Important Skills: Extra Credit

Although I'm not positive if this is considered a skill, I feel that learning to annotate literature has defintiely been one of the most important things I have learned thus far. When asked to annotate our outside reading book I wasn't confident on what was being asked of me. Later on I grasped the idea and was annotating as I read. I felt as if I gained so much while annotating because each word I was reading I was saying to myslef "Okay, does this have a sybolic/literal meaning?" or "What is the author trying to say behind this?". Typically when I read a novel before I would understand the obvious meaning while running past the deeper meaning and figuratve language to where parts of the book became a massive blur. By annotating I literally study every page to comprehend farther than the average person would see. Not only do I now gain a deeper understanding for novels including their authors but I can also gain a new perspective on life itself.

(TWIST was a great way to do this)

Something Interesting

During the "Lobsters" fishbowl discussion I learned a lot about what the piece could be and what it means. Some ideas I had already thought about and others were semi-new. One comment that really gave me a new perspective on the poem was the idea of slave trade. Way back when people picked and chose their slaves relates to how in the story we pick and chose our lobsters. It was sort of the idea that we were the superior looking down upon someone or something. It also went along with the idea of when you take something out of its place it probably won't be the same. Such as taking the slaves out of the South, and taking lobsters out of the ocean for us to go out and buy/eat.

 I learned that some may fit in and are beautiful where they belong but when taken somewhere else they may be insignificant or looked down upon. Rather than thinking about the typical suggestions, I'm now thinking about historical references to times such as slave trade and even the Holocaust. Hearing that one of Mrs. Gilman's previous students researched that the author was involved in the war really geared my direction towards those kinds of ideas. I feel like this helped me see beyond then what I have been thinking this week about the poem and I have gained a new perspective on this piece of literature.

So many paragraphs, so many skills

For the third period class of Mrs. Gilman, none of the papers read would be considered horrible. Most people did did good jobs while others did fantastic and semi-okay jobs. The flaws of papers that were consistently pointed out would be that the transitions were too attached with the quote embedment so they were hard to find. This would be a problem because now you can't really tell when they are trying to "transition" into a new topic rather that just jumping from thing to thing. Another weakness about papers was that the commentary was more plot summary. This was really annoying to me because I didn't get to hear about their opinions on what they thought it meant and I got yet another recap on this book we've been analyzing forever. Other than those two main the things, most of the papers were pretty decent. Our class was somewhat brutal when it came to negative things about the paper. People were pointing out things as small as the page number should lye by itself such as (98) not (p.98). To me those types of things don't matter as long as the quality of writing is up to par. So overall I would  say transitions and commentary were some of the most frequent problems in the papers read. 

My paragraph, I thought was not bad. I mean obviously it has lots of flaws but I felt I got "hated on", if you will, when my negative critique's came around. The issue's in my paper were mainly transitions. My transitions flowed too much into my quote embedment and were hard to find. I definitely will make sure that they are clear next time so that the viewers can understand the point I am trying to make. Reading over the checklist multiple times is a for sure thing to do when writing my next paper. I know fully understand how helpful it will be the next time around.