Author: Mackenzie

Brave New World Personal Response

Before we started reading this book my brother warned me it was a strange story. After finishing it I understand what he was telling me. This book had many things That were messed up in it. From the time when scientists were conditioning the children to hate flowers and books, to the time when John Savage started whipping himself and a woman. There were many times that this book made me question what I was reading and why I was reading it. Even though this book had many… strange events it also had some interesting things as well. My favourite part in this book was when the three men; Bernard, Helmholtz, and John the savage all were together talking to the controller Mustapha Mond. I liked this part in the book because after questioning why all of these rules were put in place in this society, we finally got some answers. One specific part in this book really stuck to me, when Mond was talking with John and Helmholtz about love stories. John and Helmholtz wanted stories and movies to be more passionate like Othello, but Mond persisted saying:

“Our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel-and you can’t make tragedies without social instability; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; there safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they are blissfully, ignorant of passion and old age; there plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers, to feel strongly about; there so condition that they practically can’t help behaving as they are to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.” (p. 193-194)

After reading this I realized why the world in this book was the way it was, Mond made me realize that even thought this sounds like a horrible place to us from the outside, from the inside it might be better than we think. Even though the citizens don’t get to experience things that give us pleasure like passion and love they do have something that we do not, they never have to worry about anything really, all of their problems have been solved, and they just live their life. After reading thing book, I am questioning what a perfect world would be like; a world with equip ups and downs or a world with no passion and choice.

 

PW #4

I have always thought that my personal project was going to be extremely difficult. I’m not saying that it’s super easy I’m just saying it’s easier than I thought it would be. I’m doing my personal project on an animation about plastic pollution and how it’s affecting see life. My animation is about how a plastic bottle cap travels from the manufacturers to being dumped into the ocean (And consumed by animals) then ending up back on a beach being cleaned up by volunteers. I was hoping that with this I could inspire more people to help fix the plastic crisis that’s going on in our lives today. I have always been particularly interested in plastic pollution and I have done many projects about it. So far I have completed part A, the planning stage. Right now I’m working on part B&C which is applying skills and reflecting stages. I’m supposed to complete this project by the 28th of February, which is 10 days from now. My advisory teacher is Ms. Moroz and she has been helping me a huge amount with my report and what I should be including in it. So far I’m at almost 2000 words and six pages and I’m quite proud of it. I’m excited to get it finished and upload it.

 

Personal Writing #5

I’ll be honest with you, I completely forgot about this blog post. So here I am, writing it late, and having nothing to say. I have already done many other posts with things like poems, stories, about me, and others that I can’t remember. But I feel like I have nothing else to say. I always find it difficult to come up with a good topic to write about so today im not going to write about anything in particular. I’m just going to ramble on as I please. Yesterday I didn’t do anything interesting either. I worked both Saturday and Sunday and talking about that seems too boring. There also hasn’t been anything interesting happening in my life, it’s been kind of boring to be honest. Mr. McKnight wanted me to write about how I grew up in a barn (which to be clear, I didn’t). I grew up in a normal house like everyone else but that also seems too boring to talk about. I tend to read other peoples blog posts to get ideas but nothing really stood out to me. Right now in English we are reading Brave New World which to me is kind of weird. I can’t tell you if I particularly like the book, but I’m not saying I don’t like it either. I’m also reading a book right now called You’ll Be The Death of Me which one of my friends lent to me. I’ve never been much of a reader, and have read few books in my life. Which is probably why I suck at spelling… Anyway, I’ve reached my word limit so that’s my blog post for today.

 

IRJE – Brave New World

Reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, we learn about a futuristic world in the year A.F. 632. Humans have discovered a way to mass produce themselves, but still keep people happy in this Utopian world. The writer tells us how humans are divided into levels of status: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, each of which are designed to do specific jobs to maintain peace in their perfect society. Alphas are designed to do intelligent jobs whereas Deltas and Epsilons are designed to do the unpleasant jobs. Part of this process involves giving better nutrition to the growing Alphas and worse to the Epsilons, allowing the Alphas to develop better brains. They also change the environment that these growing brains are subjected to to alter how they interact with the world when they grow up. In this quote it describes hypnopaedia, a process of using sentence repetition to sleeping children, from infancy to teach them what is a right and wrong in their society. This quote tells us how children are taught that their work is better than other group’s work:

“At the end of the room a loud-speaker projected from the wall. The director walked up to it and pressed a switch. ‘… All wear green,’ Said a soft but very distant voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, ‘And Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. There are too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they were black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.‘ There was a pause; then the voice began again. ‘Alpha children wear Gray. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever I’m really awfully glad I’m Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid.” (p. 22)

This is an important quote in the book because it explains how these children are under constant mind control, training them to adopt these social standards from a very young age. This explains the status of each of the five groups and how they interact with each other.

