A New Ending

As the walls are closeing in, there is no time to panic. Think, think, think. The walls are closing directly over the pit. How deep is this pit? As I inch my way tword the pit, I search the wall. Iron walls of heat bearing down on me, but how are they heated? Reaching the pit I lean over and can see nothing but darkness! There is no time to waste. Leaning down I near the wall to the right and by reaching my hand into the pit and under the closing wall, I pray to not burn myself. Reaching far and around the underside of the wall I frantically feel for a notch in the other side. I feel none, but how is this wall heated? There! A tube is hanging a few inches up, but I have no time to question anymore! I grab it and jump into the pit, hoping this tube can hold me. Yet, it is a flimsy material. It snaps when holding my weight, and i am falling...falling...fallling.

Team Poe

I prefer Edgar Allen Poe to Irving. I like that Poe has a background story to everything in his writing, not just some reason to write.  I think he is a very gifted poet and writer, because of the way he pays such attention to detail. Every word and the meaning behind every word is so thought out, or maybe it naturally occurs when he writes. The amount of bloodydeath in his stories make alot of people wonder why he thought it was necesary to be put into the story, but I believe Poe would not have been such a famous writer without it. This makes me question things a little though, because if his stories were not as gruesome.. Would he have been so famous? Or would he have been just another washed up writer with a past?

Reflection on poem read...(oct. 30)

The Viking poem from this week, I found odd. It didn't really make sense as to why someone would write this piece, but there is always a reason for everthing. I think it is a new twist on a love story, because it isn't what you would normally read about. When the guy kills himself, the first thought that came to my head was... What happened to the child? If the mother died in child birth, and the dad killed himself, I kind of want to know what happened to the boy they had. If there is an answer out there, it would be nice to know.

voki

Get a Voki now!

Aparently, my text didnt work for voki either.So the following is what it was supposed to say..

My connection to nature is found in the fish tank at the doctor's office. The fish inside are beautiful and exotic, but are not ment to live in Rockford, IL. I connect to this, because I do not like anthing about Rockford. It's cold and boring. I personally like to think I was born in the wrong place due to some crazy, cosmic mix up. It makes for a good story, right?

McCarthy Hearings. Political Climate of the 1950's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTwDUpbQHJg

This week i have chosen to find a video about the McCarthy hearings and discuss it. I have chosen the Army vs McCarthy case because I believe that it is a defining moment in history for these trials. Within this video, it is a man with the last name Welsh, speaking and McCarthy also speaking. It is a back and forth arguement, but you can tell that McCarthy demands the attention of the room when he speaks. It is a very dominant personality, which is why I find the end to be so shocking.

This was a heated trial, but it was the beginning of the end. This trial is when people stopped listening to McCarthy's controlling arguements. During this trial, I believe people began fighting back and showing McCarthy's true character. At one point, Mr. Welsh said to Senator McCarthy," Senator, you won't need anything in the record when I finish telling you this. Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness." (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html) This is a stunning statement to McCarthy, but welcomed by the court room. This is very much like The Crucible because the recklessness of the Salem witch trial, was ignored. In this story, no one made a statement quite like this one to help the people come to their senses. In the end of the video, Mr. Welsh gets an applause from the court room after telling Senator McCarthy, "and if there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask, Mr. Cohn, any more witnesses." I secretly cheered in my head when I heard this.

Crucible Reflection

The Crucible to me is a very boring play to read. This text drags on and loses all excitement with the type of english being spoken. Yet, when I get past al the boring and summerize, I begin to like it. The drama is equal to that of a soap opera or any other modern day television show. I believe that when I complete the entire play, that my mind wil change. Untill then, it is just boring.

In act one, I feel like this story is over dramatic and at the end, redundant. It is alot to take in and especially when the plot is already flowing when the story starts. I believe this is what makes it so hard to get into. Yet, the character Abigail, is entertaining. I feel that she is going to be running the town and the whole show by the end of this story. For one teenage, she has alot of influence. So I will be excited to see how things progress with her, her scandal with John, and the witch hunt.

Write like a Puritan week... Dodgeball Sermon

A very small sermon like we read in class...

