Kyle's Academy Blog

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.