Oh, boy, I sure did love the five paragraph essay last year. (Actually, I hated it, my teacher just forced it on us / didn't teach us anything else.) This one's actually kind of fun, it connects The Catcher in the Rye with existentialism. It also throws in this weird movie called Dead Poets Society because that was the assignment.
Another writing dump from Sophomore (last) year with the horrible Tasha Graff. I wrote all these in a single week when faced with a failing grade. I think they turned out... alright.
Existentialism is a philosophy invented around the turn of the 20th-century, but it became widely popular just after World War II - the time period of both The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, and Dead Poets Society, by Tom Schulman and directed by Peter Weir. The philosophy centers around authenticity - the living of your life true to your spirit and your values. The struggle for self-determination is closely tied to coming-of-age, but is more generalizable and ... (Read full post)
Another writing dump from Sophomore year (last year). This one's on The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I felt quite ambivalent about the book and decided to take a cynical position.
In The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, Hosseini uses characterization to make the same statement about selfishness with every major character. A central theme in the novel is that only when a character has lost the right to respect himself, can he learn to be loving, as seen in Amir’s redemption, Hassan’s loyalty, Baba’s humanitarianism, and Assef’s continued sadism.
Most strikingly, Amir develops from a selfish character to a selfless one, at the moment that he realizes there is no other way he could live. It comes in two parts. The first is when he agrees with Rahim Khan to go get Sohrab. In the span of a few hours, he loses all respect for himself, and at the same time, he accepts what must be done. Rahim Khan tells him two things: that Hassan is dead, and that Baba was his father. Sitting ... (Read full post)
Here's a writing dump from last year, which is one of the essays I wrote in the final week of the year since I didn't do any work that whole year. It's an analysis of Elie Wiesel's Night.
An unreliable diagnosis, a lottery ticket, a freak vehicular collision. Throughout our lives, we make decisions that dramatically change our future, but we also have decisions made for us, by others or by chance (though in a solipsistic sense they are the same). This chance can be equally dramatic, but uncertainty is also a crucial part of our decision-making process. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses chance to enrich the portrayal of decision-making and its implications, helping to distance himself from being an active character as part of his destroyed identity, turning his innocence into the innocence of the meteor that happens to kill the dinosaurs. Things that happen by utter chance help convey Wiesel’s utter powerlessness as well as magnify the meaningless cruelty of the Holocaust.
So I wrote a shiny little tutorial for Flip. I think the difficulty progresses much better now, and it makes the learning build up to the higher levels better. At the expense, that I think it may be a little patronizing / not allowing for learning in the early levels. I don't know, no one plays my games so I don't have any data to go off of. Anyway, if you found it too hard before, I recommend you try it again.