Thinking Outside the Box

Plato and Sartre

To be totally honest I am not a philosophical thinker to further examen these allegories. English and philosophical thinking in general have never really been my thing. However I think both allegories did an amazing job at extended metaphors that really gets one to think the current world we live in.

For sure I know an Inez, an Estelle, and a Garcin in my life, or at least those with similar personalities. I know what it is like to see something no one else sees and being laughed at as well. Through different characters and ideas that you would never expect you see a lot of the story taking place as if you were living it.Or even if you have not been in that situation once you understand the meaning of an allegory you can really imagine it as if it was happening in the twenty first century.

Anyways I feel both allegories really made me do a reflection on life. What it is worth and how much it means. What there really is to live for and how sometimes we waste our life away being ignorant. I feel both allegories really carried that message and really could bring out the best and worst of lies in true reflecting metaphors.

Literature Anlysis

 To Kill a Mockingbird  By: Harper Lee

GENERAL

1.To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a girl named Scout and her story about how her brother Jem broke his arm. To explain how he broke his arm she takes us back to help us understand how it all started.  Scout's family lives in Alabama during the great depression and eventually both Scout and Jem become friends with a boy named Dill who is always interested in the spooky Radley house at the end of the street.  Eventually Dill has to leave and the year goes on, but Jem and Scout start finding what they believe to be gifts in a tree in the Radley's yard. When Dill returns the next summer he is still infatuated with the Radley house. On his last night, the children decided to sneak onto the property to get a closer look at the house.  They are shot at by Nathan Radley and while trying to escape Jem loses his pants.  When he goes back the pants are fixed and folded for him. Jem and Scout continue to find gifts in the tree until Nathan Radley plugs it up. Scout’s father Atticus defends Tom Robinson (a black man) on trial and even though the man is innocent, he is still convicted because of the racist community. He is later shot to death while trying to escape.  Bob Ewell (the man who with his daughter convicted Robinson) is furious at Atticus and vows to get revenge. He attacks Jem and Scout on their way home from a Halloween party and breaks Jem’s arm. Boo Radley steps in and saves the children and kills Bob Ewell.  Scout finally felt as though she can see Boo Radley as an actual person and believes once again in human goodness.  Boo Radley was the man leaving the presents.

2. I believe that the theme of the novel is Human Goodness. The book goes against all of the stereotypes that were in place during the great depression and shows that there is good in everyone no matter what their color of skin is or how different they are. It really emphasizes to not judge the book by its cover especially in times where everyone else seems to be doing it that way.

3.The author’s tone is innocent. It’s told in a way that could only be done through the eyes of a child. 

 "I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."

 “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”

 (Talking to Jem about Dill) “Yeah. Don’t say anything about it yet, but we’re gonna get married as soon as we’re big enough. He asked me last summer.”

4. Symbols: The Mocking bird was the biggest one and represented innocence. Therefore to kill a mocking bird is to kill innocence. 

 “Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy... but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

Imagery: The imagery that Lee uses throughout the book paints a vivid picture in your head about how Scout sees the people in her life.

 “It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."

Setting: The setting itself explains a lot. A small town in the south during the great depression is the only place where a story like this could take place.

 “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square.”

 “The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”

CHARACTERIZATION

1. "The main one is, if I didn't I couldn't hold my head up in town, I couldn't 

represent this county in the legislature, I couldn't even tell you or Jem not to do

something again." (75) Atticus 

This is an example of indirect characterization to Atticus and how he can’t stand up for himself and is somewhat of a coward.

"Atticus was feeble: he was nearly fifty." (89) Narration 

This explains to us that Atticus is an older man and therefor we get a sort of picture as to what he looks like.

2. Being as the narration is being told in a "child's" point of view it is not very dynamic. The narrator keeps that ideas on the people pretty innocent and simple. The emotions are all very blunt because of the fact that it is supposed to be a child's narration.

