and I am really glad that we are doing it. Plus it is fun. I haven't gone on spark notes or anything so what I have understood is purely my own thinking. Reading it twice has also helped in remembering who said what which is good for the tests and quizzes. In class I don't have much input on what we are discussing not because I didn't read but because I either didn't know what was going on in the book or wanted to hear what other people thought of what was happening. Doing group work is better for me because speaking in a smaller group is easier than in front of the class. I want to read more so next week I am going to. We should definitely keep talking in class and I am excited for our first discussion!

Dickens' message to the world!

In Great Expectations, the author Charles Dickens entwines many important life lessons into his seemingly boring book. The main theme that should be learned by reading this book is that no money or social status should take the place of family and friends. Money is a touchy subject to many people and when a lot of it is gained at one time it can be spent unwisely, so remembering the people who are less fortunate is another lesson to be gained from this book. Also, with money happiness is not guaranteed a place in your life. Even if you have what ever you needed you thought would make you happy does not have kind of happiness than the irreplaceable love that your friends and family provide for you. If it is thought about in the sense that money is only paper, worth nothing, that is traded for items or services, and people in your family are living organisms who have feelings and the ability to love, it makes money seem worthless and causes you to think that money can be replaced but you cant replace a person so you should not take them for granted. From the time when money was just and idea all the way up to today, this theme that Charles Dickens wrote about has always had an effect on people and always will because as long as humans have feelings and emotions they will abide by and deeply think about this moral.

Finally Done with Great Expectations!

Great Expectations was not the best book I have read, but it is also not the worst. The story seemed like it took a lot of time to write and add all the small details, but some parts put me to sleep. I liked the settings because they were easy to annotate but the book had a lot of Gothic details like To Kill a Mockingbird, which we have already read so that is something I really disliked. In eighth grade we read A Christmas Carol also by Charles Dickens which was way better than Great Expectations. Charles Dickens isn't a bad writer but he makes things more complicated then they need to be which bugged me when I was reading fast at night. The thing I really like were the characters. They all had different and interesting personalities and made the story interesting because their personalities were sometimes used to show motifs and themes. Most of the mysteries I didn't solve but Magwitch being Pip's benefactor I am proud to say I figured out mostly on my own. I was really surprised that Biddy married Joe and very disappointed because I wanted Pip to marry her.

My reading habits are pretty embarrassing and left me extremely tired in the morning. I would usually start reading at 10:00 or 10:30 on the day I was suppose to read, after I got ready to sleep, comfortable in my bed, and ended at around 11:15 depending on the length of the assignment for that night. Towards the end of the book I got lazy and would only read half of the assignment and catch up on Thursday or over the weekend. Sense we have been reading, I have not had much homework so reading was not an issue, I just procrastinated then felt stressed to get it done. Every night. I was usually in my bed which is pretty comfortable and I was tired from a long day at school so sometimes I would doze off, especially in the middle of the book when it was really boring. The discussions and talks we had in class were really helpful in understanding the book for me and I would probably not have picked up on a lot of things if we didn't do those. The thing that I dreaded doing the most because they had to be perfect, were the discussion questions. I wasn't here for the second discussion and I still haven't written the questions for that, but for the first discussion the fifteen questions I did about six that day at school with a little help on ideas from Sherwin, and took about 4 hours that night finishing them. I was just glad we didn't have to answer them because that takes forever! I am glad that we are finished because if I was reading it independently I never would.

Photo connection

The picture that I chose represents how Pip always wants things to be different than they are. On his way to London he is imagining a wonderful and exciting new city to became a gentleman in, but instead he is crestfallen when he sees its dirty streets and unorganized court system, but instead of looking for good things about it, he creates a pessimistic and condescending attitude about anything that he thinks he is better than. Also when he finds out that Magwitch is his benefactor he refuses to take his money anymore. Disappointment develops in to a substantial emotion that Pip expresses throughout the book. 

Connections and Picture

In Great Expectations, the main character and narrator Pip leaves his family to become a gentleman in London. This opportunity helped him meet new people and see London with the eyes of an innocent adolescent. But shame and guilt overwhelmed him with the thoughts of home and other things which Dickens uses as a motif. These themes along with many more relate almost directly to the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, a literary contemporary of Charles Dickens.

