Blog for 5/4 videos

For the first video, I think it was Alex's, was very good probably the best one so far. It was easy to tell that he put a lot of work into it. There was a lot of pictures and writing. There was good camera work and audio. Next video was Devin's and it was a very interesting concept about procrastinating and perfectionism and I liked it especially because I am a procrastinator myself. I liked the interviews he and he had four and was in them. Marco's video was very good and interesting. He had interviewed people who had learned English ass their second language and a person who had dyslexia.

Blog 5/3 videos

First was Kevin's video he seemed very well spoken and had a very interesting concept and his grandfather was funny and interesting. Kevin was also interviewing on camera which can be hard to do. Next was Emma's video and she had a lot of music and typing which I liked. She also had good camera work and audio. Brendan's video didn't have any music, the camera work wasn't too good and his grandma was reading off a script for some of it. For Nick's video there was no intro and no conclusion. It was hard to hear for most of the interviews also.

Blog for Monday 5/1 videos

First was Anastasia's video, which I thought was very well done editing-wise. There wasn't much awkward cuts and there was a lot of consistency through out. There was also a lot of work in between showing a little bit about each person. Next was Hugo's and there wasn't much words to help to understand the dialogue or back story of each person. He did have some very interesting people in his interview but it was hard to hear throughout. Connor's video was last and I liked this one specifically because he was in the interview picture and he had good camera work. Also he seemed very relaxed on camera and had good questions.

Reflection of My Project

Going into this project I was treading it so much from watching the examples of bad reports because I was thinking my project will definitely end up like that and I'd be nervous to ask anyone to let me interview them. After I found out I could interview my family I felt a lot better about the project and I knew just who to pick my Nanny, Grandma and Mom. I went into the interview with my Nanny thinking that my Nanny would tell me that she went to catholic school and was a fairly good student, no college and secretary jobs and that she used reading and writing a lot throughout. I heard most of that but I was surprised that she went to college and got a job with the Wall Street Journal. I was also surprised to hear that she pretty much only wrote script throughout her life because I hardly ever write in script. I was surprised to see her so nervous because I've never seen her like that. I left out part of her interview because in the first question she answered most of my other questions and I didn't want it to be to repetitive. She also said that she loved books now and reads a lot in her free time but off camera. I went into the interview with my Grandma expecting her to say that she was a decent student that didn't really like school or wasn't into that much. I was surprised to learn that she was a very hard worker and was a good student and had a job right out of high school. I was surprised for hearing some of the stories she had about when she was younger but I edited most of them out or didn't record them. I think this was my favorite part of the project because I don't really see my Grandma much and we used to be a lot closer and I can tell she really enjoyed it and I was happy to see her happy. Some of the stories were funny and a week after our interview she asked me to see my project and it was fun. I was not surprised to hear that she knew some German because I remember when I brought her to school when I was in elementary school she was talking to someone else's grandma in German. Going into the interview with my mom I was expecting her to say that she loved English as a kid and was a pretty good student who mostly like art because she is a really good drawer and does a lot of drawings for her work as a curtain designer. I was surprised to hear that she didn't like English in school and was more of a Math person because I always see her reading and didn't know she was good at Math. I was surprised she said that she thought school was a lot more strict because we went to the same schools and I expected us to have similar experiences. After viewing my classmates videos I wish that I added more about my family that I took out because I was thinking I needed only information about reading and writing but it gives more life to your project and avoids awkward cuts. Also maybe some more questions about literacy.

"Writing About People"

This chapter is such a great help for doing our end of the year project by giving so many examples of beginner errors I would have done had I not read this. I thought the writer made some interesting points and liked the fact that he says that all his stories that he writes even if they main "project" is supposed to for something such as the Library he makes it about the people. "You'll find that he said much that's not interesting, or not pertinent, or that's repetitive. Single out the sentences that are most important or colorful." Although this seems like an easy tip to figure out it is very important especially with a person like me who is not experienced in interviewing, I tend to get a lot of answers which repeat.  "Do I literally mean "don't change any words?" Yes and no. ...". I would probably have had such a hard time writing about my interviews had I not known that sometimes its okay to change the words if I have to.  "Quotes are livelier when you break them up, making periodic appearances in your role as guide." Having to write quotes seems pretty challenging in having the words flow and breaking the quotes up in the way he showed makes it sound so much better to read.

