I liked my independent novel. I read The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks which is a spinoff of one of his other books, The Notebook. I personally love The Notebook and to be able to read about the characters relatives and their story is really interesting. It’s about Wilson, the son-in-law of the main characters in the Notebook. He realizes that his marriage is failing so he goes to his father-in-law, Noah, to try to get some help. I love that Noah is helping his son-in-law because everything he went through with his late-wife and trying to keep her. Wilson tries to make her fall in love with him all over again and realizes that he never really was that romantic before so he changes everything to try to win her back. It was a really heartwarming and touching story and I loved the cross over between this and The Notebook.
What makes me proud to be an American? I love that we can have the freedom to be who we want to be and to live good fulfilling lives. There is so much opportunity in our society. Even though it doesn’t seem like it’s always there, there is always opportunities for you. Opportunities to be successful, to grow as a person, to make friends, and so many more. It gives you so many different ways to live our life and make it as good for you as possible.
I believe that family dynamic in today’s society is very important. A person will have a hard time living a good and fulfilling life without a good family dynamic. Your family shapes who you are and is supposed to help you grow into a good, well functioned person. Your family is supposed to support you and cheer you on through everything you do in your life. I think children should obey their parents. Parents are there to protect you and help you through life. They are trying to help you do right in the world so by listening to them, you are allowing them to guide you to success. I think a child should obey their parents until they are adults, once a person is an adult they can live their life the way they choose to. They can still choose to have their parents still help to guide them until they figure it out but I think that until you are an adult you should obey your parents.
I read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. The books whole idea is about the veterans of Vietnam and what they experienced and what they had with them while they were there and why it was important and significant to them. Personally, I am a history person so I found the book extremely interesting. It also was a little bit of a tear jerker because of some of the things they experienced and how they felt during different times. It would have been very hard to be a soldier in Vietnam. For my project, I am going to create a playlist for my book.
We have been doing prior research to reading The Crucible. We’ve learned about mass hysteria and the salem witch trials. From this I have learned that people people conform to society very easily. They want to fit in so badly that they will conform to others and then a whole group is formed that all thinks the same and acts the same. In the context of the salem witch trials, people would accuse those who did not conform and who were different from the majority.
During our socratic seminar we touched on the topic of how social media is affecting our lives. I agree that social media is not very old and is fairly new so we don’t know all the long terms effects we are going to have from it. You can see some of the effects that it is having on us now. If you look at the way people act on social media versus the way they act in real life, it’s totally different. People are much more outgoing and open on social media. They can get away with saying anything they want to say.
I chose the book The Things They Carried by Tom O’Brien. I chose it because it is about the Vietnam war and the men in the Vietnam war. I really like it so far, I love history and I the view you get to see through this book is really good.
Not everyone has the same “Journey to America.” Based on some of the texts that we read we heard about the stories of how slaves and immigrants came to America and how they are seen and how they see the world. Some slaves were brought here from their home countries. They were forced to leave their homes against their will and do forced labor. They were tortured both physically and mentally, torn away from their families, and were given almost no hope of happiness and freedom like their lives had been before. Other slaves were born into it and didn’t get a chance to see what their world could be like without slavery. Either way they came here, they were seen as the bottom of the barrel, outcast, “unclean” group of people. They weren’t even really seen as people. The immigrants also weren’t seen as people. Though many of them that lived here considered this country their home, others didn’t see it that way and they were deprived of having normal lives.
I read the book The Book Thief. For my project, I made buttons to represent my book. My first button I made is a guess the book type of button. It features a booke and a thief on it so you can easily guess that the book is called the book thief. My second button was made from a very important artifact from the book. Its a picture of the very first book that the book thief stole which started her stealing days. The book was called “The Gravedigger’s Handbook.” My last button is a quote that I thought was very important to the book. The quote is, “If you can’t imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.” I thought this quote was important because the book thief’s story starts off on a train where her brother died and it was the last place she was able to be with her mother.
For my independent novel I am reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I didn’t really pick the book because we were matched to our books but I decided to keep it and read it because it sounded really good and it takes place during WWII. I enjoy reading historical books and WWII is a really interesting topic to me. I’ve only read a few pages and so far it’s pretty good. I am excited to keep reading!