Along with being set in around the same time, Little Women and Great Expectations both start out with the narrator being an innocent young person. Jo March and Pip are both young and guilty but for different reasons, but both authors are trying to say the same thing. Jo is guilty for not being polite and not doing the dishes or cleaning the kitchen, and Pip is guilty for helping a convict and stealing his sisters pork pie. Both of theses instances are portraying the motif of guilt and trying to say that young people are still learning what is right and wrong and what they learn from when they are wrong and all of their experiences will stay with them their whole life and make them better and more intelligent adults.

In the 1800's many of the men were fighting in wars so many children were missing a father figure and had to make up for it. This is what life in the March house was like for the little women who lived there. In Great Expectations Pips parents died when he was young so he is brought up by his sister and her husband, the blacksmith, who is intellectually equivalent to Pip. With these restrictions of parental issues the characters from both books were limited to their homes and were not supported if they went off on their own. Theses confinements led to the theme of wanting to go away from and essentially wanting to be a gentleman or lady. Pip ends up going to London and feeling ashamed of his family, and Jo goes to New York because she wants Beth and Laurie to fall in love but also to get away from home for awhile.

On of the main themes in Little Women and an important idea that is satirized in Great Expectations is being a good person leads to happiness. In Little Women, the character Amy turns down Fred Vaughn when he asks her to marry him, because even though he has money she doesn't love him. Also, the girls love each other to death and would never betray any of them and they all end up very happy in the end with good lives. Alcott uses positive examples to show this theme, while Dickens uses the opposite and shows the outcomes. Pip hates his home and is condescending towards people who he thinks is lower in social stature, causing people to dislike him and make him feel like he always needs more. He also spends a lot of money, and the cliche money can't buy love applies greatly to Pip because he always seems to be missing some important personality trait that would cause him to be happier. 

Second stage event analysis

As the first stage finished and the second stage began, the novel got excessively more boring, but many new characters were introduced. An event that has motifs hidden in its explanations is when Pip gets to London and is sent to stay with his old companion the Pale Young Gentleman, and it taught manners while eating dinner that he had never learned or thought of before. While these pointers are given to him, the Pale Young Gentleman, Herbert, is telling the story of Miss Havisham and why all of her clocks are stopped at a quarter to nine and why she always wears a faded wedding dress and has a rotting bridal cake on her table. Apparently her husband left her on their wedding day for her money, and her step brother that was kicked out of the family was involved, just to get her excessive amounts of money that her father left her when he passed away, but it is unclear the way he tells it. Some of the tips that Herbert gives Pip while he is telling Miss Havisham's story include not putting his fork all the way into his mouth and not tipping his wine glass upside down.

The scenes in stage one when Pip is playing at Miss Havisham is full of mystery because he doesn't know what was wrong with her, and as Herbert is telling the story more mysteries come up like why did her fiance do that and where is he now and what happened to her step brother. This motif, along with being a gentleman, comes up a lot in the book. The manners that Herbert teach Pip have to do with the motif of being a gentleman which is why Pip left his family in the first place. As Pip becomes more like a gentleman, his attitudes towards other people become critical and condescending. He only started becoming like this when he was criticized about what he looked like, then by wanting to be a gentleman. London has also encouraged him to treat others with less respect then they deserve.

Olivia's English Blog: Quotation Response

Olivia's English Blog: Quotation Response: "In Pip's quote, he is referring to his day at Miss Havisham's. If he never lived this day, he would have been a whole different person. It c..."

Pip's Quote

"Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

When Pip is thinking this, or looking back on that day and interpreting it, he means that what you do or think on just one day will change your life and perspective on something for the rest of your life. Like a chain, one link is connected to another which is connected to another and so on, but the first link is what every other link is built off of, and will have an influence on all of the other links. This is the day that he goes to Miss Havishams mansion and is humiliated my Estella about things that he had never thought about before. By being made fun of for his hands and boots, Pip changed his views on his appearance and his status, which has made him feel ashamed of his family, especially Joe because he is just a lowly blacksmith. In the following chapters he says things like, "It is a most terrible thing to feel ashamed of home...(106)" and "Now, is was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham  and Estella see it on any account," which he would have never said in earlier chapters, before the idea of being lower than somebody else was brought into his mind. These changes in Pip's personality and ideas are giving him bad thoughts about his home and Joe, which will turn out to be mistakes because Joe has always been there for him and he shouldn't feel ashamed of a person like that. For me, Pip was more enjoyable to read about when he didn't care about what other people thought of him because I really like Joe, and Pip is being annoying when he is embarrassed by him.

