My poem vs. My life

The poem i chose for the Poetry Out Loud competition is Invictus by William Ernest Henley. After you read this poem you get a sense of struggle and victory, as if the speaker had just come back from something resembling a war. But when you really pay attention to specific words, you come to understand how much this poem is saying about life. How you just have to keep moving forward through all the challenges life throws at you. No matter how many times people try to control you, or how looming and threatening the future may seem, you just have to push through it and keep to the path you chose for yourself.

This can be compared to anyones life, including mine. Through out my life there's been the usual twists that life usual throws. I've moved twice, I went to competetive sports when i was ten, and the difference between high school, middle school, and elementary school is deffinitely noticeable. All these changes required me to adapt, to push through and complete all the challenges i receive.

Poetry Out Loud

Part One

1. 
   

   Keeping Things Whole By Mark Strand
   



2. 
   

   Let the Light Enter By Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
   



3. 
   

   Invictus By William Ernest Henley



4. 
   

   Prisoners By Denise Levertov



5. 
   

   Queen-Anne's Lace By William Carlos Williams

Part Two

1. I liked Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand and Invictus by William Ernest Henley the best. This is because the other poems were very wordy, with long lines and no breaks through the ideas that are being listed. I also like when poems rhyme, it appears more poetic in my opinion.


2. I did not like Prisoners by Denise Levertov because the poem seemed more like a paragraph, and a lot of poems are compared to life so it wasn't very original.


3. I would chose Invictus by William Ernest Henley


4. This poem is like struggling through life and the unknown, and being able to still hold your head high when it's all over.Every one has to go through hard times, and no one knows for sure what will happen next. So I can easily relate to this poem.

Part Three

1. I think that the accuracy and dramatic appropriateness will be the easiest criteria for me to follow. This is because accuracy is something easily controlled, it is something that people should fully understand what has to be done as it is only knowing the pronunciations (mainly) of all the words in the poem. We have dictionaries for a reason. As for dramatic appropriateness, that is easy for me to follow because the main idea is to not be overly dramatic. Dramatics is not really my thing, so no worries there.


2. I believe that voice and articulation along with level of difficulty will be the hardest for me to do well on. Voice and articulation will be hard because when I get nervous I tend to read faster than what is normally required of the piece I am reading. Also, the poems I am usually attracted are ones that rhyme, but I do tend to read those in a sing-song manner because it is very hard not to. For the level of difficulty, it's hard for me to read a poem and really get into it if there's a lot of use of higher level language...I tend to be attracted to poems with a normal level of language and length.

Part Four

1. I watched forgetfulness by Billy Collins and Frederick Douglas by Robert E. Hayden. These were both successful performances because they captured the feeling the author used when writing the poem. There were no stumbles through the words, and the person reading the poem had a confidence about themselves that flowed into the audience. This caused them to feel confident about the person too.

Part Five

1. Poetry Out Load is a lot of fun for me because I just lately started to really appreciate poetry, and the possiblity of earning a prize just for doing what I do anyways is really cool. Also, this competition introduces me to poems and authors that I might not have found otherwise.
   

Human vs Lobster

In the discussion that was held in class on the poem "Lobsters", there were many ideas introduced that I had never previously thought of. One such idea is that the lobsters described in the poem are being compared to humans. The color of their shell is described as a dead person green instead of just plain green, or bruise purple instead of just purple. Also, the last line compares the human curiosity of what unknown object lies beneath the earth to the pot that boils the lobsters. When I think of lobsters, the first thing that comes to mind is food...not human beings.

When this is idea was introduced to my mind, I began to run away with it. I thought about the poem in a new light, and consequently came up with an individual idea about the poem. I started thinking that some of the actions in the poem could be compared to our government. How the government will take people out of their environment and place them in one that is nothing like what they are used to. They would do this just for their own, selfish purposes. For example, when they moved the Native Americans off their own land and into a polar opposite piece of land just so that more room could be used for settlers. This idea I got from a poem about lobsters...what a crazy world, poetry is.

5-Part Paragraph Mistakes

It's amazing how people can spend so long on something and still manage to misunderstand certain aspects of that topic. For the 5-part paragraph, we spent awhile learning the structure and detailed rules we have to use to create a good paragraph, but some small and silly mistakes were still commonly made. For example, people tended to forget to cite the quotes correctly (including me). They would forget to put pg. before the page number, or they would just forget the page number itself. Our class also tended to leave out a sentence here and there for commentary and the like. This caused the paper to become more chunky when read...it loses the flow that should be present in all good writing pieces.



