We did presentations three out of five days this week. The first day of presentations Haley and I gave ours and I was a lot less nervous than I had expected. I really hate public speaking and was not looking forward to giving this presentation because of it. It ended up going pretty well, we didn't add any related images and our prezi was pretty simplistic so we got marked down but we kind of did both of those things on purpose. As we were working on it we decided that what we were going to say was the most important thing so the basis of our preparations was discussion. We styled it after a TED talk in that respect, we didn't practice our lines or prepare what we were going to say. We just unloaded the knowledge we acquired through our reading about our elements of fiction and did so in an attempted imitation of what the TED talk we watched in class said was the perfect format of a presentation. We tried to keep our audience interested by giving them new information instead of reiterating the basics they already had knowledge of. I felt like our audience learned from our presentation and I know that I certainly learned a lot from myself and from the other groups.
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This week I felt like all I did was read - which I am totally not by any means complaining about. I finished reading Pride and Prejudice which was absolutely fantastic. I loved it so much and the only reason I had to spend my entire Thursday night reading it was because I hadn't set aside enough time to read it, not because I didn't like reading it. I will definitely be more diligent in my reading for this next marking period, procrastination makes life more stressful. Besides doing a lot of independent reading I also was reading through my elements of fiction stories this week. I've noticed that throughout my reading of both the short stories and Pride and Prejudice, I paid attention to who the story was told by and how the author chose to set up the story. In Pride and Prejudice, the story is told from a third-person point of view who mainly follows around Elizabeth Bennett but will occasionally give us a look into another character's thought process. Also Jane Austen used free indirect discourse (which I had to google what it was called) to show Elizabeth's judgement but making it sound like its coming through the eyes of the narrator. And the ending was a happy ending for me. It is arguable that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were truly meant to be together, all throughout the book it shows that struggle. That is what makes this story a literary fiction instead of commercial, because it is technically a happy ending but it happened in such a way that still are the reader want to read it again to fully understand why they should end up marrying. This week was honestly pretty crazy. We had a delay on Tuesday which shortened our hour significantly and then Thursday we didn't even have school because of the fog and then Friday we had a substitute teacher. All this amounted to not a lot of class discussion time which made me sad. It is an active discussion that involves everyone I am forced to think for myself about the questions posed, I can't just wait for the teacher or for another student to answer because I want to have an input. Despite the limited amount of time we had this week I still learned a lot and we worked on our group project/essay and analyzed the poem, Bright Star by John Keats. We talked about how the poem has three different perspectives you can look at and that readers can connect with. I think that the perspective the reader connects with completely depends on the moment at which they read the poem. I know that if I had read this over the summer I would have connected a lot with the star, as an observer and as someone who was content with admiring the beauty of what's going on around me and of other's relationships. But now I can connect the most with the speaker's love, it's really fascinating how the same poem can mean so many different things at different times. I would have never took the time to think about the different points of views this poem displays before our class discussed it together. For the group project, my partner Haley and I are still reading through our two themes; Point of View and Plot and Structure, and highlighting the things that stood out to us the most. Both documents have been surprisingly really interesting and eye opening - especially the Point of View. The point of view aspect of a piece of writing is much more significant than I realized, it can totally shape how the writing makes the reader feel. This is displayed in the poem we read, with it being told from the viewpoint of the speaker who personifies the star and admires it then translates this to his affection for his lover. This poem could have been told from the viewpoint of the star, the speaker's love or by a narrator, but because it is told by the viewpoint of the admirer it shows the depth of his feelings without revealing the feelings of his love. And his affections are not skewed by an opinion of a narrator observing. |
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March 2017
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