Kyle's Academy Blog

The first post I read was Emily’s. It mostly talked about how some blog prompts that she though were interesting weren’t really used, and that there could be some additional prompts that she thinks should be added. She also mentioned how she likes how the grading isn’t very subjective.

“I definitely agree with you Emily about adding some additional blog posts. I think that adding a post just about an interesting article that you read or something you saw in the news would really be beneficial to this assignment and make it feel more like a personal blog. Though we aren't graded very harshly for these blogs, I learned that we can lose points if are blog isn't long enough, which I think is slightly unfair as there weren't really any basic guidelines laid down in the beginning of the year. I do think this could be easily remedied though for next year.”

Alyssa’s metacognition post talked about how one of her favorite things was reading other student’s posts, and how she liked the prompts, how they gave some basic guidelines to the posts but then let the student do pretty much what they wanted with them.

“Reading other peoples blogs is one of my favorite things about this assignment too, though I really only get around to it when we have a blogging around prompt like this one (Mr. Allen should definitely keep these prompts for next year). In my metacognition post about this blog, I mentioned how I really didn't like a lot of the prompts we had, and that I'd rather just talk about what I wanted. But your post reminded me that some people really want a general structure to their posts, and I might be in the minority in that I'd rather not have them.”

I really enjoyed this assignment this year. This assignment inspired me to start my own personal blog which I update fairly regularly. Blogs were also an assignment in my chem class so I really got involved in this medium this year.

Blogging allowed me to ponder things that I wouldn’t normally think about, and that, in itself made this assignment worthwhile.

But to me, some of the blog prompts seem slightly forced. For example, with the “best of week blogs”, many kids in our class had issues coming up with things, often asking around to see what other kids come up with. This led to less than stellar blogs, and a less than stellar experience.

To me, these blogs aren’t really “blogs”. By imposing strict guidelines on what you need to blog about, and not letting students post other things it becomes more of an online journal rather than a blog. Another critical element with blogging is interaction with the community. Other than the comments that we need to post for the “blogging around” prompts there’s really nobody else. I installed a hit counter on my blog out of curiosity, and it gets probably 2-4 hits a week. Mostly me, you, and the occasional other academy student. My personal blog, where I post lots of different things, gets 50-60 a week.

I feel like without this interaction with the online community, I could get the same experience by emailing a response to prompt to you every week.

This blogging experience did introduce me the idea of having my own personal blog, which I enjoy a lot, and for that I’m grateful.

When I started this book, I was a little annoyed with Michael K. He seemed extremely unintelligent, and normally I don’t really enjoy reading about dumb people. In the beginning of the book, he did some things that just made me want to scream at the page.

But after discussing this book in class, I began to see how Michael K has his own brand of intelligence. Its not the average type of intelligent, but as we see in the book, he knows how to disappear into the landscape and escape the system. In this way, we see him attract followers, and we begin to see him more in a god like way, which is a pretty big leap from someone who I originally believed to be extremely unintelligent.

Today, my Mom asked me if I wanted to go to the beach with her, my little brother, and our dog, Callie. At first I was hesitant, why would I want to go spend time with my family? Sunday is normally my day to relax at home with my laptop, finish up homework, stuff like that.

Then the thought popped into my head.

In ten years what am I going to remember? Not the lazy afternoons spent with a laptop and microwave pizza, but the ones I spend with my family. Those are the memories I’m going to cherish for years to come.

So I went to the beach. I had a lot of fun, and I don’t think I’m going to forget that memory any time soon. For all the other teenagers reading this, spend time with your family when you can. If you don’t you’ll regret it later.

After our my last revision, I didn't have much more to add to my story. In my last revision, the character returns to her relationship which doesn't work. After one of the comments Mr. Allen left on my story, I realized that that just doesn't work. It didn't really make sense for her to go on a figurative journey, and then come back to something that just doesn' work.

While talking during class, Mr. Allen said that the ending needed to have the character make a substantial shift in thinking. He also said that we can't give the characters exactly what they want, but what they need.

My character may have wanted to return to her relationship and have everything work out, but that didn't make for the best story. Once I realized this, the story became much more meaningful.

This was a pretty interesting assignment, as well as being fairly open-ended. We had to have six Jane Eyre quotes, three references to other books we’ve read, and a big topic. Ours was “Breaking the status quo”.

While writing this, our direction seemed to shift more towards a general conversation about the status quo, who’s participants just happened to be Jane, Charlotte Bronte, and an academy student then a conversation about the status quo just in Jane Eyre.

I’m not sure whether we’ve created what Mr. Allen asked for, and according to the project page on his website, I can’t be entirely sure. But I think that writing it the way we did made for an extremely interesting discussion, one which makes interesting points, as well as revealing more about the book itself.

