smart goal

My smart goal is to master the ukulele. This will be achieved when I have at least one of all the main chords. I also plan to write music. It will be legen........ Wait for it.... I hope you catch any cheating boy friends cuz how DAIRY!!!!! Get it? It is a pun.

Semester End Game

1. Do you read your colleagues’ work online?  How often? What is it like to read their work? How does being able to see everyone’s work online at any given time change the way you do your work?            -Only ocasionally. I generally perfer to do stuff myself at my own pace. I find I learn better by figureing it out for myself then trying to look at what other people swim. For me at least the mentality of building a strong foundation on an assinement myself, is much more benificial. For instance with the dickens books everyone did a Lit Analysis on. I could have looked at other peoples when I did mine, but for me at least, that wouldn't help me master the book. Mastering the book for me, is thinking about it myself. I usually get better results doing things myself. Thats not to say I don't get anything out of it. I checked a few blogs on "A Christmas Carol" to see what others thought. I was genuinely surprised at how cynical  Abby Kuhlmans thoughts on it were. Especially after reading Conor Macknamera's analysis(He is thought of as very cynical)
2. How has the publicly and always visible course blog made this course different from one without a blog?  How would the course change if the course blog disappeared tomarrow?                                           -The publicity of the course blog has been interesting. We've heard from random people stumbleing upon it which was cool. It's nice to be able to check up on the homework at anytime and find all the readings in one place. Its also cool to say be in calculus, and wonder what were gonna do for the day and whip out my smartphone and find out.
3. Has publishing your work for the public to see changed your approach to completing an assignment? How so?  How would your feelings about the course change if you couldn’t publish your work thatway?                                                                                                                                                 - -  -  - - - -It has made me consider that people may actually look at mystuff. It encourages a higher standard of excellence when you know someone might read it. I'd probably be relieved if I couldn't publish my work over the blog. It's allot easier to write for an audience of one(the teacher) then an unknown audience.             
4. Has your experience of the physical classroom changed because of the open & online aspects?  Where does your learning actually happen?                                                                                                          - - - -I have found that most learning happens at home over the internet. Just based on the quantity of time available in class. Everything in class just kind of flows over onto my computer.
5. You were described in the Macarthur Foundation/DML  interview as “a pioneer”-- how do you describe the experience on the edge to people who haven’t been there (friends and family)?           - - I don't describe it to them. I show it to them. It is so much easier to just pull up the course blog and let them see for themselves. Or say the hamlet blog the Josh Ng and Chris Green made. Which was just stellar by the way.
6. How do they respond when you describe the brave new world in which you’re working?                   - - -Usually they are surprised. Its never quite what they expected. But with the visual component they can really see what's happening
7. What do their responses mean to you?  What effect(s) (if any) do they have on you?                              - -To me its not strange. So in my mind I'm like "Pffftttt Get with the program grandma". That being my reaction when I showed my sister.

On a side note

Dr. Preston, If you are reading this you should consider having "Wild Horses" By The Rolling Stones. I was listening to my record player while answering the questions about the course and it was awesome.

Lit Analysis 5 "The Road" By Cormac McCarthy

The Road By Cormac McCarthy Lit Analysis

General

11..       The story is set in post-apocalyptic America. It’s about a father and son living in the tough times. They travel along the “State Roads” and try to survive. The father try’s to raise his son as best he can to be a good person and not conform to the times they live in. After reaching the coast the father dies and the son goes to live with a new family that he meets.

22..       The theme would be that light defeats darkness, and about the bond between father and son. The father tells that they are the good guys and “carry the fire”. When bad things happen the father ensures the son that they are the good guys. Also he try’s to teach him to be good. Their bond is shown in the scene where he teaches him to swim.

33..       The tone is bleak and minimalistic. The bleak tone of the words helps set the mood for how they are living and the minimalistic of the writing causes you to understand how little there is.

44..      Simile: “the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawingsketched across the waste.” (page 4)                                                                                                                                                 Flashback: “Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation perfectly evolved to meet its own end. They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn. A few nights later she gave birth in their bed by the light of a drycell lamp. Gloves meant for dishwashing. The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium. Her cries meant nothing to him. Beyond the window just the gathering cold, the fires on the horizon. He held aloft the scrawny red body so raw and naked and cut the cord with kitchen shears and wrapped his son in a towel.” (Page 30)                                               Metaphor: “To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They'll just be soup.” (Page 33)                                       Foreshadowing: “A single round left in the revolver. You will not face the truth. You will not.”                Foil: The boy and father foil each other. In the sense that the father wants to protect the boy and love him. The fact that the boy is still learning from the dad and needs protection just highlights the differences between them and their relationship.                                                                                                              Imagery: “The dead came to light lying on their sides with their legs drawn up and some lay on their stomachs. The dull green antique coppers spilled from out the tills of their eyesockets onto the stained and rotted coffin floors.” (page 111)                                                                                                         Setting: “Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash.”(P. 112)                                                                        Motif: “You cant. You have to carry the fire./ I dont know how to. /Yes you do. /Is it real? The fire?/ Yes it is./ Where is it? I dont know where it is./ Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.” (Page 145) The slashes represent a new line. Do to formatting I couldn’t make a new line.                                                                                                                                                       Syntax: “He'd come down with a fever and they lay in the woods like fugitives. Nowhere to build a fire. Nowhere safe. The boy sat in the leaves watching him. His eyes brimming. Are you going to die, Papa? he said. Are you going to die?” (page 97)                                                                                             Diction: “In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her downturned eyes. In the morning it was snowing again. Beads of small gray ice strung along the light-wires overhead.” (Page 9)

