Starting off this week with the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder spoken word piece kinda set the stage for this week. When I am doing presentations I really want them to be the best that they could be. I don’t like presenting and not knowing the material I am talking about or having a presentation that is just thrown together. I know it’s not to the point of OCD but I can understand where you want to do something until it feels right, I get that from being a dancer where perfection is something unattainable yet always what is wanted. I do feel happy with how our presentation turned out . I was very appreciative of the time that we were given to work on our presentation. Emmy and I at first had struggled to pull our ideas together, but we did figure out what we wanted to say. During the time we had to spend in class we were able to figure out how we wanted to structure it and then we each chose an element to focus on what exactly we were going to put on the slides to help guide us. Watching the other presentations was really helpful and cool. While people may have had the same element of fiction each group chose to have a different approach of how they looked at the elements themselves and how they went about presenting to the class. I found it very helpful to see others present before Emmy and I did because we were able to see what we liked, didn’t like, and what needed improvement. Being able to hear all the presentations also allowed me to realized that every author has a different approach to creating their literary works as well as how each reader has a different experience while reading said works. I am excited to see how I can look at books differently now, even though I have learned about literary elements before. Well maybe perfection is attainable....
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This week we started off with a really cool spoken word poem called Heaven or Whatever. This was such a cool spoken word piece, and it made me realize just how much something you say can have an impact on another person. I don’t usually like listening to things because I have difficulty processing things fast enough to realize the weight of their words. When there is a visual component it is a lot easier to feel the weight of the speaker’s words. Moving on in the week we were focused on our ‘What is Literature?’ project. While most of the week was spent getting our thoughts together, but we did have questions about how we should format our presentations. After it was explained, I feel like what we are saying can have so much more impact than when we first started the project. It is not just what we say but how we choose to say it, and the formatting that is used. You do not want to just have the information spewed at you without any thing that would engage you. Next week we are going to watch a TED Talk about how to present in a way that engages our audience. I am really excited to work on presentation skills because they are very valuable for life. Watching the TED Talk will also be very helpful because TED Talk speakers always engage their audience. I’m looking forward to being able to present next week and see others present. Don't underestimate the power of words!
This week we spent the majority of our class time workshopping for our ‘What is Literature?’ projects. I am working with Emmy and we chose to look at characterization and symbolism. The characterization paper I found very interesting being able to learn about the different ways authors chose to present information about characters. Most likely you are going to learn character traits and such information from an indirect presentation, allowing us to see their traits through their actions. A direct presentation is useful, but it does not make the piece of literature very interesting. When I was reading my SSR book, A Clockwork Orange, I did notice that Alex does not explicitly say that he is a bad malchick or that he was a changed malchick after he was released from jail. Once you start reading and get farther into the book you begin to see that Alex and his droogs doing horrendous activities. By seeing his actions, and not reading he “was a bad boy” or “he was a good boy,” I was able to infer that Anthony Burgess-the author-used direct presentation. The symbolism portion of the project is a little more difficult to grasp. I don’t want to go overboard when I’m looking for symbolism, but I also don’t want to go under board. I think the problem that I’m having is that I am afraid that I am going to find too many symbols so I just take everything literally. Hopefully when we are done with the project, I will be better at finding symbols and not scared of them, but as of right now I am still slightly scared of them. This is an accurate depiction of me looking for symbolism.
I feel like we really didn’t do much this week just because of the 2 hour delay on Tuesday and no school of Thursday. I know that we did do a lot during the four times we met for class, but the nine hours of lazing around completely overshadowed over the 28 hours of actual learning done this week. The things that I did learn about while analyzing the poem Bright Star we focused a lot on perspective. When you are reading something the point of view of the speaker really allows you to see what the author wants you to see. The book can be first person or third person, it could offer you a biased, limited view-point or an unbiased, all-knowing view-point. While reading A Clockwork Orange, I was able to notice that the book is told from Alex’s perspective so you see these horrible acts being committed by a young person and you are reminded by the slang that this story is coming from a young person’s mind. Another thing that really helped me see perspective in a different way is finding what person in the story you connect with. There are three different people in the Bright Star, trying to figure out where I fit into the three people (the star, the speaker, or the speaker’s love) really helped to put things into perspective. Usually I will look for qualities in character I like to equate them to myself because I desperately want to be like them, but now I can find exactly what qualities I have that make me an active player in the story. So I guess that in starting I was not correct in saying we did nothing, but it just felt like we did nothing. I was really grateful for the fog, but I think that it stuck around in my brain. Hopefully the fogginess will disperse so next week I can feel like we actually did stuff in school. |
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March 2017
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