TOW #4- America Responds to the Latest Mass Shootings (Visual)

    Yet another school shooting, just another day in the life of every American. Is this what we are now? A society where a norm is little kids getting shot? This is what this cartoon is questioning. It is also very true. In the days since the Sandy Hook shootings, there have been a multitude of new examples. 74, just in schools. Everyday, there is another story, another hundred people grieving for their loved ones. Now, it is so commonplace that the news may spend just ten minutes, or less on it, before going on, to explain other things, like how a Kardashian is pregnant. Chris Britt showcases this horrible cultural phenomenon that is taking place, through the Creators Syndicate, a website where hundreds of political cartoons are posted weekly.
   Did everyone know during the Sandy Hook tragedy, that it wasn't going to change anything? Did the optimists push it to the back of their minds while the pessimists complained loudly? Not much has changed in the policies that govern  gun rights. Americans have become jaded, and this is what Britt shows. People dying is no longer something out of the ordinary., but nobody expects it to happen to them. I am sitting in a school right now, one very similar to Sandy Hook. Do the gun regulations make me safe? No, as the 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook have proved. Americans need to stop thinking of these shootings as just something on the news, and start thinking of them as very real threats, because they are.

TOW #3- I Had a Stroke at 33 by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (Written)

      I Had a Stoke at 33 is a long form Buzzfeed article written by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee. It is about her personal experience of having a stroke very young because of a hole in her heart. While not lacking in many medical details, the main focus of this article is about how she felt during and after the stroke. It's how her life went into a tailspin, but ultimately made her into the person she is today. Since the article is on Buzzfeed, it is mostly targeted towards the younger generations, probably teenagers, or people in their twenties. While the story is sad, telling about her life feel apart, it also inspires hope, that she was able to fight through this tragic event. It showcases how the people around her dealt with it, but mostly importantly how Christine dealt with it.

      A stroke is a horrible thing, that changes brain patterns forever. At just 33, Christine's way of life, her way of thinking, everything about her, was scrambled. She had to quit her job, she divorced her husband, and her thoughts would never be the same. But ultimately, out of all these struggles, she gets her life back on track. I think her purpose is to educate and inspire. Educate people about what happens when you have a stroke, so maybe people that know stroke victims can be even more understanding. Inspire people not to give up, to keep on fighting through whatever is afflicting them. I think she did accomplish this, because before reading this article, I had no idea what a stroke was like. I only knew the physical, that you sometimes got paralyzed. I didn't know the mental effects, or the social effects. Inspiring is a little harder, but I believe she did that too, because I was hooked the instant I started reading, then thought about it many times during the day after that. By speaking up about her stroke. Christine has educated at least one more person, me.

Link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/xtinehlee/i-had-a-stroke-at-33#1u9787

TOW #2- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (IRB)

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir about Walls' life, and the crazy nomadic life she had with her family. The first part of the Glass Castle is purely about her childhood, starting from when she was very young and continuing until she is around ten or eleven. Her and her siblings' lives are greatly influenced by their parents, who many would say are not the best of parents. Her mother is a free spirited woman who does not believe in rules while her father is a brilliant drunk, chasing the dream of inventing something great, even if it leads his family to ruin. While most people would agree that Walls' childhood was not the best, she paints it in the light that showed she was always happy with her situation, blinded by her childhood innocence that saw her parents always as heroes.

Using descriptive language, Walls paints the story of her family in the desert. She tells it as a narrative, flowing from one story, one home, one crazy adventure, to the next. It seems, her purpose for this first part of the book, is to show how even if their way of living was not the same as everyone else, they were happy. Even through out when they were hungry, fighting, or in a rough patch, they would come together and become one happy family again. It seemed their problems would always be fixed with one action that showed good faith. For example, when her mom and dad were physically fighting one time, it ended with them laughing together and saying they loved each other. Not to say that their problems were not major, but I think that Walls got her point across that you don't have to have the typical suburban American life to be happy. 

IRB Intro #1- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

I am going to be reading The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls for my IRB. It is a memoir about Walls' life and family. I decided to read this book because I was going to read it last year for school, but I ran out of time. Also, my friend and Ms. Torresani, my teacher from last year, recommended it. Hopefully it will be good, because they say it is.

TOW #1-How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (Written)

          How to Say Nothing in 500 Words is a guide to what every student does, and how to avoid it. Written by Paul Roberts, a writer well-educated in the ways of the English language who has written many textbooks about the subject, it is witty and concise, while still teaching the reader how to write better. Primarily for students to read, he writes it in the voice of a college professor, frustrated by the lack of originality and good writing in his student's essays. It is heavy in examples, all which I could relate to. For example, the sample essay about college football sounded exactly like what I would write at eleven pm on a Sunday night, which was exactly his point. It really struck me how much I could relate to the examples of bad writing in the article, which is how Roberts intended to get through to his readers.