3.Jem who is one of the main characters is a dynamic character in To Kill A Mockingbird because he changes throughout the book. For example, at the beginning of the book, Scout and Jem are best of friends. In the first summer that Dill came they played together every day. Later, in the middle of the book, Jem starts to mature and stray from Scout. Scout describes the way he acted towards her, “Jem was twelve. He was difficult to live with, inconsistent, moody,” (Lee 115). She goes on to say she cannot understand why he has changed so much. He starts to impose rules on her and tells her to be more of a woman. Scout thought about how just a month ago they were having fun and wrestling like two boys. Later Jem changes again, but this time he starts to become best friends with Scout again. For instance, Scout gets laughed at when she messes up the play, but Jem comforts her and tells her it is okay (227). For these reasons, Jem is a dynamic character.

4. I just felt that I had read a character in the end of the book. Not that it is a bad thing or anything I just kind of felt the emotions half way. Usually when the narrator is a more philosophical person or more mature that is  when I actually feel like I met the person. However since this story was told in a childs perspective I just felt the innocence the whole time and no real connection. True there was some very mature scenes in the book but I feel if the narration would have been different then my whole outlook on the story would have changed. 

Blog Views.

WOW OVER 1,000. I know that is not that many compared to others but wow am I happy! At the same time it is kind of a motivation to put my best thinking into the information that is going on my blog. If people are actually looking at my work then I should probably make it good material right?! WAH! So excited! haha(:

Allegory of the Cave Sonnet

In the cave they live lost in the shadows,

Torn from reality to live in chains

And the dim fire from behind them glows

By looking they break loose and feel the pains

An enlightenment he will then receive

Blinded by the light he cowers in fear

Realizing all his life he's been deceived

No more distortion it all becomes clear

He wishes to share the knowledge he gained

But the others ridicule his knowledge

Until people see the light all is stained

Without truth their lives stay over the edge

The freedom the people fear yet long for

Showing in life we should all strive for more

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

1.Allegory of the cave represents that the “reality” we believed in can the something that we create in our own imagination. We must free ourselves and getting out of the cave and coming to see real things with our own eyes. It can be “painful” to destroy all we believed before and establish the new thinking.  However, like the prisoner who suffers from the bright light when he first get out the cave. Eventually, he will get used to the light/brightness and be thankful to whoever brought him out of the “dark” cave and enter the world with “light”.

2.Prison house(cave)—world of imagination

Prisoner---people who is ignorant/innocent.

Shadow/Darkness—imagination/false realities

Sun/Light---intellectual world and reality

The prisoner who walked out the cave ---Philosophers

3. Plato believes that education is the process of learning spiritual knowledge;

and that everyone is given the power to learn within their soul. However, the process of enlightenment can be different from people to people. Education should a spiritual enlightenment. Plato suggests about the ideal world; it that there is equality among people. And all the knowledge/truth should be known by every citizen. As a philosopher, they have the responsibility go into the dark cave and enlighten the ignorant prisoners who still live under the shadow.

4.The “cave” represents the world of illusion/imagination. The prisoners who are impounded in the world with limit vision. The “reality” they believe is based on their imagination. The “shackles” are the restriction that confined the people who lives in the cave to walk out. I think it represents fear of the unknowing world with light. If they can’t break the shackles, they will ever have the chance to explores the outside world.

5.In society today , I think the suspicion/distrust shackle people’s mind. People can’t trust each others because they are afraid of close friends/family’s betrayal. Personally, it is hard for to trust some random people I meet online. You don’t like if they are telling the truth or lying for some purposes. The suspicion tends to restrict the free flow of information and knowledge. In addition, the egotism can be a shackle for people’s mind.

6. The perspective that the prisoners have is none because all those shadows are allusions that truly distort all reality of shape and size from objects. The freed prisoner has a far greater understanding of perspective because he actually gets to see the objects from nearby and judge as to their actual size and attributes from close. never seen it.

7. The prisoners were restricted to only the views of what the shadows presented therefore lack of clarity and confusion can occur at the same time when one refuses to look beyond what is before them essentially...lack of clarity and intellectual confusion occurs when people are either hidebound or stupid or a combination of both.