Daniel T. Willingham Book Reflection

When I read chapter 5 of Outsmart Your Brain by Daniel T. Willingham, I learned many new thing that will definitely help me in the future with my comprehension of texts and different strategies that will help me work efficiently. I enjoyed how easy his book was for me to read and understand, he made sense in what he was trying to tell us, and he made it very easy for us to learn new tips and tricks to help us in the future. He also told us what we shouldn’t do when reading, which is very helpful for me as I am not a confident reader.

The three biggest thing I learned from him are 1: reading and highlighting doesn’t work (unless it’s a topic that you already know very well). This surprised me when I read it because I usually always highlight the important information in texts and I thought that it helped me. His response after telling us this was that “how can you be sure you are highlighting the most important information” (p. 93) that’s when I realized unless its plainly written out as this is the most important information you never actually know if you are highlighting and remembering the correct information. 2: Taking notes with reading will help you stay focused and on task, it will also help you in remembering what happened in the text. This could be done on a laptop or on paper (Willingham suggested to use a laptop since it’s convenience with searching on the internet for words you aren’t familiar with) This is useful to me because I get distracted very easily when reading a book (especially if it’s a school related book) and if I start taking notes while I read this might help me focus and actually understand what I am reading. Lastly 3: After each subheading right a summary to remind you about the chapter. This seems very useful to me if you have a test coming up and you need to read part of a text. Writing a summery makes it so that you can retain the text better in your memory and that understand it better. You should write the summery about these three things, “an important qualification of the summery, a comment on how this section relates to the main section and, an implication of the summary for something else the author concluded.” (p. 99)

There was also many other things that I learned like how you shouldn’t plunge into texts without preparation, how to use SQ3R and many other techniques, that speed reading doesn’t work, how strategies with reading is a thing and how its important, and many more useful things that I will use in the future when reading a text, either to study, or just for fun.

Personal Writing #3 – (Written by Grade 6 Me)

Once there was a man

Who wore a scarf with pride

The scarf was red and kept him warm

Without his scarf he cried

 

He had an English major

A brain full of things to write

This man had a name you see

His name was mr Macknight

 

One dark and gloomy day

The room seemed really weird

And then he cried, “For heaven’s sake!

My scarf has disappeared!”

 

The children looked around all day

But no red scarf was seen

He cried and cried and cried away

His actions were profound

 

It’s been three weeks and he was sad

The scarf seemed gone for good

He would not smile or laugh at all

Though try the students would

 

One morning while he looked around

He saw it on the ceiling

It really was his red red scarf

“Oh joy” he said with feeling

 

He danced around and came to school

The kids were so surprised

To see him acting really happy

He stood so tall with pride

 

 

Reflection for Term 1 Assessment

Looking back at my term 1 summative assessment I should work on two things: I should work on reading over the passages carefully to make sure my ideas are accurate and that they align with the text. This is to make sure my information is as accurate as possible. The second thing I need to work on is my spelling errors which is a constant problem accruing in my writing. To fix this I should read over my writing slower and should practice more with my vocabulary. In this assessment I also learned how to write a comparison essay which is useful.

 

 

IRJE

I have just started reading this new book called The Cousins. It was written by Karen M. McManus about three cousins who are invited by their grandmother, who they haven’t met before, to work at her island hotel during the summer. I just started reading this book and so far I know that the grandmother, Mildred Story, removed all of her four children from her life and will. Ever since then her children have been trying to figure out a way to get back on the grandmothers good side again. The day Mildred suddenly sends the invitation to all of her grandchildren (protagonists: Aubrey, Jonah, and Milly) their parents are eager to send them along. But the longer the cousins stay at the hotel working, the more they find out about their messed up family’s past. This quote is one of the protagonists (Milly) talking about what she knows of her family’s past:

My grandfather died when mom was a senior in high school. Two years later, Mildred disowned all of her children. She cut them off both financially and personally, with no explanation except for a single sentence letter sent to weeks before Christmas through her lawyer, a man named Donald Camdon who’d known mom and her brothers their entire lives: you know what you did. 

