Sep. 12-16: LOTF Ch.1

Also on Monday as we began reading we began discussing about the introduction paragraph to Golding's novel, The Lord of the Flies and its diction.  Some phrases I took a not of was 'sand was think', 'heat hit him', 'ripped of each stockings and garters', 'kicked off his shoes', 'skull-like coconuts', 'forest sliding over his skin', 'snake-clasp', 'lugged off', 'dazzling beach', and 'green shadows'.  I wrote a lot of diction paragraphs about different novels because I was in Mr. Title's class which wasn't too insipid, so I can wrap my head around diction fairly well.  Then we discussed how Golding establishes his characters, Piggy and Ralph.




One way we discussed about how Golding established his characters by the two different personalities of two main characters.  Piggy is established by his friendliness and curiosity, but Ralph has a sort of gauche nonchalant  personality.  When Golding introduces Piggy's name, Piggy said he didn't want Ralph to call him Piggy, however since Ralph found it so funny about Piggy's name, the name Piggy stayed with Ralph even when Piggy had said he did not like it.  We, as readers, don't even get to know Piggy's real name.  Although Ralph laughs jokingly, Piggy is hurt.  In schools, children are teased, and those who tease, the bullies, feel name calling is just a joke.  However, some children are immensly hit with this name calling so much they are brought to depression and even suicide, and people still deal with it today.
Next in the story, Ralph had found a conch shell and had blown in it to see if there are others on the island.  Other children arrived, however the most peculiar was the introduction of Jack who in Golding's physical appearance description is nearly opposite to Ralph.  We wrote down some words Golding uses to describe Ralph and Jack.

Mr. Keating told us the six tools of characterization:

Appearance

Mannerisms

Speech

Socio-Economic Status

Motivation

Setting that Contextualizes Character

We described the characterization of the main characters we know so far.  Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and Jack.  Golding described Piggy as a boy that is plum and has glasses, from the middle to upper classes, he does not want to be called Piggy, but his motivation is how he takes after Ralph the leader.  He still talks like a boy in a sensitive way.  I described Simon as between Jack and Ralph as friends of both of them because Simon is in Jack's toon; however Ralph was nice to Simon when Jack coerced to Simon to keep going when he had fainted.  Golding described Jack as 'ugly', he is also mature but harsh and also leader-like such as Ralph.  All the characters are unique from one another because with their different personalities will have to team up together and be friends.  Golding's purpose is to use these different uniqueness of characters to draw conflicts among them, such as the part in the story when the three boys confront a pig, and felt jaundiced since there is danger on the island.

Aug. 22-26: TKAM Introduction Paragraph

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.