Characterization

11..      You can see indirect characterization throughout the book. When he and his son talk about carrying the fire for instance. It shows how they want to remain good and never give up. Another instance is how the father pays attention to the ammunition. He has managed to save two bullets, one for himself and one for his son should the time come.  When he’s forced to use a bullet to protect his son he knows that the last one will be for his son alone, should the highly possible time arise, when there is something worse than death. Direct characterization occurs when the author describes the son and father.

22..      The syntax and diction doesn’t change. McCarthy keeps a minimalistic writing style throughout to indicate the sparseness and bleakness of the tale.

33..      The protagonist is dynamic and round. He is complex, and is often specifically shown to be. Like when he kills people in front of his son. He tells him they lived or that they are still the good guys. He continues to try to teach his son to be a better person then the dire situation they are in made him. He also develops over the book. How he feels about his wife and what happen affect him and challenge him.

44..      I felt like a read a character, or more specifically watched a character. The writing style didn’t feel personal. It’s not supposed to be personal, because it’s an impersonal world. What I got was that I saw the characters go through what happened to them. There was nothing to personal or descriptive that leads me to believe that I had a deep personal understanding of them. This of course is intentional I feel, and not a case a bad writing. I don’t think you need to feel like you met a character to necessarily get the story. Sometimes it’s better when it’s left to mystery.

Lit Analysis 4 " A Christmas Carol" By Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol Lit Analysis

General

11..       The novel is about an Old Wealthy man who is very grumpy. He doesn’t live a very good life and is uncaring with others. One night four ghosts visit him. The first is the ghost of Jacob Marley, he explains that scrooge lives a bad life, and that misfortune will befall him if he doesn’t change. He then explains that he will be visited by three ghosts, the ghost of Christmas past present and future. Scrooge meets the ghosts and realizes he needs to change.

22..       The theme of the books is redemption. Despite scrooge being so mean and grumpy, he is still able to turn his life around and redeem himself. Despite being so old and having been mean for so long he still redeems himself.

33..       The tone to me changes throughout. It changes with each part of the story, Pre ghosts, ghost of Christmas past, present, future, and post ghosts. In the beginning for me the writer’s voice came off almost like a Christmas special. I guess I compared the two because they’re both about Christmas but it seemed like some rich voice was narrating the events of my mind. The first and second ghosts (harbinger and past) were sorrowful, the second was more joyful, the third is omnious, and after all the ghosts are gone it is happy.

44..       Allegory: The Novel in itself is an allegory. Be a good person, it’s never too late to turn around. Flashback: The part with the ghost of Christmas past is a flashback                                                 Allusion: “If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot”            Personification: (Referring to a bell in a church) “…struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.”                       (Page 14)                                                                                                                                        Symbol: The chains on Jacob Marley symbolize what happens to those in the afterlife who fail to live good lives Syntax: “for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in his head to be.”                                                                                    (P. 95)                                                                                                                                                      Simile: “‘I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody. A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here. Whoop. Hallo.” (Page 128)                                                                                                         Metaphor: “I’m quite a baby.” (page 128)                                                                                        Diction: “He had never dreamed that any walk — that anything — could give him so much happiness.” (Page 133)                                                                                                                                    Imagery: “Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” (Page 65)

Characterization

1.1.       Some direct characterization includes “He is the misanthrope, the malcontent, the miser.” And “Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire” Some indirect characterization includes “Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley.” And “‘What else can I be,’ returned the uncle, ‘when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’”

2.2.       The diction doesn’t really change at all. It is mainly focused on scrooge.

33..       Scrooge is a round dynamic character. It’s pretty obvious considering his sentiments and attitudes completely change by the end of the book. In fact that is what the book is about, how he changes.

44..       I didn’t really feel like I met a character. To be fair I had heard the story previous to reading the book. Many Christmas specials and plays are about the story and its very well known. That being said I got a much deeper understanding of scrooge from actually reading the book as opposed to a vague recollection of him from a movie I saw when I was seven.

On the lit analysis 3

I don't know why blogger was being so weird about the formatting. I formatted it the same way I formatted my other ones in word. I deeply apologize to my viewers.