"Writing Family History and Memoir"

This passage personally interested me very much specifically because family is so important to me and I like to think my family is really close. I think about family a lot. I think about how interesting it would be for someone else to read about my family or vice versa. I think about how unique my family is and how great of a story it could be if told correctly. This passage makes me think about how the difference of the tone or even the context of the story would be by the different narrator in my family. "Maybe so, the truth is somewhere between my mother's version and mine. That was my remembered truth and that's how I wrote it." I definitely agree with this quote because telling my family story is not to think about if I'm telling the true story it is that I am telling the story that I know. How could I tell a story I do not know and also to have a story even if maybe it has storytelling biased adds truth to the story that cannot be duplicated. "I like the fact that they all got their own copy, it recognized each of them as as equal partner in the family saga." I like this quote because it adds a happy thought, everyone has their own story and everyone has a part in the "adventure" of life. "Saga", right a way i think book, television or movie. I love to think about my life as a book or a movie just because its fun to compare the stories of your family to those of the ones on television or movies. One family I really like to think of is from the television series Game Of Thrones, the Starks are the protagonist family which are the hardworking most honorable and likable family. Watching the show adds emotional intensity to think that this family is your family. "They don't identify with my baseball game; they identify with the idea of the game- a universal idea." This quote is very strong and easy to agree with everyone has a thing to their family that they will always remember and think about all the great things about it. To me and my family it would probably have to be our house that we have had all of our whole lives. This is an easy pick because to imagine the amount of memories to happen at this house impossible and the number and or the quality exceeds infinity and there is no one thing that is emotionally stronger. In this chapter it makes you think about the importance of family to you and its hard not to feel something as you tie your own experiences to these words. While reading this chapter I thought about my family and how my family has always had an implied importance on legacy in my personal and extended family. Everyone want to succeed and everyone wants their family to succeed to a certain extent and I'm glad to be in my family and would love to pass down as much as I know like my grandparents and parents have done for me.

Reflection for Essay #2

My essay on Politics in the Media was relatively hard to write and much harder than the first essay. One reason why it was harder is that it was on something I wasn't very into nor did I have much education in politics. Also a problem for me in writing this essay was citations, I'm not really that good at having in-text citations and I think it was a weaker point in my essay. One thing I would probably like to add to the first draft is some more citations on maybe how people feel about politics in the media. I think that this would add the emphasis on how important media is to politics. I think it was hard to decide the exact topic I wanted to choose because they all had a little something that I would be able to talk about but couldn't fill my whole essay. Overall I think I put more into this essay than the first one and definitely more thought. This essay was in interesting topic and very important for modern times.

Should Writers Use They Own English?

For this essay I had a lot of trouble reading it smoothly for obvious reasons. I think for certain people it was probably easier to read that essay because they are used to talking or using sentences like that but not me. Don't get me wrong I definitely don't talk outside of school exactly how I do inside the school but I believe the difference is not much. I think I understand his argument pretty well and maybe its unfair for me to say that I don't agree with him because I don't talk like him but I also believe that his argument has flaws. "Fish got it wrong here. When were talkin bout so-called varieties' of English or dialect in relation to standard English, we're not dealin with two different languages; we're dealing with a common language." In these sentences Young is critiquing Fish's advice where he says "I am not here to take that language from you; I'm here to teach you a another one." I believe that Young is actually the one that got it wrong. Fish is trying to say that its obvious that there are more than one way to say things he really just wants to teach whats been considered proper English not necessarily saying any one way to speak is incorrect. If he said "No i will teach you the right way to speak and write," than yes, this is not a correct statement. "If meant everybody should be thrilled to learn another dialect, then wouldn't everybody be learning everybody's dialect?" I think this is just a really bad assumption by Young into Fish's thinking when Fish says, "Who could object to learning a second language?" I believe Fish is just trying to avoid to offend anyone by saying that their English is not right so he's referring to the English he is teaching as a new one which is proper. Young is not trying to promote another dialect he is just questioning why someone wouldn't want to learn. "Grassley didn't send no standard English as a tweet ...If healthcare reform is so important to Obama, why is he sightseeing in Paris?" In this statement Young refers to Chuck Grassley's tweet referring to Obama and Young believes that he used specific terms in non-standard English just because people like code meshing. I believe he didn't use the sentence above because there is not as much anger in those words as there are in what he actually typed and not because of the code meshing, besides the all caps WKEND,  he used phrases like "you got nerve" and 'time to deliver' which are much stronger than the whole sentence Young thought he would've wrote if he used proper English.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The cons of the banking concept of education is that all knowledge could possibly not be completely understood only memorized and so limits the ability to adapt to real life situations."Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." Also the student in this concept of teaching can only learn what the teacher knows which can be limiting. The student is not given as much freedom to think for themselves and new ideas can be lost. "it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity." The student may not feel as inclined to learn if they are felt that they are oppressed by their teachers. The pros of this form of education is that there is more guidance to start in a path in the right direction. The teacher knows more about the world or different things than the students do in the area of real world situations. The pros of problem-posing education is that the student feels more empowered and will in turn desire to learn more . "The students- no longer docile listeners- are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher." The student has more ability to be creative and think for themselves. "presents the material to the students for their consideration and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own." The student learns more about real life situations and how to adapt. The student also is given better chance to understand and not just memorize. The cons of problem solving education is that without proper guidance to the path in the right direction unnecessary information can exhaust needed time and thought power. This teaching can also cause maybe overconfidence in the student in certain situations.