This quote is great to start off with because it is telling the readers that there is more to the story then what we know and it’s foreshadowing for the rest of the book. Reading this makes people Intrigued about what could have happed to make Mildred so upset that she would disown her own children, which makes the reader eager to continue to read the book.

Utopian Society

A Utopian world is a world that would be “perfect” as people would like to say. Many have dreamed of this, a place with no problems. To me a perfect world with no problems would become boring, nothing in your life to keep it interesting. Sometimes problems in your life can end up being good things that change your life for the better. Let’s say you were just about to take a very important test, you have been studying for weeks, but you are very anxious that you might get a bad mark, something that wouldn’t happen in a perfect world. After the test though, you discover you did amazingly well with the best marks in the class. The feeling of nervousness before the test made your good grades even more rewarding. Without the fear you felt before your test, getting a good grade (which you would get automatically) would not be rewarding. Even though things might affect you negatively at first, in the long run they might lead to amazing accomplishments that you wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

The truth is having a perfect life would become so boring that you wouldn’t be able to achieve anything significant and special. To do that you would need to put in hard work which isn’t exactly a perfect life style. My ideal society would be one in which everyone would have access to an ideal life, but they would still have to work hard to achieve it, making it accessible to everyone, but not guaranteed.

Personal Writing #2

The snow outside is cold and white,

like petals falling from the sky.

So glad to be inside tonight,

with all my friends that have come by.

 

Christmas cheer has flood the room,

with presents under the tree.

Desserts we’re eager to consume,

with lots of holiday glee.

 

So gather around the tree tonight,

and sing the holiday song.

For its a golly good sight,

for anyone who tags along.

IRJE #3

The book Love and Olives by Jenna Evans Welch is a fiction book that I have been reading for a while now. The novel is about a girl named Liv (Olive) who went to Greece (Santorini) to meet with her father after years of separation. The book will frequently refer back to old memories that Liv and her father lived through together, and I think that it an important part of Liv trying to let her dad back into her life. This quote is one of those memories that she is reminiscing about:

There was a bench in Grant Park that should have had our names on it because we spent so many hours there. I’d bring a colouring book and a pack of crayons, and he’d bring the sudoku puzzle he was working on, but he almost never worked on it then. Instead we sat side by side, silent and taking it all in. He said that there are two types of silence, the silence that is empty and the silence that is full, and its never hard to figure out which one your dealing with. (p. 279)

I think this is very important for Liv because it was a happy memory of her life when she was younger with her father. It tells us as the readers that they had a really strong and healthy relationship and could just sit together in a “silence that is full” meaning it was never awkward between the two of them.

 

IRJE #4 (Dual Version)

In my book Love and Olives by Jenna Evans Welch the main character Liv is still visiting her father in Santorini. Liv was forced by her mom to spend her summer break to hopefully connect with her father after their divorce. During her stay she hasn’t been the most open minded with the idea of having her father back in her life. Initially Liv had disregarded the thought of seeing her dad again but the more time she spends in Santorini the more she starts to warm up to her father. In Liv’s past her and her father would dream of discovering the lost city of Atlantis together. When livs dad moved back to Santorini she felt abandoned and tries to forget the thought of Atlantis and her dad. In this quote her father is doing a documentary about the Atlantis, you can see that even thought she has turned a blind eye to Atlantis she still has some longing for it.

“He hadn’t looked at his notes once. He hadn’t even paused. And he’d quoted Pleto like he was someone he met up with once a week for coffee. Listening to him I latched on to every word, every rise and crackle of his voice. He had completely sucked me in.” (p.230)

 This is an important part because liv had always tried to push away her feeling toward her father. It his paragraph you can see some feelings of trust “I latched on the every word, every rise and crackle of his voice”, and her feeling of letting go toward her past thoughts “He had completely sucked me in”. I feel like after this important paragraph she finally started to trust her father and became more optimistic towards her new life, including her father again.