         Roberts used ten headers to organize his piece, and they were the important overall ideas that the paragraphs underneath them would flesh out. They really helped support his main purpose to educate readers because like he said to, first he gave the main idea and then added details. I think he did achieve his purpose to educate, or at least get readers to start thinking about how they write because it did make me think over my writing to figure out what good and bad things I am doing. One quirky thing I noticed is that it was written way back in 1958, which explains the typewriter, but it also shows how student's writing styles haven't changed a bit since 1958. I could have seen myself writing that bad essay on college football, which hits home to his point in writing the piece, to at least influence a couple of people to stop the bad writing that has been going on since 1958.

A Drugstore in Winter: Cynthia Ozick

      A Drugstore in Winter by Cynthia Ozick is about Ozick's progression of reading, and how it is her escape from life. Ozick is a Jewish-American writer from New York City, and in this short essay she writes about how reading was her way to take a break from the struggles that plagued her everyday life during the Depression. I think her audience is anyone that reads, and enjoys it, because this essay is a celebration of how reading is a well-needed escape, as well as a way to find out who you really are. It starts with Ozick as a young child, reading the books she could get from the traveling bookstore, her mother's magazines, and anywhere she could find material to read. She is invisible at first, but blossoms into her own as an avid reader as the story goes on.

    I think that Ozick did complete her task of showing how reading shaped her life. It was her go to comfort when bad things happened, but also a way to relate to the world, to put her story out there too. She tells her story through the medium of books, who gave her what books, and what happened to those people. Her memories are tied to books that keep those people's memories alive. As the darkness starts to creep in, and she grows older, it turns into a way to remember happier times. For example, “but after a while other ambushes begin: sorrows deaths, disappointments..” (Ozick 495). This is her childhood slowly ending, tearing her away from the books that she loves, but she eventually finds her way back to them, as well as the memories that she loves. “...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing at that selfsame round glass table...” (Ozick 496).Books are everything to Ozick, and she conveys that very well in this essay.

Old Books by the Smithsonian

A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails: Donald Hall

          A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails by Donald Hall is about the pointlessness of life, and how it can still bring joy. Its start is quite melancholy, with the author saying, “I was always aware that New Hampshire was more dead than alive” (Hall 252). Hall recounts the life of a man he knew when he was young, Washington. Hall's writing invokes Washington's bucolic past as a hermit who could fix and build just about anything. The poetry connoisseur from the mid 1900's shows through Washington how he feels about the place he grew up. Washington lives a simple life in New Hampshire, and dies only remembered by his family. Washington has an abhorrence for wasting things, as is seen from his saving of nails, food, and even short pieces of string. The readers are presumed to not be from New Hampshire, and not know the feeling that Hall conveys, about everything around them slowly decaying. Hall wrote this piece to show a way of life that appealed to many, but few could experience.

       I believe that Hall did accomplish his purpose, because he detailed a life that was fleeting and barely remembered, but that still made Washington happy. In his final sentence Hall says, “and his gestures have assumed the final waste of irrelevance” (Hall 262). This ending is sad, but it also shows the bigger motive, of showing how the whole New Hampshire way of life has faded too. Hall uses many rhetorical devices to highlight this, but the one that stood out the most to me is the parallelism between how he told the story and how Washington would tell his stories. Washington would ramble on forever, one thing leading to another thing, and that is exactly how Hall tells his story. This shows how while Washington was gone, his small impact on the world is not forgotten, and lives on through Hall.

New Hampshire Winter by Joe Dorn

How It Feels to be Colored Me: Zora Neale Hurston

               How It Feels to be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston is a commentary on how the color of her skin made Hurston feel when she was a child. It recounts how it made her feel different, the same, and how it had no bearing on her character at times, depending on her surroundings. Hurston was a prominent African American author in the 20^th century, and many of her works focused on breaking the stereotypes of how African American stories were told. This is echoed in How It Feels to be Colored Me because instead of focusing on the negatives alone, Hurston shows the wide range of emotions about her skin color. She is writing for the people who do not understand the complex emotions of being black, mainly, white people. She wants them to see that she understands that horrible things happened in the past, but they have no bearing on her present choices and that she is free to do as she pleases. Hurston uses her personal voice, recounting her childhood and beyond, to show how race affected how she felt, but makes the point that it does not make her special.
               Hurston uses a lot of metaphors in this piece to get her point across. To help the notion that her race does not make her special, Hurston writes, “Against the wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow” (Hurston 117). She is comparing people to plastic bags, each the same no matter what color they are. I think that using metaphors and personal stories, Hurston does a very good job of getting her point across. The plastic bag metaphor was what really drove it home for me, as well as the quote, “I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries” (Hurston 117). Meaning, as different as they are individually, when they come together they are very similar.

Different, but the Same by Roger Evans