I also committed these mistakes to a certain extent. I did a lot of stupid mistakes like spelling a word wrong here and leaving out the citation for the quote here(even though I swear I put it into at least one of the drafts), and other nonsense things that would be easy to fix if I read through it with enough attention to detail. Then there's the fact that I write waaaaaaaay too much. I do this with everything. I remember my fifth grade teacher talking to me about it once, but I never thought it would become such a negative thing. I think I do this because once I really get into what I'm writing, I don't stop until I've poured everything out of my head and into the paper. But that is no excuse, this is still a mistake and I need to work it out one way or another so as to make my papers the best possible.

My Week In Informal diction

There's been a bunch o' water fallin' from the sky, ya know, rain and stuff...it's awful! It gets all into my hair and my clothes and makes them all heavy and ugly feelin'. Then you hafta walk all round those stupid puddles that when you look at yourself in 'em your all squiggly and small lookin'. This is winter god damn it, where's all the snow? Where are all them kids whackin' people with snowballs? Sometimes i swear i would just as soon pack all my bags and set off for some warm place than sit here and get soaked through to my bones. But i guess that's what you're a gonna get, being a washingtonian and all.

And ya know what makes me mad? How it don't get any warmer when it starts rainin'...it's still so cold that every bone in my body is a shakin'. Even when ya walk into a warm building, its like the cold is glued to ya! Then there are those kids that act like the cold ain't got no effect on 'em so it's like they are rubbin' it in your face that you're cold and they aren't. Winter is supposed to be happy, but there ain't any happiness that's gonna happen with this stuff goin' on outside.

My 7th Grade Poems

In seventh grade I remember my block teacher telling us about this book of poems we had to make. There were going to be 20 different poems by the time we were done with it, stapled together nicely inside a beautiful binding that would be laminated and each poem would have unique pictures and drawings specific to that poem, sounds fun right? How about not...in truth, I absolutely hated this project! I never had liked poems, and it didn't help that I was no good at them anyways. To have to do 20 of them was torture for me! On top of that, we had to make each poem creative, you know, with the pictures and stuff.....again, that's not really my thing. But one persons opinion can't change a teacher's curriculum and I knew that, so I went along with everything and did the first few poems to the best of my ability (with a little grumbling and complaining but you know, at least I was doing it...).

I made it about halfway through all the poems we had to do, and then I pretty much stopped trying. I did enough on the poem to get a good grade, and that was it. I stopped being an over-achiever for that one moment, I stopped being a perfectionist, and just let go. That's when the weirdest thing happened....my poems actually got better! The last few I did were perfect in my mind! I was extremely proud and surprised, I just couldn't believe it! Wasn't I supposed to suck at these things? My teacher even used my poems as an example for the rest of the class, putting it up on the overhead for everyone to see...that's when I knew that they were good. After that incident, poems stopped being hard. I stopped hating them and began to enjoy creating them. I've written poem after poem since (teachers seem to really have a thing for them) and I don't think I've hated any of them. Maybe I'll even make a book of them when I grow up! Ya, probably shouldn't push my luck on that one....

Outiside Reading (The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver)

So, for my outside reading book I decided to read The Bean Trees. Being very sceptic when I first started reading it, I was pleasantly surprised with the very rural like language that's used. Also, I really like one of the main characters of the book, Taylor Greer. She's very quick witted which makes for very easy reading for me. But when the past of Turtle was mentioned, i almost cried. How can anyone abuse a helpless infant? Especially sexual abuse, that is the worst of them all! It makes me sick just to think about it.

I'm not sure what to think about the other character that the book switches to every other chapter though, it really confuses me. I know that Lou Ann and Taylor's stories are going to come together somehow, but I cant figure out just how. This makes the plot line a very fuzzy line to try and keep track of. This book reminds me of one a read awhile ago, Four Cups Of Tea is what I think it's called. That book also switched from many point of views during the book. The thing about that book though, is that from the very beginning of the book you knew how they were connected to one another. For me, this fact made it much easier to read than The Bean Trees.

For the project that my group has to do at the end of our book, we have decided to do a movie. It sounds like a lot of fun to make, and also a lot of fun to watch. The quality will probably be a little questionable, I'm not going to lie, but it will definitely be entertaining.

