Knowledge Post

I believe that knowledge is something everyone should seek because that is the foundation of life. By this, I mean that without knowledge we will never get far in life. I try to gain knowledge outside of school by the people who I know have been through a lot in life. They just know what the best for me is according to their past experiences. Continuous acquisition of knowledge is important because you have to experience new things in life which may or may not be good, but the objective is to learn from it.

Opinion Piece

Does a person with a positive attitude get farther in life than a person with a negative attitude?

I strongly believe that a person who is positive can be much more successful than one who is miserable 24/7. A person who is positive, motivated, and happy is who everyone should try to be. If someone is always mad, sad, and negative towards everything they will never get far in life. I personally try to be the best that i can to be positive to every obstacle that comes my way.

Being a positive person has many benefits, for example, you can motivate people to be better on who they are and what they can accomplish. Personally, I always try to motivate others to the best of my abilities so they can be happy. Making someone appreciate life a little bit more by giving them a positive thought is the greatest thing anyone can do. Another benefit is that people will want to be your friend. No one wants a sad miserable person around them all the time, so why should you be that person?

If you haven’t noticed, time flies. Enjoying life and what it has to offer is something that everyone should try to do with a positive attitude. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be on my 30s and thinking “wow, I could have turned that situation around.” I don’t want to regret anything that I didn’t do during my youth. I try to enjoy my life every day with the love of my supporting family and loving friends. I would hate to live life with the mindset of “same routine”. Sadly, our lives are actually a routine but it is our choice to either make it a good day or think that it’s just “another day.”

With those thoughts being said, that is why I think a happy person would accomplish more in life than those who hate life. My final question is, are you a positive or negative person?  

The Joy Luck Club Essay

Prompt: Although much of the plot of each story revolves around men, The Joy Luck Club as a whole centers on the relationships between mothers and daughters. How would the book differ if the Chinese characters were fathers and sons instead?

In The Joy Luck Club there were many miscommunications between mothers and daughters. Many of the conflicts these women went through were because of the diversity between their cultures. The mother being Chinese and the daughter being American. I believe that this book would completely change if these characters would be based on men instead of women for 3 reasons. The reasons being that men have less conflict, they are less emotional, and finally they're a lot less influential than women. This leads me to explaining further on about the examples I listed previously.

The first reason as to why I think this book would change if the Chinese characters would be men is because men tend to have less conflict with others. We can see in the chapter called Rules of the Game when Waverly Jong gets overwhelmed by her mother's constant pressure for the game of chess. Waverly breaks in emotion one day with her mother and asks her why she has always tried to take credit for her success. This creates conflict between these characters because at the end of the day Waverly lost interest in something she once had passion for and all because of her mother's selfishness.

The second reason why the book would change if it revolved around men is because men are less emotional. They never really express what they are feeling and tend to not have emotional breakdowns. The chapter The Voice from the Wall portrays how Lena is confused from her mother's actions and state of mind. Ying-Ying, Lena’s mom, suffered from a loss of a baby. She would always cry and never say much and claim to see the future. This affected Lena’s life because she never really got to interact with her mother throughout her childhood. By this, a wall was created upon them causing diversity between them.

The last reason is that men are a lot less influential than women. After Suyan passed away, it was June’s call to take over her mother's legacy and fulfill her wish. June was influenced by her mother and her legacy to fly to China and find her long lost sisters and give them Suyan’s message. Men don’t usually influence other’s or have a sense of control over someone, which is why I think this would be different if it was a book based on Chinese men.

In conclusion, those were the 3 examples why I thought this book would be different if it focused on Chinese men. I thought this book was very inspiring in the sense of how we should always be grateful of what and who we gave in our lives because one day they will all be gone. The book teaches us to always have a type of communication with our loved ones and if there are misunderstandings we should try to fix them. It’s better to solve a problem together than time passing by and not being able to say sorry.

Antigone Questions 9-15

9. Tom Leopard is called the Leopard Man because he is covered with a leopard tattoo and acts like one too. As described in paragraph #1.

10. The author thinks that people with tattoos and piercings are desperate for societies attention, and he finds himself unimpressed by them. He has these opinions because he thinks that when people try to attract in a positive form and have failed, they go for the more darker and negative way to attract others, otherwise known as attention.

11. The Leopard Man is different from other people with tattoos and piercings because he actually acts like a leopard. He lives in the wilderness and has no clothes.

12. The Leopard Man lives in a small cabin in the Scottish wilderness.

13. Society fears people who are loners because they pursue their own values without seeking others' permission.

14. Fey's argument in this paragraph is that even though weird people do have mental disorders, "normal" people have disorders too. For example, "normal" people suffer from alcoholism, eating disorders, depression, panic attacks, and other debating conditions.

15. Leopard Man is happy because he doesn't live up to anyones expectations, aka society.

Diction Handouts

1. An example of low or informal diction is, "...I only climbed on the spare spar and leand over the rail as far as I could, to bring my eyes nearer to that mystery floating alongside."

2. Words & Definitions
-Opaque: not able to be seen through
-Elongated: unusually long in relation to its width.
-Phosphorescent: something glows with light without becoming hot to the touch
-Elusive: difficult to find, catch, or achieve.
-Immersed: dip or submerge in a liquid
-Cadaverous: resembling a corpse in being very pale, thin, or bony
-Ghastly: causing great horror or fear; frightful or macabre

Paraphrasing the paragraph:

The side of the ship made a hazy belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. I saw at once something extended and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before i could form a guess a faint flash of shimmering light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the intangible, silent play of summer lighting in a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back shot right up to my neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. As he hung by the ladder, like a resting swimmer, the sea lighting played about his limbs at every stir, and he appeared in it terrible, silvery, fishlike.

