Thesis Statements Activity

1. "Same-sex classrooms are a possibility in public education, but co-ed classes for public schools are a much better choice for the grades of 10 through 12." A counterargument thesis statement will be effective with this prompt so then the writer can look at both sides in their response, making their work more credible and increasing their ethos.
2. "Although betraying the country is an extreme measure that not many would want to take for a "friend", E.M. Forster emphasizes his loyalty to the ones he truly cares about in his quote." This essay is an argumentative essay, so using a counterargument thesis will help you support your side better.
3. "I...I didn't want to take the time to come up with more thesis statements..." Since this essay requires/recommends more than three main points to focus on, using an open statement will make it more effective to talk about multiple points successfully.
4. "Advertising degrades the people that it appeals to since ____, ____, and ____." This essay is one where you take a position and support it, most likely with 2-3 points, so listing out your points in a closed statement will make a strong start for the rest of the essay.
5. "It's a normality for teachers to become upset over plagiarized work, but considering that they have seen the bigger picture and looked from the student's side of the story, they may have a different reaction." In this essay, viewing both sides of the essay will help make your point stronger and more credible. So, using a counterargument thesis is effective.

I hope making thesis statements wasn't a big part of it, but I did put why I did it so I hope that's good enough...

"Staking a Claim" Activity

1. "SUV owners should be required to pay an energy surcharge." Yes, it's arguable.
2. "Charter schools are an alternative to public schools." No, it's too easily verifiable. REVISED: "Charter schools should remain as an alternative to public schools."
3. "Ronald Reagan was the most charismatic president of the twentieth century." Yes?
4. "Requiring students to wear uniforms improves school spirit." No, it's too easily verifiable. REVISED: "Students should be required to wear uniforms."
5. "The terms global warming and climate change describe different perspectives on this complex issue." Yes? I don't know. People argue about anything nowadays.
6. "Students graduating from college today can expect to have more debt than any previous generation." No, too verifiable. REVISED: "Students today struggle more with debt than ever before in the past and should be given help by the government." (does that work?)
7. "People who read novels are more likely to attend sports events and movies than those who do not." Yes.
8. "Print newspapers will not survive another decade." Yes.
9. "The competition among countries to become a site for the Olympic Games is fierce." I don't know. No. REVISED: "The competition among countries to become a site for the Olympic Games more fierce than the games itself."
10. "Plagiarism is a serious problem in today's schools." No, too verifiable. REVISED: "Plagiarism is the worst problem in today's schools since it has become commonly practiced amongst the students in schools today."

Welp. I tried. Bye.

"Why Investing in Fast Food May Be a Good Thing" Activity

Domini was able to demonstrate in her article that the Slow Food Movement have been narrow-minded about fast food by giving details on the improvements they have been bringing about the world today. She states that "Fast food is a way of life" and that it has become "so enormous, even seemingly modest changes can have a big impact". Those modest changes can be something as small as banning the use of trans-fats (a staple of fast food) in restaurants or reduce the overuse of packaging. They're small changes, but it makes a big difference to the world since so many people consume fast food. The fast food business became so influential that the little changes they make for the betterment of the world has a great impact.

This I Believe Essay

Treat Everyone Like a Perfect Angel

Yesterday, Houston Kraft came to our school delivering a message of love and kindness. It was a moving speech; the entire assembly was a rollercoaster of emotions. In all honesty, I feel like I may have been moved a little more than I should have, because I related to a lot of what he said.

The message he was giving, the idea of spreading kindness to everyone, was something I have always believed in. My whole life revolved around making other people’s lives a little better and making them even just a little bit happier than when I had first met them. My philosophy has always been to show kindness to the people I meet, but it wasn’t until later in life that I realized that even the people who don’t seem like they deserve it are the ones that need it the most in life.

A few years ago, a little boy moved into my neighborhood. I welcomed him in when he first moved in, hoping that he’ll be able to be happy here with everyone…but he ended up being a really annoying person and everyone hated him. I swear, he purposely got on everyone’s nerves, then cries because people would retaliate, then repeats the process all over again! Who does that? Like, seriously!

It wasn’t until a few months later that I learned why he was like that. He used to go through foster homes and one of his foster parents didn’t want to deal with him and his tantrums. So, they decided to prescribe him a bunch of drugs and sedatives to make him drowsy and slow so then they wouldn’t have to deal with teaching him how to act properly in front of people or disciplining him into becoming a more mature child. Not only that, he bothered everyone because he was always left alone and left out of things. He didn’t mind getting beaten up or feeling pain from the people he bothered as long as they noticed him and interacted with him in some way.

That boy was my youngest step-brother who my mom worked to get him and his older brothers out of the foster care system into a safe home with their dad, who is now married to my mom.

I don’t want my brother to feel like he’s ever alone in the world. I haven’t known him my whole life, but I know that the stupid things he does could never define him as a person. The little dumb decisions he makes doesn’t explain who he is or what he went through.

I believe that applies to everyone in the world. Everyone has a story as to why they are the way they are. Everyone deserves to treated with love and kindness no matter if they’re “good” or “bad”. Nobody is going to be a perfect angel; we’re too flawed to be perfect. But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to be treated like one.

