Final Exam!

It final exam week, but its also the last week of school! I have English final today and physics final tomorrow. I think I was prepared for the English test. I read the things we had to and studied the vocabulary. However, I am not ready for then physics test. I still have one more chapter to look over and a lot more questions to do. After the physics final, I would be spending the rest of the week working on the musical. The show is this Saturday!  I only have a very small role, but still, I’ll be on stage, which I am not especially comfortable with. For this musical, Guys and Dolls, all the girls have to put on a lot of make up, especially on the eyes. Sometimes even I get scared when I look in the mirror and see my face piled with makeup. I look like I am a ghost with really think eyebrows and excessively red lips. Hopefully, it doesn’t look as bad from the audience seat. Well, I have four whole days of musical rehearsal and a very small role, so I’m planning on reading a book to spend my time. I think I’ll be reading Gathering Blue, which is the companion novel of The Giver. I’ve wanted to read it for a while, but with all the AP test and SATs I haven’t found time. But now that I’m done with all that (for now) I have plenty of time to read it.

Group Work

I personally like to do group work more than individual work. I think group work provides us with more learning experience than does individual work. Not only do we learn through sharing ideas with our group members, we also learn to cooperate. Cooperation can sometimes be the hardest part of a group work, especially if you are with people you don’t know very well. It is actually not easy to divide jobs up fairly, but sometimes, if you’re lucky enough, you get people in your group that fit each task perfectly. Take my last group for example: I thought I had a pretty nice group because we each got to do the job we wanted to. Even though group work can be nice, I often lower my standards when I word with other people. Through experience, I learned that my standards for individual work is sometimes too high for other people, so I have learned to adjust my standards to better work with the other members of the group. When doing a group project, I think it is usually best that each member have his or her say. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a leader. However, when there really is a need, I would be willing to take on that role. 

Language Use

Have you ever, like, watched a 70’s or 80’s film, and see like random words like phony (overbearing and deceitful person) or boogie (to dance) and you go like, oh wow these words are like so old! And sometimes you try to search those words up in like a dictionary, but like you can never find it? Well, yeah. Those words are slangs that use to be popular during the 70’s and 80’s but have obviously faded out. However, not all slangs from the 70s or 80s fade out. Today, we still use words from the 70’s, like chill (to relax), and from the 80’s, for example a wannabe (someone who tries to act like someone else). New words are also continuously being added to our everyday speech (or type). Words like LOL and BRB have become very popular for people who chat online, partly because it saves time. Some of the words we use now may fade out in the future, but some of them might stay. Words are constantly changing as society changed. This is the reason why dictionaries are being updated. Sometimes, slangs are being used so much that they get added into dictionaries as actual words. 

Independent Reading Project Reflection

I’ll admit it. I procrastinated. It was probably because I really didn’t like my book that much. But that could be just another excuse. However, I can’t say that I’ve learned nothing from the experience. I saw the world through a person that is very different from me. I cannot imagine myself thinking or doing the things that Holden does, and I often find myself annoyed at his attitude towards the world. One thing I really wonder about this book is why it is classified as a classic. I do not mean to criticize it in any way, but it just very far from my expectation of what a classic American Literature would be. When I asked this to a friend, she said it was probably because it was “the first book of its kind”. This might also be the reason why it was banned for so long. There are so many swear words and the author is very straightforward with things like sex. The tone and voice of the book was very realistic and unique. Overall,  I would say that I did put effort in my project, but I could have done better by doing a more detailed poster/patient card. 

Archetypes

Archetypes (n.) – the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based

We live in a world full of archetypes. From the Disney princess series or Superman than young boys and girls love to watch, to the most recent movie, Beastly, archetypes prevail. Seeing the “same” characters or plots again and again sound like a bore, so why does movie goers and book readers never seem to get tired when they spot the villain and hero, or when they go watch a typical love story where “the boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy looses girl and boy wins girl back”? This is probably because these archetypes are deeply rooted in our thinking. People like to classify things. We learn by doing so. So when we see the familiar brave prince and damsel in distress, things just click into place and we smile knowingly at what is to come. A famous analytical physiologist, Carl Jung, puts this into his theory. He proposes that people’s minds consist of the ego, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is universal and inherited. He continues by stating that the collective unconscious is composed of archetypes. We think by dividing people in the world to the shadow, the anima, the animus and the self. This explains people’s tendency to sort things.

Contemporary

The American history is divided into time periods, each with a defining way of thinking and expression. Major events in history are usually the causes of such shift in people’s thoughts. When the colonists first settled in the new world, their Protestant religion had a strong impact on the literature of the time. This time period was later called the Rationalism, where people believed that everything could be explained by the intension of God. Literature and artwork of the time put a strong emphasis on religion. After the American Revolution, people in the United States wanted to create voice of their own. People looked up to idealized Romantic heroes that were bigger than life. The Americans yearned to achieve the American Dream of freedom and prosperity. However, the Civil War, brought Americans back to reality. During the Realist movement, people stopped dreaming of the ideal and looked at the present. The subjects of this time period focused on real-life people, like the John Smith and worked in a factory and living in poor conditions. Then came the First World War. The shock of casualties and secret conspiracies between countries was reflected on the art movement of the time. Modernism sought to look at things in many different points of view. Finally, there was World War II, which brought the same intensity of disturbance on the world and caused people to re-think everything they had believed in. The contemporary, or post-modern, movement threw away all traditions and questioned what people use to believe in. There was a drastic change in expression that caused some to question whether contemporary art is a real form of art.  

Reflect on Your Project

I think each person in my group had a pretty fair share of the work. We did not have much time to get together, but I still think the poster worked out pretty well. Each of us did two posters: one on the connection with the group and the other one about the book itself. Christine did the connection with other literature. I thought her poster was really detailed. She made connections to several books she have read and wrote a thorough description on each of them. Daniel’s poster was more towards the artistic side. His poster was on the connection to the self and he drew two people that seemed to be in pain. I thought he did a great job as well. My poster was on the connection to the world. I wrote about how the women in The Handmaids Tale are in a similar situation as those in Muslim countries.

I do not think we really had a leader in our group. It was just three people that cooperated quite well. We discussed the format and paper color in class and then did most of the other work at home. Overall, I think we did a pretty good job.