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I am sitting in class when the teacher at the front of the room tells me that we are going to do a progect, where we research a topic and then present about it. This is a normal thing that happens in basically every class. I had thought that what all teachers expected the same thing from all presentations: you stand infront of the room with your presentations and you try not to read off every word from the presentation. But that isn't the case. As in writing you can convey a topic in a presentation in different ways. The Pechakucha style presentation challenges us to condense our thoughts because the presentation is only twenty seconds per silde. Many times when I would present I wouldn't practice what I wanted to say bcause I alwasy thought that if I have a good grasp of my topic I won't have to practice. With a Pechakucha presentation it encourages me, especially to practice what I want to say because I have to get to the point. Something that makes other presentations boring to me is when the presentor either repeats the same point in different ways, or goes on a tangent that does't relate to the topic. The Pechakucha persentation will help me to grow in ways of being more entertaining and sticking to my topic. http://www.pechakucha.org/faq
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eSuccess is something I fear. In society success is based off the approval of others which in some ways is a good thing but in others it is a bad thing. A year from now I will be sitting in a college class paving the way for my future career. I will have strapped the blinders of a race horse for I now have the idea that in order to be successful I must go to college, get a job, get married, buy a house, and have children. That is the case for that is what everyone does, it's the social norm. I'm not saying i don't want that but I fear leaving and going to college for the American School system screws over it's students after they receive their high school diploma. There is loads of pressure on me to pick the right major that not only will make me happy but can make me a significant amount of money so that I will be able to pay off my student loans. This is a tragedy for I am a good student but now I am being punished for wanting to further my education. In class over the week we spoke of success and how the lack of success what makes a tragedy. When the community doesn't accept a person for something they cannot accept. https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature Over the week we talked a lot about tragedies. Initially I thought tragedies, although I have heard it in many sentences before, were only meant for stories. I thought that tragedies were only found in Shakespeare not in everyday occurrences. But you can find tragedies in everything... although that isn't a positive epiphany to have. But it's true bad things happen to everyone that could be classified as tragic. Although some are less tragic than others based on perspective. Some situations are tragic for the outsiders viewing the problems unfold. Although in others a tragedy occurs and only the people involved. Perception is key. Now learning that terrible things happen to everyone isn't the take home message I got from this week. How a writer is able to write about a tragic incident teaches you more than just about the situation. You can learn about the standards in society, the economic status, governmental rules and more. I can also learn from how the protagonist learns form the tragic event. https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature This week Melissa and I worked together to bring to an end the project that we had been working on for many weeks. On Wednesday we concluded our work by presenting it to the class. We both felt fairly confident that we knew what we were talking about during our presentation. Something that made us nervous was how we were going to capture the attention of our audience. Although I had wished that we had practiced before hand we were still able to portray our ideas in a way that made sense. It felt rewarding to work so hard on a presentation and then for present all of the information we had just learned. By the end of the presentation I didn't even care what grade I got because, I felt as though I had proved to myself that I had learned something new and I was able to form what I learned into words. Some people can know a lot of information but when it's their turn to teach the information they know they cannot form words that make sense to their audience. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-become-a-good-presenter-public-speaking-2014-12 So what? Why is anything is anything we do in school important. Over the week when beginning to start our presentations we were asked to pay strong attention to the "so what" of what we were going to say. But why don't all presentations I sit through everyday focus on the so what? I sit in math learning the derivative of a square and in my mind I think "well that's some interesting information but why should I care?". I understand that when standing in front of a group of people, spouting out information it is important to focus on the so what. The "so what" keeps the audience's attention. A good presenter doesn't want their audience to feel the way I feel in math class. They want the audience to be interested in what the presenter has to be said. But My math teacher has a hard job, for even if he were to focus on the so what, he probably still wouldn't be able to capture the attention of a room full of teenageres, who lets be honest most of them would rather be anywhere else. My goal for next week when presenting is to not be like my math teacher but to engage my audience in my presentation on the elements of fiction. https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/centers/oralcommunication/guides/how-to-engage-your-audience-and-keep-them-with-you Characters play a big role in showing the reader the ideas the writer intended to show. Throughout the week Melissa and I learned about Characterization and how every character even the minor characters are important. I then used these ideas to think about my piece of literature book A Prayer For Owen Meanie by John Irving. I notice how much work is put into the round characters such as Owen Meany, or Johnny Wheelwright. The writer brings many different emotions and descriptions in order to bring the characters to life. By the end of the story I felt as if the whole thing had actually happened. While some characters are more present to the story than others, for some characters