This week we focused on our critical theory papers, two new poems of the week and we had a speaker, Dr. McDermott come in to give us guidance with our proposals. In the beginning of the week my group and I had no direction with our paper. Our plan was to keep our subject broad because we didn't know what we wanted to focus in on. We were all just kind of typing random stuff and were planning on doing a lot of editing to string our ideas together and to figure out our purpose of our paper. I was really unsure how our proposal was going to turn out because we were so all over the place. Dr. McDermott coming in was honestly perfect. She specializes in studying Shakespeare and how his works relate to pop culture. As she spoke about Shakespeare's life and the impact he had on his audience I gained a better perspective on what the philosophical meaning his plays could represent. The one-on-one time was very helpful and she talked with us about how Macbeth is very dark and opposite of Christianity which was especially prevalent in his time period. My group; Haley, Grace, Sophie and I, all believe in Jesus and everything the Bible teaches. Although Christianity has evolved over the years, we can sympathize to a degree with the people's shock at the evil storyline and its exaggerated difference to living a life through Christ. We decided to focus on when you choose to listen and chase after the wrong things, life is unfulfilling. You will be filled with regret and constantly being in want of something more for your life.
0 Comments
This week we discussed the idea of impermanence in our two poems of the week; Ozymandias by Percy Shelley and Sonnet 146 by Shakespeare, our Critical Theories for MacBeth in our small groups, a creative writing about 10 things we know to be true and a spoken word called Shoulders. At first I wasn't sure which tragedy I wanted to choose, King Lear sounded interesting to me but I have always wanted to read Macbeth since I've heard so much about it. So I'm glad that we are watching both of them in class and I don't have to choose which one to watch. I chose MacBeth to analyze and the critical theory that our group chose was philosophical or existential. We are going to be exploring what moral principles MacBeth follows or fails to follow after he meets the Three Witches, and to anallyze how Shakespeare uses his story to reflect on how and why people do things. The two poems we discussed were similar in their discussion of death and how the soul and body work. They both took different approaches, Shakespeare focusing on how the soul is eating away at our bodies, and Shelley focusing on the temporary meaning we have, the unlasting legacy we leave behind. This week we learned how to take the AP test and the books that could appear on it, how to give a peecha kucha presentation and the 10 rules of being human. I was really glad that we took practice tests because it gave me a good idea what to expect in the spring and kind of relieved some nerves. I did decent on it but what limited me a lot was my lack of vocabulary. A few of the pieces that I read on the test I was confused on what was being said. I think the biggest thing is to shift my mindset from what I think the piece is saying to what the author is actually trying to say. It was also nice to get an idea of the types of literature and poetry that are likely to be on the test. It helped me to choose my next independent read for this six weeks. The 10 Rules of Being Human was interesting as well. The one that stood out the most to me was #7, that people are mirrors of yourself, what you love or hate about them reflects what you love or hate about yourself. This one has remained with me since the day we talked about it. I now notice how that is very true in my life. The things I gush about others are either something I wish I posessed or something I am proud of, and the things I criticize about others are things I struggle with as well or an area I am gifted. Paying attention to how others react to things can help you decipher what they love or hate about themselves.
This week we read Oedipus Rex; a poem about tragedy, watched a Ted Talk about how snobby we are and read an article about the fallacy of tragedy or more our failure to interpret the meaning of tragedy correctly. The story of Oedipus illustrated that his tragedy was inevitable. In fact, his very actions to avoid his fate resulted in the fulfilling of his prophecy. Reading this was much more interesting to me than any of the past tragedies I've read. I think I enjoyed it more because I understood what tragedy meant. In the past when we read Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet I honestly thought they were kind of stupid because everyone dies. To me that was a very unsatisfying ending and I was being told that these were amazing works of literature but not why they were so great. It was cool how I was able to approach this tragedy much differently with my new knowledge. The main focus of our week was tragedy. We began to really dig into what a tragedy is by reading through several wikipedia pages and reading the "Juggler" poem and response. We define tragedy much differently than literature does. I assumed tragedy just meant something sad happened at the end but it is much more than that. It exposes human nature and how we overcome bad situations. The emphasis is on how the characters handle the tragic event, not the even itself. On Friday we talked about the Dakota Pipeline and Standing Rock all hour. I get really annoyed when people who are extremely ignorant about a topic start ranting and/or make others feel bad for their opinions. Although I disagree with the pipeline, I get very frustrated when people are rude. You don't persuade someone by making them feel horrible or by yelling at them, coming to a rational decision together and realizing that you BOTH have something to learn from each other is how I wish more problems and disagreements could be handled. 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.
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. The biggest thing I took away from this week was that you can be selective when it comes to literature and art. I have always thought that I should be able to understand every piece of literature. I thought it was my job to make sure the work spoke to me and if I was not completely immersed by this highly acclaimed novel then I was not an educated enough reader. I was the same way with art. I have seen all these great paintings, only a handful in person, but only one or two really stuck out to me. The rest left me wondering why in the word this was considered a masterpiece. People would talk about being mesmerized by all these works of art and it left me puzzled, for I have never had that special connection to one specific painting although a few had stood out to me. I learned this week that it is okay if I haven't experienced some life-changing art or literature, as long as I keep an open mind and continue to seek out art galleries and literature instead of dessert reading. The key isn't to put pressure on these kind of moments, they will come unexpected and you won't know why. Just got to let it naturally happen and not fight against nor force it. Allowing your imagination to flow and a story to be created is what makes it so amazing.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2017
Categories |