Whether or not our finished product is ideal, I’m proud of it, and I feel that the process that led to it was interesting, and well, thought provoking.

Talking about gender roles during our Jane Eyre discussion really got me thinking. Gender roles has changed dramatically over time, and will probably continue to do so.

This lends to the question of why do we have gender roles? Many of them seem antiquated, and are continuously getting replaced. They also cause discrimination towards people who don’t follow specific gender roles.

In the beginning of the species, gender roles would have made practical sense. The physically stronger male could hunt for food, while the woman who was better equipped to take care of babies. But in today’s society, both woman and men can “bring home the bacon” as making money is not dependent on strength in most facets of modern society. We also have baby formula, etc. So are gender roles just left-overs from our start as a species? Or are they engrained within our genetic code?

In the future, gender roles will probably shift even more, but will they ever really disappear?

These are two topics that have been debated for a long time. After 9/11 and the Patriot act these ideas have been pushed into the spotlight. They both have strong arguments making it hard to find a winner.

When the Patriot act passed, every body lost a little bit of individual freedom. But at the same time, it was supposed to make everybody a little bit safer, and it probably did, but does that make a loss of individual freedom and privacy worth it? Is it fair that the government can listen in to our personal phone calls? Read our emails? Even though most people haven’t done anything illegal, they still have a basic right to privacy and probably wouldn’t appreciate losing that. But if there’s one person, who’s phone calls or emails talk about blowing up a building, or planting a bomb somewhere, it could be worth it to save that loss of life. But if we keep losing more and more of our personal privacy, for the good of the community, where will it end? It would be potentially safer if we had video cameras in all our homes, watching us to see if we were making bombs, etc, but that would be an even larger invasion of privacy. There has to be a place where it ends.

First, I went to Kate Kadleck’s blog. She wrote about how she frequently writes things, but also leaves the half-finished. Because of this, she’s really excited for the short story project because it’ll force her to create something that she’ll be proud of.

I said:

I feel like this happens to me too, except for me it's more like I get an idea and I never write anything down. In our eighth grade class we had to write a "vocab" story and that was one of my favorite things just because it gave me an excuse to write something. I'm really enjoying this assignment.

Then I went to visit Marika’s blog. One of her posts was about if she had a sudden moment of JK Rowling-esque “insight” and what it would be about.

I said:

I really enjoyed reading this post, your writing style is really happy and exciting, especially the emoticons. Regarding the theoretical "insight" that you're talking about, I have to wonder if it really exists, or if you just find it by writing and creating and occasionally a bit of luck. I guess there's no sure way to tell for sure.

During class, we were talking about how the sentence length varies in "Cathedral". In the beginning, we were talking about how in the beginning, the sentences were shorter, in the middle they got longer and more complex, and in the end the were shorter again. This was attributed to the fact that in the beginning the main character was narrow minded about blind people, and not used to them. Towards the middle, his mind began to widen, and so did his sentences. In the end, his sentences shrunk again. This alludes to the fact that his epiphany can't be explained in sentences, no matter how verbose the sentences were. While other students and Mr. Allen were talking about that, the only reason I saw was that in both the beginning and the end he was talking about himself, and in the middle he was describing everything around him. Mr. Allen said that these two ideas could be layered upon each other, creating more meaning. But it raises the question how much of this is intentional by the author? Is he writing the prose, or in someways is the writing working through him.

People told me that during English Class on Friday, one of the them main things we talked about was how form is content. But what if form meant nothing? What if how an author writes was meaningless, and it's only purpose is to be pleasing the to eyes or ears? I guess that it would be a lot harder to pick up minute meaning in the text, and it would be difficult to understand subtle things. Maybe the author would just have to be really abrupt in his writing to try and get his point across. I don't think writing would be nearly as enjoyable then. I've spent a couple hours today reading books, and if they weren't well written I don't think I would have spent that time reading them.

In Heart of Darkness Kurtz is portrayed as an almost god-like figure. We hear about him numerous times, while all the details are kept vague. The impressions that I got from him were: awesome, genius, clever, personable, awe inspiring. He is portrayed as the ideal person, but when we finally meet him, as the curtain is pulled back, we realized that he is so little than what we thought he was. He goes from an awe-inspiring figure to a weak, broken man so quickly. It’s very abrupt and hard for the reader to comprehend and make the mental transition. We also see a connection with The Wizard of Oz  and Heart of Darkness as the primary purpose in both stories is to find the wizard and Kurtz respectively. The yellow brick road can be paralleled with the river. It’s interesting to see this connection as it shows that this is a common theme that shows up multiple times, whether in children’s literature or a short novel. It’s likely that the theme of searching for a almost mythical figure and then discovering he’s not that great is pretty widespread throughout literature.

I just made a new personal blog at kylealbert.blogspot.com. Check it out if you want.