Lit Analysis 3 "Catcher in the Rye" By J.D. Salinger

Catcher in the Rye Literature Analysis

General

11..       The novel is about a 16 year old who failed out of a school and decides to go to New York, because he doesn’t want to stay at school. He stays in a hotel and has a series of revealing encounters including paying a prostitute, but talking to her instead of sleeping with her. By the end of the book he gains a better understanding of the world.

22..       The theme of the novel is youthful angst. Holden constantly is talking about how people are phonies and how the world is messed up. He also alienates himself as a form of self-protection. All are very angsty things.  3. The tone is very casual. Or at least its every day. Holden speaks in his own voice, and uses his own unfiltered speech. He curses and rambles and such that sets the tone for the book. It comes off as natural and angsty.                                                                                                                                                  “ If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” (page1)                                                                                                                                                              “I mean my mother always thought Jane and her mother were sort of snubbing her or something when they didn't say hello. My mother saw them in the village a lot, because Jane used to drive to market with her mother in this LaSalle convertible they had. My mother didn't think Jane was pretty, even. I did, though. I just liked the way she looked, that's all.” (page 42)                                                                                                      “Can you imagine how drunk I was? I hung up too, then. I figured she probably just came home from a date. I pictured her out with the Lunts and all somewhere, and that Andover jerk. All of them swimming around in a goddam pot of tea and saying sophisticated stuff to each other and being charming and phony. I wished to God I hadn't even phoned her. When I'm drunk, I'm a madman.” (Page 81)                                                                                                                                                           4. Bildungsroman: The book is an example of this because its about how holdens perception of the world changes.                                                                                                                       Irony: Holden constantly says the opposite of what he thinks. Hes constantly complaining about how everyone is a phonie so its ironic that he is one also "You're aces, Ackley kid," He doesn’t like Ackley.                                                                                                                         Amplification: “So what I decided to do, I decided I'd take a room in a hotel in New York--some very inexpensive hotel and all--and just take it easy till Wednesday.”                                       Foreshadowing: “I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.” (P. 1)             Charecterization: “Old Selma Thurmer--she was the headmaster's daughter--showed up at the games quite often, but she wasn't exactly the type that drove you mad with desire. She was a pretty nice girl, though. I sat next to her once in the bus from Agerstown and we sort of struck up a conversation. I liked her. She had a big nose and her nails were all bitten down and bleedy-looking and she had on those damn falsies that point all over the place, but you felt sort of sorry for her. What I liked about her, she didn't give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.” (P. 2)                                                                                            Syntax: “Anyway, while I was putting on another clean shirt, I sort of figured this was my big chance, in a way. I figured if she was a prostitute and all, I could get in some practice on her, in case I ever get married or anything. I worry about that stuff sometimes. I read this book once, at the Whooton School, that had this very sophisticated, suave, sexy guy in it.”(page50)                                                                                                                        Hyperbole: “But I roomed with him for about two whole months, even though he bored me till I was half crazy” (Page 67)                                                                                                            Diction: “I told her no, but she was around ten minutes late, as a matter of fact. I didn't give a damn, though. All that crap they have in cartoons in the Saturday Evening Post and all, showing guys on street corners looking sore as hell because their dates are late--that's bunk. If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.” (Page 67)                                                 Simile: “It was icy as hell and I damn near fell down.” (page 3)                                                   Point of View: “I didn't feel much like thinking and answering and all. I had a headache and I felt lousy. I even had sort of a stomach-ache, if you want to know the truth.” (page 99) Its first person.

Characterization

1.       There isn’t much direct characterization of Holden. If any it’s in the beginning, there is direct characterization when Holden describes people like his sister or Stradlater. The indirect characterization would be when we see how Holden reacts. Like when he talks to the prostitute, or asks the cab driver about the ducks. I think indirect characterization is big in this book. Direct characterization is minimal or at least unimportant because most of the people Holden meets are unimportant. Its only important because how Holden describes them indirectly shows us more of who he is. We learn how they act and Holden’s perceptions of them aren’t always the same perception you get from what they actually mean. It shows Holden isn’t some perfect genius and that he isn’t always right though he doesn’t realize it.

2.      No not in my opinion. The shifts in syntax and diction generally occur when Holden chooses to elaborate on something. He tells the story matter of factly and then will break into his own internal monologue about the situation. The matter of fact parts and internal monologue are equally important in my opinion.

3.      Holden is dynamic and round. By the end of the book he has grown as a person making him dynamic. He is also complex and often contradictory making him round.

4.      I feel like I got to know Holden. “Well, you could see he really felt pretty lousy about flunking me. So I shot the bull for a while. I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would've done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull.”(page 7) Holden’s narration provides an intimate and almost vulnerable perspective of him. We know everything he is thinking and feeling and are able to understand his motives. For instance in the quote you see how he is perceptive of his teacher and that he likes him and wants him to not feel like it is the teachers fault.