The theme that I have chosen to write about for Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is race relations. We chose our themes by looking at our text logs, deciding which one of the themes we wrote about over the summer stood out to us, and which we wrote about well. I had a hard time choosing between childhood innocence and race relations, however I felt more inclined to choose race relations since it felt more closer to me, and perhaps would be easier to write about. Then we chose our six quotes/examples from To Kill Mockingbird, and you abetted to a student to change the last quote since it wasn't a major part of their theme, and was extraneous. One of my examples is Frances calling Atticus a nigger lover. In an article by J. Richard Cohen, "Hate crimes are a national problem", a teenage boy ran over a black man, just because of his skin color. The boy told his friend after in a phone conversation, "ran that nigger over", so as you can see this racist word is used constantly in the world today. We followed an example of another student's essay to follow a cohesive staircase through sentences we write in the introduction paragraph. The staircase starts with a hook that draws the reader into the essay we are going to write, for the reader not to be reading the essay insipidly I wrote the hook about one of the golden rules, treat others as we like to be treated, since the people of this world usually do not ever follow this rule, and isn't strictly applied to racism. When we started to write about our story background, I specified this towards a racist view, explaining how people will hate another person's race to act horrible to others to whom they do not know. This is shown in Arizona's immigration law passed by Gov. Brewer according to Ross Miletich's article "Arizona Immigration Law is Racist and Wrong". Many will be placed in poverty because the law states one cannot shelter an illegal immigrant knowingly. Poverty will rise in Arizona to people the Governor will never know. After we wrote our story backgrounds you taught us about writing a thesis, and how the verb in the prompt, develop, is very important and would be useful to use the word in our thesis. I wrote about how Lee develops the theme through the childrens' eyes. I believe that the essay I will write will have a connection to childhood innocence, even though it is about race relations because Lee develops the theme of race relations by having the children go through different hardships, increasingly advanced, throughout the novel. After we passed our introduction paragraph to our partners, it was sort of funny since we both gave each other proficient in our relevant story background. He wrote that I needed to add more information, while I said he needed to take out information. However, I do agree with him since I only talked about the children going through Tom Robinson's trial. This week we learned about the different parts of an introduction paragraph, and followed the outline you laid out for us to write about a theme of To Kill a Mockingbird.