just their existence in the story makes a difference. Like the angel of death, or reverend Merrill Lewis they are influential to the story. The angel of death solidifies Owen's faith when appearing at the head of Johnny's mom's bed. While reverend Merrill Lewis mostly shows up at significant ceremonies, weddings, funerals, or Christmas gatherings. This week opened my eyes to a new element of literature that I tend to over look when I would read in the past. http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson800/Characterization.pdf When my dad was around my age he read A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving and it easily became his favorite book. When I say that John Irving was on the list of authors with a significance in literature I choose the same book. Monday night this week I was sitting in the kitchen with my dad as he was making dinner and we were discussing the book. My dad said to me "I've never understood the significance of the armadillo that Johnny and Owen play with, it's a weird toy to be found in New Hampshire". I agreed with him that is is a weird toy but I told him "I think the armadillo represents their friendship. It's weird and unexpected, they both cherish it so much, and when Johnny's mom dies Owen removes the claws of the armadillo to show how their friendship was crippled but not destroyed". My dad sat down and said "huh, thank you". I could see in his eyes that he had made connections to the book. He then goes on to say that he had read the book years ago and some parts have never made sense until just in that moment. I was proud of myself for being able to help my dad understand his favorite book. This proved to myself that I was growing as a reader for I used to read for surface level meanings and take everything that the author gave me as just another piece in the entertainment pie, but now I am seeing things in books that I never would have even looked for. http://literarydevices.net/symbolism/ This week we gave a big emphasis on the comparison of literature to pieces of art and the differences of literature and stories. Before this week I did not know the difference between a piece of literature and a story but after reading an article in class about how works of literature are made into movies the connection clicked in my mind. A work of literature tells a story but adds background and makes the reader consider missing parts, make connections that aren't obvious. A story is something anyone can make for they are more to the point and are more focused on entertainment. This thought made me think more when back to my sixth grade class, during a writing workshop our prompt for the day was to think of an object and describe it without telling us what it is. This prompt came back many times in my life for last year in my creative writing class I found myself describing what a tree was without saying "my object is a tree". When looking at art pieces we were told to not try to view the entire thing but to pick out different perspectives. This was helpful for me because unlike reading and writing I find no fascination in looking at a painting for hours. This also helped me to be more interested in art works for I could look at the piece of art in a way that brought entertainment to me. This exercise connects to reading literature (for this class is not AP art its AP literature and compositions) in the way that you don't have to view a book in every single way and not everyone will view the piece of literature the same way as you but if you're able to back up your claims then you can't be wrong. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/literary-novels-_n_3790198.html Looking back on this week I saw that I didn't grow through the traditional classroom style that most teachers use. But I grew by interacting with my peers trying to complete our summer reading essay. In my group there are four of us desperately trying to get a good grade on the essay; although we quickly grew frustrated for our ideas, and writing styles seemed to clash. We found that whoever was typing a sentence the other three in the group would tend to micromanage their work. This frustrated me for I felt that we couldn't get anything done. About half way through the week we found that we were able to discuss the book in more productive ways. We chose three chapters from How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster and then discussed examples from our other two books, the Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid, and The Fall by Albert Camus that relates to the chapters. I found that discussing the book actually made my understanding of the books clearer. Although it took more time to write down what we were saying, a lot of thought was put into each sentence written in the essay. I also found that being passive does not help the group or the quality of the paper. Sharing your ideas helps the whole group, for others may not have noticed an idea that I had. http://www.speaking.pitt.edu/student/groups/smallgrouptips.html I have done the same thing with every poem I have ever read, until we read and digested the poem of the week the Eagle. With all other poems I have read the poem to comprehend it and then set it down because to be honest poems just never interested me. But with The Eagle we read it many times and each time I got a different meaning from the poem. The first time I read it I related it to the current situation in our government with words such as "crooked hands" making me think of a corrupt government. The second time we read it I thought of it as an actual eagle getting weaker. But the third time I read it I connected it to a monarch or someone very influential who got to where he was by cheating. As the week went on I realized that I did the same thing with reading. I never read to get a deeper meaning from a book but to finish the book or to entertain myself. As we were working on our comparison essays for our summer reading books I started to be able to connect different symbols in the Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid and it felt as if a whole world opened up in my idea of the book. I was intrigued to see how the other people in my group were able to do the same thing. In the beginning of the week when we had to answer the questions about the both of our books we had a difficult time being able to answer some of the questions, but as the week went on we were able to go more into depth about the thoughts in our minds. http://www.fno.org/mar97/deep.html |
AuthorLindsay is thinking in AP Lit Archives
March 2017
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