8.Cave prisoners get free when they are released into the real world. This in a way releases them to be intellectually free. It really demonstrated the prisoners getting to know reality. They feel that all the images they see and the shadows they have live by are reality and really and truly they know nothing. Not even light because they have never seen it. The beginning stage of seeing the light I think is the beginning stage to their intellectual freedom.

9. There is definitely a difference between appearances and reality. If you translate that to the modern day I think as a teenager we can compare it to the way girls act and the way they look. They might pack on makeup and make themselves look completely beautiful but sometimes they are the meanest people you will ever meet. There are always different worlds people would like to live in and I feel that because of this conclusion it is safe to say that reality and appearance can be very confusing and misleading but they are two different things that definitely exist.

10.  Assuming that Socrates's assumption that there is a difference between reality and appearance, two metaphysical assumptions that can be made is that reality is self-deceptive and therefore reality does not exist because of the discriminatory ideals between each persons reality.

All Nighters.......

So this is my two cents for this all nighter study session with Sam. Now every one always talks about how pulling all nighters and cramming sessions are completely horrible and you should never do them, but come on you are talking about teenagers here. The one who reigns over our souls is the great and almighty power of procrastination. Yes this has been a long time to stay awake and completely unhealthy but I feel this is one of the few times I can place YOLO appropriately in my school work. Being as we both might regret this by tomorrow when we are taking the test I feel that for now this is really helping us review. Apart from giving us more hours in the day I feel it really helps us prepare for the future. Those college days when we need to pull these all nighters left and right. AP class would not be complete with the full imitation of a college experience now would it? haha

Lit Anal: The Kite Runner

Refreshing Sophomore year time! haha(:

 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is about Amir and his struggle to cope with things that happened when he was a boy and his attempts to make them right.  He grew up in Afghanistan with his friend and servant, Hassan.  Amir and Hassan did everything together and Hassan would protect Amir at all costs if it ever came down to it.  That winter, Amir wins the kite fighting tournament and Hassan runs to collect the kite only to be raped by a few other boys.  Slowly Amir and Hassan drift apart and Hassan and his father leave.  Amir and his father flee Kabul when it is invaded by the Soviets and move to California. Here, Amir meets and marries Soraya and they try and fail to have a baby.  Amir goes Pakistan where he learns that Hassan has been killed, but has a son, Sohrab, in an orphanage.  He rescues Sohrab but gets badly hurt in the process. After he recovers, Amir and Soraya try to bring Sohrab back to the U.S. to live with them. Sohrab tries to kill himself and fails. He becomes severely withdrawn and only smiles when he wins a kite battle back in the U.S. And Amir runs the kite for him.

 The theme of this novel is really all about redemption. “There is a way to be good again,” is one of the quotes that seems to haunt Amir throughout the book and what drives him to try to fix everything that happens.  He regrets everything that happened between himself and Hassan and wants to do everything he can to try and make it right.

 The authors tone throughout most of the book is very tragic. While there are uplifting and happy parts, the main tone is one of despair and loss.

 “I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba.”

 “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”

 “That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.”

Symbolism - 

 The pomegranate tree - The pomegranate tree serves as a symbol of Hassan and Amir’s friendship.  As long as Hassan and Amir’s friendship is strong, the tree blooms, and produces fruit, and is healthy.  But as soon as the boys start to drift apart, the tree withers and dies.

"Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul." "Those words made it formal: the tree was ours."

Irony - 

 Amir wants to be like his father and make his father proud, but instead he ends up possessing the traits of his father that are unwanted.  He, like his father, betrays his best friend.  Amir constantly has to deal with the unintended consequences of his actions that he took when he was a child and almost every action has a negative consequence.

“My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.”

Foreshadowing - 

 A lot of the major things that take place in Afghanistan, reoccur when Amir is grown up.   He has to deal with the rape of Hassan’s son, realizing that he betrayed his best friend just  like his father did, and the most well known foreshadowing; Amir running Sohrab’s kite  for him.

“For you, a thousand times over.”

