TOW #28

Dear Future APELC Student,
         Congrats for getting through tenth grade! Now, starts the probable hardest year of your life. On top of that, you've chosen to take APELC, which you most definitely will struggle with. Going into it, you're going to think, oh its completely fine, I totally know how to write and analyze! Wrong. This class will help you learn how to write better than you ever have before. Your analysis skills right now are weak. Do you even know what a rhetorical device is? If not, you will be completely familiar with them by the end of the year. This class most of all teaches you to analyze text, and that's what you will come away with, so just make sure to do the readings or you will be lost 100% of the time.
        But it isn't just all really tough work, there is also a lot of growth that comes from the course. Your work ethic will be refined and you will finally be able to experience the struggle of working for the grade, if you haven't ever before. I'm not lying, it is going to be difficult, but you can get through it, because all of us did. Get ready for a difficult but rewarding year ahead of you, and good luck.
Neha Jog

TOW #28- Reflection

It is really nice to see growth in my writing, and these TOWs make it plain to see. At the beginning of the year, I stuck to the script, putting everything in a sort of formula that I had in my head. Everything had a place, and deviating from that was apparent death. But as you scroll through the year, you can see my writing get more relaxed. That does not mean it gets lazy, but rather that it gains more flow. I think as the year progressed I mastered the art of making sure my writing had flow, instead of just a formula that I filled in the parts. I also grew better at picking out rhetorical devices, and could often see them at once when I opened an essay. Though I did learn a lot, I could still improve on my diction, because I tend to always sound a bit informal even in my formal writing essays. I think I did benefit from the TOWs because not only did they force me to write something every week, but they forced me to read something every week. This means, while I was honing my writing skills, I was also learning about real world events. It kind of opened my eyes to the thousands of different articles that are written every day. What I mean by that is that even though the Internet has mostly always been at my fingertips, I had never really used it to read articles. That sounds incredibly weird to me now, because even without the TOWs I now keep an eye out for interesting articles to read, instead of the quick reading of lesser articles (10 Crazy Things You Didn't Know About Salad!- Buzzfeed). 

TOW #27 (Written)- When a Culture is Destroyed

A powerful earthquake — the country's worst in 80 years — rocked mountainous Nepal on Saturday, killing more than 1,800 people and leveling buildings and centuries-old temples. Dozens if not hundreds remained trapped under mounds of rubble.

Hospitals in the capital of Katmandu were so crowded that many of the injured were treated outside in the open, according to local media. The magnitude-7.8 quake, which shook a wide swath of northern India, Bangladesh, Tibet and Pakistan, also triggered avalanches in the Himalayas, killing at least 10 people on Mount Everest.

Nepal police said at least 1,865 people were killed. Given the scale of the destruction, the death toll was expected to rise. An emergency Cabinet meeting designated 29 districts as crisis zones, the Home Affairs Ministry said.

Tens of thousands of people, fearful of aftershocks bringing down more buildings, gathered outside during the night.

"My entire neighborhood is still in shock," said Chiranjibi Gurung in Katmandu. "My children who were inside the houses at the time of the earthquake are scared to go inside now even at this time of the night."

Around 180 bodies were pulled from the ruins of the nine-story Dharhara Tower in the center of the capital, China's official Xinhua News Agency reports. It said about 200 were feared trapped in the rubble of the tower in the city's historic Basantapur Durbar Square.

"We had heard the earthquake stories from our ancestors and how I remember my grandparents telling me about the devastation of the 1934 earthquake and how it uprooted the Dharahara Tower then," said Sabita Lal of Katmandu. "I saw the same thing happen today to the tower. It was a massive one."

TOW # 26- Hillary 4 Pres? (Visual)

               In today's news, there are many articles dedicated to Justice Sotomayor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The articles are covering all sorts of topics including how race is the most important issue to her, how being a minority is the reason for her votes during 2009, and other subjects that are along the same lines. Then, I came along this political cartoon that has grasped the attention of many. The author, written in a blurry manner on the side of the cartoon, was able to include everyone's views on this matter in one picture. The cartoon displays, what I saw as, Barack Obama on the left saying that he throughly checked Sotomayor's background before he picked her to be on the Supreme Court. On the right, is his checklist for Sotomayor, and it only includes four points of qualifications that are seen as the biggest debates when it comes to politics. The viewers, people interested in the news and information about Sotomayor, mostly agreed with the political cartoon saying that the picture represents everything that shouldn't be present in a judge on the Supreme Court. The viewers do sound racist, but Sotomayor did publicly state that race is a huge matter to her. To Americans, it sounds like she has some sort of safe zone for people of color, which is frankly a little scary because she does hold a lot of power. However, as a woman of race, I don't feel threatened by Sotomayor's outburst on people of color. Now, people could argue I am coming from a biased side, but I don't think that an intellectual woman could make such a poor decision. I think that all she meant by it was that race matters to her, but not the extent people are thinking. As a woman of color, nobody expects her to act aggressively to others in her situation, but with her education and skills, she does not seem like the type to favor others.  Ultimately, the purpose of this cartoon was to portray the different viewpoints of Sotomayor and her recent statement of race mattering to her. 