The game of dodgeball is like the world. There are always two sides, and they are only there to hurl problems at each other. These balls are thse problems people face in the world, because they are relentless and sometimes painful. You are always a target in this game of life, and even when you are out of play, every person wants back into the midst of life. Not only does every person dodge these problems, they throw them too. The people of the puritan church need to understand the havoc they are causing.

God has put us on His earth with to love one another, but we take that and use His forgivness as an excuse. God will be the final referee and judge us all. You will all be out in the end.

Squanto

I didn't know alot about the indian named Squanto before this blog. All I had known was that he arrived at the English settlement where William Bradford had landed, and  could speak very good english. How is this possible? An indian able to speak almost flawless english when they didn't know of any prior settlements in the area?
Squanto had actually been to England before the settlers came. He went there with John Wheymouth, an explorer. Over the years he was brought back to his home, taken as slave by the Spanish, and somehow brought back. His entire village was killed from disease left behind by the slavetraders from the time he was taken.
Squanto was key in the fact that he could help the pilgrims communicate with the surrounding indian people. He helped the pilgrims when they were starving and in bad conditions. Squanto taught them how to use thier resources for food, cultivate land, and build indian styled wigwams. This relationship helped make "the first Thanksgiving" what it was. I think that without Squanto's help, that colony would be just another failed attempt.

Settlers Relationship to the Native Americans

The writings of the settlers had always showed the indians to be crazy savages and that they were a worse level of human. In John Smith's journal about Jamestown, they were always a threat and never any help. The indians helped them to survive the terrible conditions they were in, not because they were savages, but because they were reaching out. It has been proven that over the years of settlers taking over the continent, that they took the land with no respect for those who already owned it. I thought about if the settlers of Jamestown to find native americans with a written language, would things be different? When it comes to the issue of lad ownership and who had rights to the resources, the indians were there first. Yet, the new invaders believed they were entitled to everything they wanted. If the natives would have had a written language to prove in document form that they owned that land, do you think things would have been different? Or do you believe that they would have taken the land they wanted anyway? Do you think the indians would have been less "savage" if they had ways to prove civilized documentations of land ownership?

http://www1.webng.com/InteractiveLearning/NAIndians/what_was_the_attitude_of_the_whi.htm

Native American Culture- 9/8

"You can find an article on the internet about how modern Native Americans still revere their root culture. Provide a link to the article and post a reflection about it."

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/03/14/20100314native-american-teachers.html

 This article is about a young woman who became a teacher to Native American children on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, near Tucson. Her name is Shannon Begaye and she is a member of the Navajo tribe. Shannon had never planned on becoming a teacher, because she wanted to be a lawyer. She tried to move away and start life in other places, but she found it very hard because of the culture and the way she was raised. When she lived in Hawaii she loved the people but would always have to remember her religion in everything she did. Shannon says her father upholds all the old Navajo traditions. For example, she was raised that she could not enter the water of the ocean without prayer first,m because the ocean is a powerful life force. I personally think that this would b redundant after awhile, because living in Hawaii tends to deal with its water a lot. The Navajo also believe that shellfish is bad for the spirit, so she wasn't able to eat shellfish. I wouldn't mind this, because i don't eat shellfish or any other fish anyway.
   When she moved back to the reservation, her mother had known she would come back. In my opinion, Shannon was raised almost if to never leave. I know that all people have a right to live how they want to and where they want to, but i think she was raised in a way that made it too hard for her to move away.
  On the reverse of that point, the culture of the Navajo is slowly dying. So when Shannon went back to the reservation, she was doing her tribe somewhat of a favor. They are in such need of teachers to teach the native children, because any non-native does not understand the children and the ways they live. Its so much harder to teach a person a culture and make them understand it, than to just find a teacher who was raised with it. It talks about this in the article, and how outside teachers tend to block themselves off from the culture and the tribe. This of course gets them no where with the kids.
  This article made me think alittle about how these people live and how they raise their children. So here is my question, is it better to raise your child to stay in the tribe and live in a way that is hard to part with, or fall away from your culture to make life easier to mesh with the outside world?