CHARACTERIZATION

Hassan's Indirect and Direct characterization

"...even in birth, Hassan was true to his nature: He was incapable of hurting anyone." (p. 10)

This is one line through which Amir indirectly characterizes Hassan as a person. We see through the chapters that Hassan is a very loyal person and could never hurt anyone. Proving to us that this statement is true.

One Direct characterization is in Chapter 1 where we are told that Hassan is harelipped and it is something directly on his character.

Being as one of the characters is the narrator of the story he doesn't really change his tone. He keeps his tone very mono tone due to the story being told in one point of view only.

All the characters in this story are very dynamic characters. As they go through the struggles they now have to face a lot of their mentality changes. The characters are not the same as the story progresses and its easy to follow that they are going through difficult times and that is why they are now struggling. At the beginning of the story however seeing as Amir controls the story I think the story seemed to make the characters flat but as time passed and incidents like the rape and so on, I think the dynamics of the story really changed.

Through the whole story I felt a lot of different connections and emotions. Seeing a close friend go through a hard time, I think we have all felt something like that at one point. I think in the end I some what knew the character but at the same time I don't think it was realistic, or as realistic as it could have been. Yes there were many parts that were related to situations somewhat like I have been through but the setting and the way of thinking these characters had did not match my sense of reality. I think the biggest effect would be the geographical aspect. However I did like the emotion portrayed in this story.

Sonnet Analysis Part 1

The opening line poses a simple question which the rest of the sonnet answers. The poet compares his loved one to a summer’s day and finds him to be “more lovely and more temperate.”

The poet discovers that love and the man’s beauty are more permanent than a summer’s day because summer is tainted by occasional winds and the eventual change of season. While summer must always come to an end, the speaker’s love for the man is eternal.

RESOURCES:
Here is where I found most of this analysis. There is a further analysis on this webpage but I believe those two lines summed up the poem well at the tip.

Big Question

Now... my question always seems to become controversial and is answered mainly on a persons beliefs and morals. The Question is... Even though there is evidence that spirits live among us, why do people still question their existence?
By their I mean ghosts and by evidence I mean things like medians who exist. If you visit one I think people have become believers but some people close themselves off to that option.
That is my big question. I(:

Vocab Week #11

VOCAB REMIX IN PROCESS
Affinity- relationship by marriage
Bilious- of or indicative of a peevish ill nature disposition
Cognate- of the same nature
Corollary- A proposition inferred Immediately from a proved proposition with little or no additional proof 
Cul-de-sac - a pouch
Derring-do- a daring action
Divination- The art or practice that seeks to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge due to the interpretation of omens 
Elixir- A substance capable of prolonging life indefinitely 
Folderol- a useless accessory 
Gamut- an entire range or series
Hoi polloi- the General populace
Ineffable- incapable of being expressed in words 
Lucubration- to study by night 
Mnemonic- intended to assist memory
Obloquy- abusive language
Parameter- an independent variable used to express the coordinates of variable point and functions of them
Pundit- a learned man 
Risible- provoking laughter
Symptomatic- having the characteristics of a certain disease but arising of a different cause 
Volte-face- a reversal in policy

Sonnet

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines, 
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; 
But thy eternal summer shall not fade 
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; 
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, 
When in eternal lines to time thou growest: 
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
~ William Shakespeare

AP Hamlet PLN

So after a long search into countless pages where discussion took place here are my top five. The reason for these I have chosen is the fact that they all seemed like sources a teacher would use. Seeing as we have read through the play these resources will help every student know the break down of Hamlet. When you can fully comprehend something to the point where you can break it down and explain it to others then you have mastered the material. This is why I think these sources I have posted here will really help those of us who have yet to master Hamlet.


HERE is a full outline for teachers that are looking further into Hamlet and a teaching plan. I think you can easily take this and self apply to study habits.


Mind Map... Great to sort out your major ideas,

Look around on this blog! It's another class looking for some good resources like us!

http://shsaplit.wikispaces.com/hamlet_review_1 

Multiple Choice Test Good help for anything!