I am still continuing reading the book Love and Olives by Jenna Evans Welch where the main character Liv was forced by her mom to spend the summer break in Santorini to reunite with her father. Liv used to have a good relationship with her father, they would dream of one day discovering Atlantis together. After the divorce her father had moved away and they haven’t seen each other for years. This broke little Liv’s heart and ever since then Liv had shut her father and their shared love for Atlantis away. Liv had tried to forget her loving memories with her dad, because she felt betrayed that he left her behind. However, the longer she was visiting her father on Santorini, the more she realized that being around him made her aware of how much of an influence he had on her.

“Listening to him, I latched on to every word, every rise in crackle of his voice. He had completely sucked me in. One minute I’d been sweating it out with the rest of the residents with modern Thira, and the next I was transported back in time to the moment when it had all changed. I had heard the panic of the Minoans waking in their beds, confused, then running for their lives. I’d smelled the sulfur. I’d felt the impending rush and terror of the tsunami. I’d been there.” (p. 230)

In this quote you can see that even though Liv had closed her heart towards her father and their love of Atlantis she still has hope to return to her childhood adoration of her father and the shared dreams they had.

IRJE #2

I am still continuing the book called Love and Olives by Jenna Evans Welch. Since I am further along into the book it has really started to take shape. The main character Liv is now in Santorini to visit her father after being apart from him for most of her life. Things are awkward and unfamiliar but with the friendly help of other new characters like Theo, Ana and ‘Geoffrey the Canadian’ she is getting used to this chaotic summer. Something I have noticed in this book about Liv is that she is very creative and artsy, she always finds a way to create art in any situation. I like this about Liv because I also like art and the idea of creating something out of nothing.

Most kids grew up learning colours like red, yellow, orange, and green. I grew up knowing colour names like burnt umber, sap green, and Prussian blue. (p.92)

This quote was interesting to me because it really shows the passion Liv has for art. It is telling readers that even at a young age she has always loved art, and it also lets us get to know her personality as well.

Personal Writing #1

I wake up to the sudden sound of my alarm clock. I drowsily roll over to turn it off. The soft taps of the rain hitting my window and the warmth of my bed is all I can think about. I lay there in peace, as though I have no care in the world. A few minutes pass and I suddenly hear my name, “Lisha come down, your going to be late”, my mother’s stern voice calls. I pick myself up from my bed, feeling like I am made of bricks, and slowly make my way downstairs. “You have to walk to school today, ok?” my mother says while she rushes around the house frantically. “And for the rain, I bought you a new rain jacket yesterday so you won’t get wet.” I look down at my cereal rubbing my eyes. “What about after school?” I ask, “Will you be able to get me or should I walk back?” “Ya, that would probably make things easier. Thank you” she says with relief hugging me. I nod and she rushes off again. “Ok I have to get going, see you after school!” she calls across the room as she slams the front door. I sit there in silence for a few seconds before I realize the time and decide to get moving.

I step off the front porch closing the door behind me. I see cars full of busy families rushing to school and work, hoping to get there in time. I also see the rain pouring from the sky and making puddles on the ground. I sigh as I turn around and go back inside. “I’ll go to school tomorrow” I say as I slip myself back into bed.

“We Shall Not Grow Old” Comparison

After watching the movie We Shall Not Grow Old it really made me realize the true horrors of war. For example when reading a book like All Quiet on the Western Front and Soldiers Home you wouldn’t get the same feeling that this movie gave you. This movie showed real footage of World War I and the real people that suffered through it. In my opinion having the real footage shows people proof that these events are really as bad as people say, unlike books were there isn’t any evidence of war besides made up characters in a war-like scenario. The movie We Shall Not Grow Old really made me realize the trauma of war and why these men would come home feeling isolated and out of place, seeing bodies of the people you once knew and talked to would have been horrifying and unimaginable.

We Shall Not Grow Old, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Soldiers Home all have the same thing in common, the fact that once the surviving soldiers came home after fighting the war they never fully settled and most became lost souls.