3. The elevated language contributes to the tone to make it sound more formal and more mysterious. Paraphrasing the passage affects the tone in a casual way. It sounds less formal and when reading the passage, it's not as intriguing as reading elevated words since it makes it sound better.

4. 4 examples of concrete diction in the passage are:
- phosphorescent light
-opaque belt of shadow
- a board livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow.
- a headless corpse

5. The author chose to leave the captain, the ship, and the crew nameless in the story because he wanted the readers to still keep thinking and being in a way clueless as to who was being described. The elevated words are the ones which unveil what the objects are and how they look like.

6. The denotative meaning of the title The Secret Sharer is of a person who talks about their side that other people don't see, which is dark.

Word	Denotation	Connotation
Cadaverous	resembling a corpse in being very pale, thin, or bony	Body
Darkling	of or relating to growing darkness.	Darkness
Pale	light in color or having little color.	White
Phosphorescence	something glows with light without becoming hot to the touch	Flashy
Ghastly	causing great horror or fear; frightful or macabre	Scared
Headless	having no head	No mind
Fishlike	a characteristic of a fish	Feature

Latin Roots #6

Roots and Derivatives

1. Corp(or) (body): corpse, corporation, corps, corpuscle, corpus, corset

2. Cred (to believe, to trust): credo, credit, discredit, credence

3. Cur, curs, course (to run, to flow): current, excursion, discourse, concur

4. Dic(t) (to speak, to say): diction, indication, edict, addict, dictionary 

Word List

1. Benediction: the invocation of a divine blessing, as at the close of a religious service; a blessing or a state of blessedness.

Example: The benediction at the end of the service was as long as the sermon.

2. Concourse: a running or flowing together; a board public walkway or hallway; a crowd or throng.

Example: A long concourse extended from the main lobby of the airport to the check-in counters.

3. Concurrent: occurring at the same time; meeting or acting together.

Example: Things that happen concurrently happen at the same time.

4. Corporal: related to the physical body.

Example: Corporal pleasures are the enjoyments of the mind.

5. Corpulent: very stout; fat.

Example: Grown corpulent from years of overeating, Kamlesh decided to participate in the sack race.

6. Credibility: the quality of being believable or trustworthy.

Example: Only the most childlike credibility would allow a person to believe a phony set up.

7. Credulity: the (naive) willingness to believe too easily without proof. 

Example: From your credulity expression, I can tell that you don't believe.

8. Cursory: done in a superficial or hasty manner.

Example: A cursory examination is not as thorough as it might have been.

9. Dictum: an authoritative saying or maxim.

Example: "Business is business" was my friend's favorite dictum.

10. Incorporate: to form into one body or function unit; to combine several different things into a whole.

Example: We should incorporate as much traditional Americana into our news campaign as possible.

11. Incredulous: not believing, skeptical, or doubting.

Example: An incredulous smile is likely to suggest skepticism.

12. Indicative: characteristic of or very much like; suggestive.

Example: Any remark indicative of the truth should not be misleading.

Literature Analysis #2: I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak

1. The book starts off at a bank robbery scene where the main character Ed Kennedy unintentionally becomes the town hero by telling the cops who the robber was. Ed knew who he was because he was one of the hostages kept by the robber in the bank. The day after, Ed receives an ace of diamonds in the mail by an unknown person. He then discovered that the card had three addresses written in the back of it, which ment that each address had a problem he had to fix . Throughout the book he got a variety of aces: diamonds, clubs, spades, hearts. It wasn't easy for Ed to finish one card a day because he had to find clues on how to get to the destination and he had to figure out how to fix the problem he had to face. At the end when Ed completed all of the cards given, he received a last card. This card was the joker and the address listed on it was his own address. Ed then learned from the card that he is not the messenger, but the message.

2. The main theme of the book is faith. I feel like this is the main theme because Ed was called worthless and useless all his life up until he reaches his last card. Throughout the book he stays motivated to continue with the messages even if it ment he had to kill someone. He just wanted to help the people that were listed in the poker cards. 

3. The protagonist is dynamic by the end of the book because he learns many things about himself that he didn't know. At first, he was very calm and at ease but towards the end of the book he gets out of his comfort zone and does things he never thought he would do. This explains why I think he's a dynamic character (also round) by the end of the book.

4. One significant symbol is the joker card he receives in the mail. This is symbolic because it's his last card but also because the last thing written on it is his home address. This reveals that the main character has to find out how he could possibly deliver a message but to himself. 

5. The reason why I chose this book was because it looked like a mystery piece. I personally only enjoy reading mystery books because I get more intrigued by them and if keeps me wanting to finish reading the book. I wanted to keep reading more when I reached to the point in the book where Ed goes to 45 Edgar Street. Here he sees a woman being raped and he has to help her. In the end I thought this book was amazing. I honestly thought it was better than The Fault in Our Stars and that says a lot!

6. One of the connections I can make from the book to my life is that I have friends who sometimes tell me what they're affected by it. I remember one friend in particular that toled me how her mom would tell her she was useless. This connects to the book because Ed is constantly always being called out by his mom which are hurtful words. I believe my friend is not wot has because she is a great person and very smart. This also connects to Ed because he's intelligent and is his own hero.

7. One of the things I will forever remember from this book is the quote on page 224. "Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are." When I read this for the first time I was in complete shock. I feel like our generation/society is so focused in looks but what they don't realize is that a person is beautiful because of what they bring to the table. I can't go on any further explaining why I will always remember this quote because it already speaks for its self.