Raw Material Reflection

This essay made me think of several prison movies and television shows such as The Green Mile and Prison Break but the one that came to me the most is The Shawshank Redemption. The Shawshank Redemption comes to mind for a couple of reasons such as that they both base off of prison obviously. Another reason is that I believe both stories have a lot of hopeful and hopeless points that the audience feels. The last and biggest reason is that it made me think of the old man, Brooks, he got out of prison after living most of his life in jail and becomes very overwhelmed with the world and commits suicide. "I felt that i was the cause of their suffering. What followed was a type of silence that only the mental disorganized can recognize." I believe this quote shows a similarity to the way I believe Brooks probably felt internally before he committed suicide. This essay mad me feel very sad because its mostly about the struggles of people who were not given the same childhoods as most people. The women were abused as children and that caused them to have different behaviors from what people with better backgrounds would have.  "I question the way Wright's Grandmother brutally beat him after he accidentally set her house on fire. The women look at me in amazement." "One of them describes the way her confidence had eroded after years of being called "fat house" by her stepfather." These women were treated very poorly and in turn acted out and that's what put them in prison. Most of them uneducated and young but years in prison made them more focused in terms of their future which is a hopeful part. "Many of the women in the college program are very smart; a few are truly brilliant. One of our math instructors, a retired IBM executive, used to say to me every week as we left the prison that some of the students in his Introduction to Algebra class could be CEO's of a Fortune 500 company. (We both know, of course, that these women will probably not even get entry-level positions in such companies once they check the "yes" box under the criminal record questions.)" This quote shows a very large level of hopelessness for these inmates. No matter how hard these women can work they may not even be able to get a good job. These women's spirit is a big part of the hope in this story though and which keeps it together.

Essay Reflection

I overall liked my paper because I believe I was really able to show how I feel about language and how I branched off with writing. I'm not the happiest with my work though I felt very worried when I heard the topic of the essay because I don't remember anything from when I first started to learn to write or read so I didn't know how to start my essay. I believe I could have taken more time to look over my grammar. I believe it was a pretty clear assignment, it was just a hard one to think of a early personal story that you would like to share. My writing process is I wait almost as long as possible the day before its due to start writing my essay and I don't stop because usually I get a good flow of writing and it helps to do it all fast. My process worked in high school I'm not sure about college yet. Reading a classmates peer review helped me get some ideas to edit into my essay actually that I used. I also fixed a lot of formatting stuff because of the peer review.

Reading To Write

I believe that King is right to tell people that if they want to be a great writer their time would be better spent reading than watching television. "Reading takes time and the glass teat takes too much of it" Although a picture is worth a thousand words i believe that a book gives much better information and obviously is better for a writer to take from than watching a screen. There are things a writer can learn from television though. There are many television shows and movies that can give many similarities to aspects of a book which can be picked up by a writer and converted into literary devices. Most books even become movies or television shows and many elements can be seen if looked at carefully.

Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue"

I agree with some of Amy Tan's points throughout the narrative and some I disagree with. I agree with her decision to become a writer although her teachers and professors seemed to push her to fields in mathematics and sciences. "And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing." She is a very strong-willed person to be so gifted in other subjects but deciding she would rather achieve her goals and she makes a great statement to all Chinese writers or minorities in any fields that it takes work to succeed and overcome. Obviously I disagree with her shame for her mother's accent or English language skills. "I was ashamed of her English." Its unfair for me or anyone that isn't or hasn't been in similar position to judge this though i believe. "I have described it to people as "broken" or "fractured" English." I disagree with her fear of the term "broken English" I believe the term is not "broken" meaning it must be fixed, I believe it just means she speaks in not completely connected sentences missing some English words that are used to flow a sentence. Overall this narrative gives some comedic situations Amy was put in with her mother because of her English and it gives a more positive look at her mother's struggle to express herself. Another aspect that gives a positive light to this story is her obvious leadership role which gives people the ability to look up to her.

The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me (Thoughts)

I really liked this passage by Sherman Alexie because I believe it gives a positive message overall. "I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry. Writing was beyond Indians." This quote clearly shows Alexie's perseverance through adversity. Alexie and all Indians for that matter were not expected to do what he had done and also Alexie's family was "poor by most standards." It is heartwarming in the respect that Alexie's father loved books and Alexie became in love with these books because of his "aching devotion" to his father. A father and son's bond is very strong and Alexie admits he could not even read but he would still look at the books and pretend like he was or at least try. "I can remember picking up my father's books before i could read." I believe that Alexie's father must be very proud that is son became a writer while he had such a desire for novels. His idea about everything being its own paragraph than goes deeper and deeper but also with some connection to each other. Another example of Alexie's ability to overcome is when Alexie's classmates try to stop him from showing his intelligence in class. "A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike." My favorite part of the text though is his love for books, I wish that I could have shared this desire instead of my love for television. I also strongly agree with is decision to show off his knowledge in school and this reminds me of something in current life where people call someone a try-hard for doing well even thought that is the right thing to do. Also it is nice to hear that the Indian kids in the reservation he visits read his books and work and aspire to be like him.