Blogging Around

First I went to Kyle's blog. Kyle mentioned that while our blogs are interesting, few people read them

I had the same thought when we started blogging- How many people see this? I put Ads on my blog, and for the whole year, Google owes me... $4.15! That's about 250 page views total.
Maybe if next year's prompts were a bit more open- ended, they could develop into something people would really want to read.



Some passerby did read Mitch's post, which lamented posting on topics that weren't easy to write much about. He posted

ur gay

I responded:
Hey Mitch,

I saw the comment above mine and thought, that just about sums up our blogging experience- being forced to write up a few paragraphs on a topic that has little context for the outside reader, and sometimes little for us, either. Sometimes our prompts make for good posts, but not always.

Metacognition: Blogging

I've liked blogs this year!

Grade-wise, they're a double-edged sword- 15 free points is helpful, but 0/ 15 is horribly punitive for forgetting a small assignment- larger than the penalty for a late large assignment.

That said, they're usually fun. Once you make it to the keyboard, there's no pressure, you can just write whatever makes sense. Some of the topics are a bit hard to follow- perhaps for next year, link to an exemplar (from this year) below each topic, if you keep the same ones.

Blogs let me write like I'm talking, and I enjoy that. For the paragraph above, I started with

"Some of the prompts are, like, what?"

I wrote that, and then thought

That's not proper! And it doesn't make as much sense!

So I fixed it.



While I'm stuck in a loophole of thinking about what I'm thinking while I'm thinking about what to think, I'll share a cartoon with you all.
You may need to click to see it all.

Metacognition- short story

Editing my story this time around, I had a bit of a challenge. I had to partially rewrite the middle and write an end. Rose and Harold, an older couple, want to pull off a scam to prove they've 'still got it.' I had a bit of a problem- I didn't know what they'd do! If I had a good idea like the one I needed, I'd probably be scamming people, not writing a short story. I went out to dinner with my mom, and, as we were finishing our desert of chocolate lava cake, she suggested, "why don't they steal wine?"

And so they did.

I used the idea of a shop like WineStyles in Northbrook as a model, in a town like Troup, Texas. They used a turquoise van, like the one my family owned until I was about 11. In fact, almost everything I wrote about was based on my experiences.

I wonder where Robert Frost got his inspiration....

Metacognition: Jane Eyre Essay

When I started, I had a bit of trouble picking a group. I knew I'd work with Eli, but I knew that we needed to find a third to fill our group, or we would find ourselves grouped with a certain individual who has trouble wich such group selection.

Albert and I started in the lab. We first took on one topic, because we thought it would be easy. After about two thirds of a page, I thought, 'from where I am now, that topic would be a natural extension of the flow of the dialogue. So, instead of rewriting our initial launch trajectory, we changed targets. (Imagine- NASA's rocket for Saturn messes up at takeoff, so they reroute it to Mars.)

I wrote the discussion's first half, but that was during rehearsals for Cinderella. Eli and Albert took it from there.

Change of Mind: Jane Eyre

Every time we start a new book, I usually make a quick judgment about how that book will be. For example, I knew King Lear would be hellish. I knew I'd like Life of Pi, etc. When I picked up Jane Eyre from my bookshelf of unused books (it was next to The House on Mango Street and Rules for Writers), I knew that I was in for Lear, round two.

I kept this view untill about chapter 12, when a bit of the language made me stop, and think, 'This is great writing.' It was When Rochester reveals himself as the gypsy. Jane tells him that he was neither himself nor the gypsy woman- he was "some other countenance". I fell in love with the book.
Maybe not the book, but the writing. Charlotte Bronte's style is warmly welcomed into my growing collection.

Literary voices can be likened to the implement that writes them- Life of Pi was like a crayon, and Lear was... a chisel, and Siddhartha, a fine paintbrush, but Jane Eyre is like a exquisite fountain pen, and I'm glad to have it.

Dialectics: Conflict vs problems

First, this week, my brothers Lee and Phillip are here. In illinois. at my house. With them, there are four of us. four boys, and all three of them take medicines for varying degrees of ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other endless sources of destructive energy. Together in the same room, there's usually always a conflict. In under one hour of playing Xbox, all these conflicts were argued
(loudly):

• Someone is not a satisfactory teammate. teammate wants to switch partners.


• someone thinks that their couch space has ben encroached upon. Demands reorginization
  
• Someone finishes the ice cream. Someone else did not get to eat any ice cream.


• Someone claims a territory on the game map. others disagreed. someone kicks someone else

But, there wasn't really a problem behind any of these. just a conflict. The prolem is a group of people that can't handle conflict, and so the conflict escalates. That's a problem.
and so on.

Blogging Around

Brandon,

I did the same thing when I started looking for a story fragment- I looked at the last time I wrote. I found a vocab story from seventh or eight grade that I had liked at the time, and I took about four and a half sentences from it. However, I already had an idea, and that made expanding my fragment a lot easier.


Mitchell,

If I had to, or rather could, choose, I think I would choose the Red. Both world have pain, both have death, and neither is guaranteed to be more 'real' than another. If I stayed here, I'd die just like everyone, eventually. If I left, I might be able to help people, whereas here, all I could do is make someone feel better. I want life to be worth more than a quest for sensory enjoyment. Whether or not it is, i'm sure that I'm not achieving anything great inside the matrix. might as well see the outside.

Kyle:

After i read your blog, two possible instances of "form without meaning" came to mind. First, in 1984 (George Orwell), the people don't have enough words to choose a form- there's only one was to express one idea. They can never say everything they mean.

Also, computers. Computers can't tell if the printer it's connected to is scared or tired or lonely. Computers don't have feelings, so there's no meaning behind any content. There are only facts and instructions.