This week we were challenged to find an article, share our opinion about it, and ask questions.  For my article, I chose Conformity – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly by Bruno Mirchevski.  In his article, Mirchevski does a great job of explaining all of the ups and downs of conformity so I don’t really have any objection there.  However,  midway through his writing, Mirchevski states that many people aren’t living the lives that they want because they conform to the norms of society and this goes against their natural inclinations.  This act of betraying themselves leads to a disappointing lifestyle.  I don’t necessarily believe that this is the whole truth.  I believe that we must be wary to place the disappointment in our lives on one single thing.  By doing so we can miss the stuff that is really making us sad and end up being even more disappointed, or worse, even begin blaming ourselves.  Nonetheless, this article did leave me wondering two things…

1. In class, we learn that conforming can lead us to do things that we wouldn’t normally do.  However, this article makes it seem that conformity can make the world a safer place.  The combination of these two things makes me wonder if not conforming is worth the risk of decreased public safety?
2. In my independent book this year One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the characters were taught to conform to the rules of the medical ward where they lived in order to not be punished.  Is this type of conformity also wrong?

For my Independent reading, I chose to read “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey.  I would 100% recommend this book to someone.  The point of view of the “mute” Chief Bromden brought an interesting narrative to the events throughout the story.  I felt like I was actually cheering for McMurphy when he stood up for the patients and getting angry when things didn’t go his way.  I won’t give away the ending but I was shocked at what happened.

For my independent novel project, I will be creating a timeline of events.

I, unfortunately, had to change my book halfway through this unit.  I originally had chosen Of Mice and Men but had to change it because we were reading this later in class.  I switched to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest because it came highly recommended by Mrs. Soper.  I haven’t been able to begin reading it yet but I’m sure it is very good.

Earlier in class, we discussed the founding fathers and their vision for America.  However, I believe that it is unfair to ask this question because of the founding father’s lack of insight.  There is no way they could’ve predicted social changes like social media and the internet.  With such stark differences between our society and the one, they lived how can we hold the two side by side and judge them.  Doing so would be to compare an apple to an orange.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/english-immigrants-language.html

The above article is titled “American English Needs Immigrants” and is written by Ilan Stavans.  To summarize Stavans says that they American diction is built on a continual supply of new words that push out the old ones.  He says that the way that these new words come in is with immigrants.  He then goes on to explain that if the American language is not able to get a new supply of words it will become obsolete.

I don’t necessarily agree with this.  I would argue that the American language does not fully rely on immigrants for new words and would be fine without immigrants.

However, does the risk that immigrants bring to the American economy outweigh the benefits that they bring?

What are some of these “new words” that have been recently integrated into the American language?

For my classic book, I chose “Of Mice and Men”.  I chose this book because it was recommended to me by my mother and Mrs. Means.  So far it has been pretty dry but I was warned of this; hopefully, it gets better at the end!

This week in English 11 we talked about immigration and our stances on illegal immigrants.  To make this more interesting we looked at an article written by an unlawful immigrant where he confessed what he had done and shared his story.  This challenged how we had originally thought about illegal immigrants and created a sense of sympathy toward them.