The End of an Era

     Overall, I really enjoyed our blogging project for AP English. It was nice to be able to write with less restrictions on topics and so forth, and really allowed me better insight into my fellow classmates' writing styles. I definitely found myself spending hours a week reading everyones blogs, and I never found a blog I didn't want to read, or loss interest in. At the beginning of this blogging project I was frustrated with having to come up with two different topics every week, and trying to keep those topics related to English class. Also, when I would first log on and go to my Dashboard, I couldn't help but glance at other students blogs. Then I would freak myself out when I saw that someone wrote about a topic I was planning on writing on and other ridiculous things. It seemed even this blog project stressed me out. However, as this project continued I found myself enjoying writing freely about things that I had found interesting that day, or early that week. It became more of a way of expressing myself to my classmates rather than a project I had to do to receive credit. I sincerely hope Ms. Serensky lets us blog again next semester, so I can continue to grow in my writing while connecting what I learn in AP English to the real world and my peers in the classroom.

Extra Credit Mania

     With our Data Sheet now complete, and our amazing, relaxing English final just around the corner, comes the end of the semester. Most students are happy because most of the difficult work for English class is done with however, there is yet one more task to be completed before the end of the quarter: Multiple Choice Extra Credit! I'll be the first to admit it: the multiple choice AP practice is one of the highlights of English. It's always so amusing to watch how competitive the English students are when it comes down to extra credit. I mean who wouldn't be. It's extra credit for goodness sakes. With this game, however, comes a lot of stress. No one wants to be the team that is the only one to miss the point. Those dreaded words: "the point goes to everyone...except Team 4" have haunted my nightmares this weekend. Also, the fact that my team failed to agree on a couple answers last Friday has had my nerves wracking since the end of eighth period. These multiple choice tests force you to look at how you compare next to everyone else in your class, and preclude how well you will do on the future AP test, which stresses me out a little. Overall though, these multiple choice tests are a gift from God, and two class periods of stress are worth the extra credit points in the end!

A Shutter Island Surprise

     In class this week we watched the movie Shutter Island after reading the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The ending to this movie was mind blowing. I never suspected Ted Daniels (DiCaprio) to actually be Andrew Ladis! However, looking back at the end of the movie, this made a lot more sense. It explained why he kept having visions of the girl asking why he didn't save her. It also explained that his hallucinations did not result from being drugged, but actually his withdrawal from his medications. Also, this explains his fear of water at the beginning of the movie,when he's on the ferry. Obviously the water reminded him of his wife and his childrens' murders, something he couldn't face.
      However, the most interesting part of the movie for me was the very end, when Ladis is sitting on the steps of the ward, talking to Dr. Sheehan. At first, when he brought up how him and "his partner" needed to get of "this rock and back to the mainland" because there was some crazy things happening on the island, I immediately thought he had regressed again, and forgotten who he really was. However, when he says to Dr. Sheehan that he had always wondered which "was worse: living as a monster or dying a good man," I realized he had not. I think that he simply chose to be lobotomized because he could live with the memories of the many deaths he had cause, and the guilt of killing his family. I don't know if we talked about this in class today, because I wasn't there, but to me it seemed like the more likely outcome. The fact that he knowingly walked away with the nurses and the doctor to get lobotomized also shows how he accepted his fate.
       Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. It always kept me on my toes about what was going to happen, and at the end of the movie I felt extreme sympathy for Ladis, and in return, the mentally insane.

Investigating Criminal Minds

      On our last week of break, I found myself just laying around my house, simply enjoying my last week of vacation before mid-terms and the end of the semester. On Thursday, the television show Criminal Minds was having a marathon event, and I must have watched about four hours of this show. I don't know if any of my fellow classmates have ever seen the show, but it's about detectives who try to solve crimes, similar to Law & Order and NCIS. However, being an avid watcher of these kind of crime shows, I have found that Criminal Minds features extremely gruesome crimes, always so bizarre compared to the others. Most of these crimes are committed by lunatics or psychopaths, but something about them had me intrigued. While watching this show, I couldn't help but think of the recent novel we read, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and how it related to the show. One episode in particular that sticks out in my mind was when a man had convinced thirty people to commit a mass suicide in the name of God. This reminded me how the inmates would almost blindly follow McMurphy's actions in the hospital, and how they would anything he told them to. Although McMurphy's actions can be considered beneficial compared to the criminal in the show, they both had this charismatic personality, where just by talking to people they could manipulate people to their wills. Criminal Minds however reveals the darker side of insanity, and how not everyone who is insane is like Chief Bromden or Billy Bibbit: practically harmless. There are definitely insane people who have the capability to commit massive destruction, and I felt like the novel only showed the less harmless side of insanity. In the real world, there are different types of insanity, not simply acutes and chronics, but harmful and harmless.