TOW #25 (written)- The Technology Gap by Ben Wineston

One of the most powerful parts of this article was not the words, but instead the pictures. One picture could mean as much as a thousand words they say. These pictures, or rather, collages that embellished the article were full of "It Girls" and just at a glance you could recognize that at one point every woman up there had been idealized into an it girl. Then there's the pictures of magazine covers-most notably Vouge and Vanity Fair-which have the it girls posing. Not only does this sometimes create the "maniac pixie dream girl", as 500 days of Summer aptly put it, but it expects woman to conform to the standard of that one woman. It also pits women against each other in competition to be the "it girl" when really, we are all the It girl. Now the It girl category is diversifying, take Lupita Nyongo and Benazir Bhutto, but this image limits the woman that it holds. Now, the media expects them to be the exact mix of sexy, demure, smart, but not too smart, different, but not too different, and they take away the power of the woman to define herself. One example of this is Clara Bow, from the 1920-30's. She was the starlet of Hollywood, until she went too much out of the box and proclaimed herself a feminist, gambling, drinking, and partying too much. But of course, the it girl mantle was passed on, as it always is. Take the quick switch from Jennifer Lawrence, to Lupita Nyongo, to Rosmund Pike. The article says, “It's another to see the term-and all its insidious, objectifying power- resurface, proliferate, and thrive nearly a centuary later. Only this time, it's saddled not on one woman, but any woman who seems primed to be more than an object-an It, passive and pliable-in the narrative of their own lives.”

TOW #24 (IRB)- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

This book makes me want to take "A Walk in the Woods" as Bill Bryson puts it. The book makes me want to live outdoors for a while, reconnect with nature, get healthier and more outdoorsy all at once. It brings the spirit of adventure that I so crave, and I want to see it fufilled. But then I remember that I'm irrevocably attached to my computer, that the internet is my lifeblood. Which may be a bit of a hyperbole, but in most senses its true. When I was born, dial-up internet was the thing and in my short lifespan, it has grown to so much more than that. To say I am anything but a baby of the Information Age would be a farce, because I was weaned on technology in and out.
Which brings me back to Bill Bryson, and the way that books transport us to another reality. I'll probably never walk the Appalacian trail, probably never spend more than a few nights under a tent, but I will always have the yearning to do so. Or at least, I'll always have the feeling that it could be possible for me. This suspension of reality is the great thing books give us, and before this class I didn't realize that nonfiction books could do that too. I thought nonfiction books were dry textbooks on whatever subject they chose, maybe greek mythology, or the anatomy of a bird, and etc. This class has opened my eyes up to how nonfiction can also be mystical and interesting, because our world is mystical and interesting. And who knows, maybe one day I'll walk a day or two on the Appalacian trail. All I know now is that its always an option, and always will be, for the rest of my life.

TOW 23- (written) Scientists Call For Moratorium on Human Genetic Experiments (Dan Vergano)

Though this is an undoubtly very scary article, the author uses an allusion to make it easier to understand. Or at least easier to understand for people alive in 1997, because it references the 1997 movie Gattaca. I was not alive in 1997, so I guess I was a year too late to get the joke. Anyway, this article is about how close scientists are to being able to genetically engineer babies and how they are struggling with how unethical it could turn out to be. At first, to me, genetically engineered babies didn't seem so bad, but then I remembered something my AP Bio teacher had told us in our DNA unit. She had been talking about how if people could genetically engineer babies, they could choose what traits they wanted their babies to have. Meaning, they could choose if they wanted babies with any hair color, any eye color, any body type. This isn't build-a-bear people, this is a potentially extrememly unethical thing.
Just think of the modern standard for beauty, thin, possibly blonde and blue eyed. I mean, if Hitler had this technology, we would all look exactly the same right now. Our differences are what make us beautiful, not all looking the same and this technology endangers that. Now, this can still be used for tweaking the genes of people with debilitating diseases, like HIV, but it should be kept away from most everyone else. Just think of the book the Uglies, a society where, at the age of 16, everyone goes through a surgery to become "beautiful", but really, they are just being brainwashed into following the government's every decree. We deserve better, and the world must stay diverse, because diverse, is beautiful.