How To Kill a Mockingbird Pertains to My Life

You know when you were a little kid and your one greatest fear was the monster under the bed? Or how you wouldn't go on the monkey bars because you never had before and they were just so huge? It was this fear of the unknown that would keep you awake at night, and for me still does. Like what is going to happen in the future, what score I'm going to get on the test I just took, or how my friend is going to act when I tell her that I accidentally lost her favorite bracelet. That is the scariest thing, how the unknown has so many outcomes that could be bad or good, and you have no clue which one it will be. This idea is what my life has in common with the book To Kill a Mockingbird.



In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is terrified of Boo Radley. He is her unknown, her monster under the bed. He lives in a house, all by himself, and he never comes out. She has never seen what Boo looks like or what his personality is like, so she pictures the worst. The people that live in town aren't helping her fear either. They gossip about Boo, making up stories about how he goes around and peeps into peoples windows and freezes their flowers. The only reason i can think of that would justify these people's actions are that maybe they are scared too. The unknown causes a life long fear that seems to just be part of human nature. Because Boo lives all by himself and keeps to himself, he kick starts the fear of the unknown inside people, and gets disrespected and teased in return.

So in my life, the unknown is my Boo. And this book has taught me that maybe the unknown isn't as scary as it seems. It's not always as bad as it could be. Maybe if you get over your fear of the unknown and try something new, you'll find out you are good at it or that you like it. Just like when Scout found out that Boo was actually a really nice guy, and that he's just not as forthcoming about it as others. I will remember this lesson the next time this fear comes up, like the next time i here a growl from under the bed...

Sigh, Ms.Clear...

I remember the summer before eighth grade, right when you start freaking out about school, when i finally learned who my teachers were. Going through my schedule, i was thinking "science teacher - Ms.Burroughs, I heard she was nice...Mr. Pendergrast for orchestra again, can't wait, math - Mr. Clarke, everyone says he's funny in a weird way, that should be interesting, block is..." and then I nearly had I heart attack when I saw the teacher's name. Ms. Clear. This was the same teacher who when she asked her class last year to fill out a paper saying whether she should teach eighth grade next year or not, and not one person answered yes. This was the same person who made a racist comment to a student, and didn't know where Connecticut was on the map. Right at that moment, i knew this year was going to be a long one.

Now, this assessment was not wrong. The year was full of blunders and an unnecessarily large workload. Incidents that made for hilarious stories were also there too, like how the first day of school she had to count the days of the week on her fingers because the math that went along with "if you're absent one day you have one day to make up the work" was too difficult to fit into her head. It was definitely a hard year that made me incredibly happy when it was over (at the time that is). But when I look back on it, the most annoying part of the class (the huge mundane workload) was getting me more ready for high school then I thought it would.

For example, I remember reading this book called The Pearl. We worked on this short story for at least a month, finding 10 different ways to describe the theme and drawing at least 10 different pictures of those themes. I hated it, and I hated it with a passion. We worked on this material for a very long time, and I was personally finished with it about the second week (repetitiveness tends to bug me a lot). But what I have now realized is that we do this in high school too. We have been working on To Kill a Mockingbird for awhile, which is not too bad because I like this book a lot...but repetitiveness is not my favorite thing for any aspect of life. So I've just got to learn to like it, because this type of education isn't going away any time soon.

So I guess I should thank Ms.Clear for this and the very few other things (like the blog we also did in her class) she taught me that was useful quite useful for high school. Because of her, I have many funny stories and some high school knowledge in my head. She is my Boo Radley, in her own way....

All About Me (English Class Wise)

Hey! I just started this blog up for English, so here is the official introduction.

I did a blog last year at WMS, so I've pretty much figured out how my posts turn out. They tend to be long, so any reader who wants a short summary will NOT get that here. But my posts are long because they are detailed. By the time you finish reading one of my posts, you will feel like an expert on whatever topic the post was about. I do happen to love the gadgets part of my blog, so any time you visit it there will definitely be something to do. Though that is not the best reason to visit someone's blog, i believe that it makes the whole experience a lot more entertaining and a lot less mundane.

But since this blog is mainly for English, gadgets are not going to be the focus of this introduction, as English class is more important. This is because having the ability to use the English language well help a person in everyday life as well as school. It helps you to carry on a conversation, while it also helps you understand parts of your other subjects a lot easier as you might come across the vocabulary associated with a certain subject while reading a book. English also includes grammar and pieces of literature other than books, like poetry. But since there are so many components to this one class, it's difficult to remember the details to each thing over a long period of time. That's probably why you have to have four English credits for most college. Though it could also be because you can never know too much English. There are always something that will pop up that you might never have even heard of before. English is a wonderful class, and anyone who follows me is sure to learn a lot about it.