IRJE #1

For my independent reading journal I am reading Love and Olives by Jenna Evans Welch. From what I have read so far the book is about a young girl named Liv (Olivia) Varanakis. Liv lives in Seattle with her Mom, her step dad James and her little brother. Liv’s real father picked up his stuff when she was just eight, and fled one day to Santorini to investigate his true passion for finding the lost city of Atlantis. In this quote it is talking about Liv’s father and her relationship before he moved to Greece.

His eyes are bright, because he’s talking about our shared love of Atlantis. Child Me is hanging on to every word, because back then I wasn’t just Olive. I was indiana Olive, the world-famous explorer…..she always had her dad next to her.

until she didn’t.  (P.2-3)

This is surprising to me because reading this everyone would say they had a perfect father daughter relationship (“she always had her dad next to her”), which is clearly not the case since now he is out of the picture (“until she didn’t”)

Comparison between Soldier’s Home and All Quiet on the Wester Front

 

Soldiers Home by Ernest Hemingway and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque have many similarity’s and differences between the two main characters Harold Krebs and Paul Baumer and what they experienced in their life.

Harold Krebs was a soldier from World War 1. Krebs and Paul Baumer were fighting from different sides of the war but ended up sharing many things, for example, Paul and Krebs were both school boys, meaning they were both young. Yet the biggest difficulty they shared was the isolating loneliness after coming back from the war, the feeling that they were not like the rest of the people in their town/village or they where not their old selves. “I am not myself here.” (Page 75) was said by Paul when he got home. It’s not that they didn’t want to be its just after fighting in the war they changed and could not go back to their old selves. Another similarity is the way that the authors symbolized the loss of love in the characters’ lives. After being in the war and seeing so many of their close friends being killed they probably couldn’t take it and decided to suppress their emotions. This was most likely a defence mechanism that soldiers had after the war to make sure they wouldn’t be hurt again, and so the the whole aspect of war would be easier if they couldn’t feel any emotional pain. Krebs says to his mother when confronted about love “I do not love anybody.” (Page 6). And for Paul, he shares the same thoughts “I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear.” (Page 139)

Though the books were about the same message, they had quite a few differences. Like the fact that Krebs had actually enjoyed the war and the excitement it had where as for Paul it was the opposite. After Paul gets on the train to go back home he says “Suddenly i become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone” (page 72) where as for Krebs it was “He did not want to leave Germany. He did not was to come home.” (Page 3)  Soldiers Home had also a more religious side to  “god has some work for everyone to do,” his mother said….”I’m not in His Kingdom,” Krebs said.” (Page 6) some more important differences in this book are the status of the characters and their families, in Soldiers Home they made it clear that Krebs’ family wanted to impress others in their town and cared about the girls Kerbs would be with (the nice girls vs the bad girls) in one part Kerbs mother said “you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their was to being really a credit to the community.” (Page 6) In this passage, she is Implying that Krebs should be more involved in their community just like the boy named Charley.

In conclusion, when you compare the short story Soldiers Home to All Quiet on the Western Front, you will realize that even though they are different books about different people who fight on different sides, the writers created many similarities and differences for these two characters.

My Personal Response To ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

I enjoyed All Quiet on the Western Front more then i thought I would have, this was because of the way Erich Maria Remarque portrays the characters. It shows the readers how those who fought in these wars weren’t just soldiers, they where common young people. This was made obvious when Paul Baumer (the main character) says “ An hour passes. What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.” (P. 31) Another instance that the writer shows realistic emotions through the characters is when “Tiedjen, who called for his mother- a big bear of a fellow who, with wild eyes full of terror, held off the doctor from his bed with a dagger until he collapsed.” (P. 31) This tells us that Franz and Tiedjen, along with many other young boys at the time, never wanted to die in battle, and the majority were very scared of death.

The book gives a different and more educational perspective on the war. It explains to the readers how the war really damaged and scarred everyone who was a part of it, meaning family, friends, and people who experienced the war first handed. It told the story of the main character Paul and his classmates and what they experienced when they went to war. When you read this book you will notice that the soldiers never fought like how normal fiction war story’s would, this is because this story is focused on the more realistic side of the war, and how in real life it is never the good guys who always win. This is shown at the end of the book when describing Paul, “He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”

In conclusion I think ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ represents a more realistic picture of what war was like and how it effected all who where involved. I enjoyed reading how Erich Maria Remarque represented the emotions of the characters.