A day in my life that started a long chain of events is when my Mom took me to my first orchestra concert in fourth grade, played by the Olympia Symphony Orchestra. That was the day that I decided that I was going to play the violin, so my Mom signed me up for violin lessons and rented me a tiny violin. After a couple months of lesson I auditioned for Student Orchestras of Greater Olympia and got in and have been in it ever sense. This year I am in the top orchestra and have had an amazing experience playing with some phenomenal players from around Olympia. Violin has given me a lot of opportunities to play in front of crowds up to 2500 people (for a free concert of the Messiah)  Now, I spend a lot of my time with my violin and have made a lot of friends because of it!

Questions from Great Expectations

There are some confusing passages and words in this book, but one of the most unclear to me was when the sergeant and Uncle Pumblechook are talking and they say, "With you. Hob and nob," returned the sergeant. "The top of mine to the foot of yours-the foot of yours to the top of mine. Ring once, ring twice-the best tune on the musical glasses! Your health. May you live a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you are at the present moment of your life! (31, chapter 5)"

I think that towards the end they are talking about staying in good health and living a long time, but the rest just seems like gibberish. They were drunk so they could just be rambling, but I think that Charles Dickens wouldn't put that in there just because. What are they talking about and what does it mean? Its so confusing!

Group Essay Collaboration

My paragraph has mostly stayed the same, I added the missing commentary to my last concrete detail but that is about it besides minor editing. The commentary talks about how beauty in a relationship should not be the main concept of it. It is elaborating on the other commentary and it is a little bit repetitive but we can talk about it on Monday. I can not think of a conclusion for my paragraph though, because the next paragraph is about Algernon and the topic for that is marriage, and to tie mine in is difficult without sounding redundant. What should I do? Also for the conclution paragraph I think that it is great, but if we could somehow magically incorporate how all of our ideas make the characters lives a work of art...if that is possible? If you think that I need to add or take something out of my paragraph from what you heard on Friday please tell me.

Dishonesty?

Dishonesty in The Importance of Being Earnest is a main theme that Oscar Wilde emphasizes with humor and wit through out the play. When Wilde shows dishonesty through humor and epigrams, he is using the short statements that have to do with life to explain that lies are easier to tell than the truth. Epigrams like "the truth is never pure and rarely simple" is an example of how epigrams can also contradict themselves, and show preferences towards lying, which lead to distrust and an uncomfortable situation in the end of the play. Dishonesty is also shown through satire of social institutions such as marriage, religion,  and social classes. It is shown in marriage when both Jack and Algernon pretend to be Jacks pretend brother Ernest and lie to their fiances, but the women will only marry them if their names are Ernest.  Christening and religion can also be dishonest because Algernon and Jack want to be Christened to the name Ernest, when both of them had already been Christened, and they were only doing it to have the name Ernest because they lied to their fiances. Satire of social classes shows dishonesty because the butlers lie for the people they work for, like Lane and the cucumber sandwiches, but the upper class also lie about a lot of things. On page 89 Jack says to Gwendolen "...it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?" which is saying that he is sorry for telling the truth. The references to the title of the play and the character Ernest were often times dishonest because Ernest was a fake person that Jack made up so he could go and party in London. Whenever someone said that Ernest was the most earnest person, that was dishonesty that they didn't know of because they thought Ernest was a real person, but it was a big lie for Jack and Algernon. The pursuit of pleasure is not necessarily dishonest in itself, but it causes acts of dishonesty. That is the reason that Jack turned into Ernest in London. He turned into Ernest to visit Gwendolen and to have fun in London, which was a big lie.

 Oscar Wilde used his characters to show that little lies will lead to bigger and bigger lies, but when the truth comes out everything is better. In the play The Importance of Being Ernest, he starts out with the lie of Jack being Ernest, then incorporates Algernon into the lie and it all turns out messy with two women thinking that they are both marrying Ernest Worthing. This is a big pun on the upper class because they live behind a shallow mask of lies and do not think anything of it. When ever someone tells the truth they automatically apologise and the person that they are talking too accepts their apology as if it would actually harm them if they told the truth. Oscar Wilde ends the play with truth, which I think means that if you want to have a clean conscience and be able to live the rest of your life knowing that you are better off telling the truth.