The Inheritance of Tools Questions

1. "A week or so later a white scar in the shape of a crescent moon began to show above the cuticle, and month by month it rose across the pink sky of my thumbnail." I just found it engaging for Sander's use of imagery to describe his swollen thumb after slamming a hammer on it.

2. ex 1. "My cobbled-together guitars might have been alien spaceships, my barns might have been models of Aztec temples"

ex 2. "He learns how to swing a hammer from the elbow instead of the wrist, how to lay his thumb beside the blade to guide a saw, how to tap a chisel with a wooden mallet, how to mark a hole with an awl before starting a drill bit."

3. The section about the gerbils was organized in a way similar to a story. Each paragraph was created when a new thought was formed, each kind of...layering one another, overlapping.

4. I'm not really sure if I'm answering this question correctly (mostly because I'm really confused right now) but in the gerbil section, he was able to save his daughter's gerbils from (possible) death. The conclusion that came shortly after started with his father's death. Sanders couldn't do anything to save his father from his death. There was no door he could open, no wall he could tear down to bring his father back. However, all of the lessons he learned from his father as a child, was something that he has to keep his father living through him. So he continued building, just as his did his entire life before passing.

5. To his daughter, the gerbils in the wall is a "calamity", a circumstance in which she's crying for rescue. The radio was giving out worldwide catastrophes where people are crying for rescue, too. If Sanders had to rescue those people from those kinds of situations, he would be afraid of failing, or even just not being able to handle the situation, but the situation he's in right now was something he could handle and could do without fail.

6. Sanders compares his hammer to other classics from history such as the greek vases or "dawn stones". These historic artifacts have a timeless beauty to them; comparing his hammer to them, Sanders insists that his hammer has a timeless beauty to it, too.

7. He's working and living just as his father did before him. Now that his father has passed, he lives on with the lessons and every technique his father taught him. The last sentence was him acting upon some of the many timeless lessons his father taught him when he was young.

Welp. I tried.

Once More on the Lake Questions

1) White's attitude seems reminiscent in a way within his opening paragraphs. He was speaking about his past memories and making it sound like a story he's telling to other children, like a bedtime story.

2) White's selection of details provided imagery for the reader. For example he said, "I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot–the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind." In saying this, he provided the reader with the image of what the lake looked like when he was young along with the image of the lake possibly changing completely.

3) A. "There were cottages sprinkled around the shores" – personification. It provided imagery for the reader so they could visualize the scenery better. 

    B. White also tends to list when describing thing and/or actions that were made. For example, he said, "We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were mackerel, pulling them over the side of the boat in a businesslike manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the back of the head."

    C. There's also the asyndeton he used to create this poetic effect such as "Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end;"

4) He applies to all of our senses, even touch. He mentioned in the fifth paragraph, "I felt the damp moss covering the worms in the bait can," appealing to our sense of touch, adding to the effect of imagery.

5) He was comparing and contrasting the motors back in the time when he was a child to the time now that he was an adult. He used similes, metaphors, and personification to help him describe to the readers what the motors sounded like.

6) White was reminiscing in his memories again, and the readers get a piece of why the lake was such an important part of his childhood.

7) The sentence seemed unfinished, as if he was purposely leaving us in suspense, leaving space there for the readers to fill(interpretation),  kind of like we're doing now.

8) It was another piece of imagery White used that mostly parents and adults would relate with. He was describing his realization of how old he was getting after watching his son doing things that he used to do when he was a child.

9) Mr. Giddings, I'm not counting the "and"s in this story. That involves numbers and numbers mean math, so no.

With the amount of "and"s he used in this passage gave all of his details a sense of connectedness. "And"s group things up together. Like in lists, they would be used to list a bunch of things that are somehow connected in some way. The "and"s in his story has the same purpose, so that all of the many details he had about the lake could be interconnected.

Hunger of Memory Reading Response

Mr. Giddings, I honestly don't know what to write...

Richard Rodriguez said in his work, Hunger of Memory, "Perhaps because I have always, accidentally, been a classmate to children of rich parents, I long ago came to assume my association with their world" (3). Rodriguez tells that he has always been around rich, privileged people since he was young. The beginning of his story even mentions wealthy places and things like Bel-Air cocktail parties, Belgravia dinner parties, tuxedos, New York, things that aren't common parts of a man's life with a lower social status than the wealthy. Even in his adult life, he is surrounded by rich people. He became "a comic victim of two cultures" (5).

Now, the two cultures he's split between is his Mexican culture that he was born and raised in, and the American culture that he had "assimilated" into. He had always been different from the people around him. In childhood, he's was isolated. Adulthood, he was welcomed. In childhood, he was intensely close with his family, with his Mexican culture. In his adult life, he became more familiar with the American ways and adapted to the culture.

His story seems to be about changing and fitting in, assimilation. The books he stole at the beginning of his story, could they by any chance be the classic volumes of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Lawrence that were later mentioned near the end of the passage? The idea of him "stealing" the American books can in a way represent him stealing a part of American culture. It wasn't his to begin with, but it looked like a really amazing thing to have, so he decided to get it some way, somehow. And by taking in to a new culture, he throws away his original one, which explains why he said that his parents were no longer his parents, but "in a cultural sense" (4).

I'm sorry Mr. Giddings...This is all I can think of...