Reflection Final 2

Eric Lau, Period 2

Reflection Final

I have written many blog posts this year. I think that my best would be my response posts to the Dog In the Nighttime. To me, the dog in the nighttime was a very unique book, because it was unlike anything I have ever read. It was also the only book I reread 3 times, so I knew the story and plot inside out. On this blog post, I used a lot of feeling and emotion to refine my points.

“The book A Curious Incident of A Dog In The NightTime has a writing style that is very unique that hooks the reader right when the first page is read. The whole autistic point of view is the one that really catches the reader's attention and the author really connects to it as he writes the book.”

When I was writing about this book A Curious of A Dog In The Nighttime, i really felt the what the main character, Chris, was trying to show. Although Chris’s perspective on the world is much more different from mine, i could feel myself acting as him throughout the story. I remember asking myself questions on how Chris feels about this.. and that.. and about himself. In my opinion for writing to be good, the writer has to feel in concept of the topic he/she is writing about.

Blogging has made my life so much easier. Instead of having to print every now and then, I can just post my essays on my blog for my teacher to read. This relieves the stress of having to check if the printer has ink and the need to constantly go find some printer paper. Blogging has also made me aware of the Internet. After checking my stats, I realized that people from all over the world read my writings, and that simple keywords typed into google search that are the same as my posts can make my blog show up on the search list. in a way, I’m glad that many types of people have been on my blog. However, instead of having them stumble upon my blog as a mistake, i would like for them to actually come to my blog to read what it has to offer. To address this problem, over the summer I plan to continue writing on my blog and on the subjects that I think are interesting and ill catch attention. Instead of writing blog posts for homework assignments I would like to extend farther and write reviews, personal opinions, stories, and stuff like that. Having a blog really changed my perspective on writing. It has made me more interested in writing and think of ways on how it can pull the reader’s attention.           

A blog has also helped me put more emotion into my writing. With the privilege to type blog posts about books, I can express my feelings about the book through what I write. This has really helped me in the a lot of ways.

Another blog post that I think has a lot of feeling and emotion into it is my Pigeons: Natural Toilets.

In this post, i talked about how disgusting pigeon poop is and even added an example to help support my points. One thing that I think really helps support points are daily life examples. I think that these help build a bridge to the audience as they might have experienced the same type.
One of my examples are:
Here's a little story that i "heard." "There was once this guy who was enjoying a nice day in the park. It  was a hot day and he was melting so he went to get an ice cream cone. He stopped by a ice cream cart and asked for a scoop of vanilla ice cream. After receiving it he went and sat on a bench. It just so happens that a bird was flying above him and decided it was time to let go. When the guy wasn't looking (for he was checking out some girl), the pigeon pooped and the white poop flew onto the guy's vanilla ice cream and camouflaged with melting vanilla. Then the guy started to lick his ice cream and what happened next is :P."
In this blog post, I can tell that my story telling skills aren’t very impressive nor very descriptive. While I was writing this, I remember that I was only thinking about writing the ice cream, dude, and pigeon. I thought that it was descriptive enough and I didn’t touch on anything else. Now that I read it over, I can tell that the imagery is blah, it’s bad. However, I can say that my description on things have gotten better over time. Instead of only focusing on tiny part of what’s happening in that scene, I can expand onto what was happening in the background, the scent, the way the pigeon felt as he was soaring and much more. Although I can’t tell if that it will actually help the story, I know that the imagery will improve.  

Anyways, after looking at my previous work, I realized that I have improved in writing a lot. In most of my post, my grammar has went up, and my use of vocabulary has also improved. However, while writing this reflective essay I think that my grammar and has gone down. I’m frequently experiencing writer’s block as I write this so it’s a really hard.

Writer’s block is a real jerk. Even as I’m, writing this I’m experiencing writer’s block. I think that writer’s block occurs to me most when I’m really tired. Because I haven’t been getting much sleep in the last few days, my mind has been really jacked up. There is a way to deal with this though. Exercise! or get more sleep. I wish we had p.e in the morning because after p.e I would be really awake to start the day. Another way I fall in to writer’s block is when I’m not informed about an assigned posts I’m writing through this year there have been blog posts about books where I had no idea what to write about, because I haven’t either understood the book, or read it. However, for this type of writer’s block I have an easy solution: read the book again. even though it might take a while to read or understand it, in the end, writer’s block occurs less.

One type of writer’s block i really hate is when you’re trying to type a word that’s at the tip of your tongue, but it doesn't come to you. This usually happens when your mind really numb from the lack of sleep. For me, there is no other way to deal with this but to get more sleep.           
As a side solution I can also train myself  to resist  writer’s block my waking up earlier. By doing so my mind will adapt  to the lack of sleep and might be able to focus more on writing then on sleeping. Training my mind to writer’s block  might or might not work depending if I have the willpower to adapt. For the next semester, sophomore year, I hope to gain a higher level of vocabulary and improve my grammar and writing to make it more appealing. Another goal I have for the second quarter is to work harder on bettering my working methods. The goal is to stop procrastinating on my blog post and do them at the beginning of the week or middle, instead on doing them last second like i”m doing now. I’m not entirely sure i have a way to do this, but i think if i have the strength to wake up earlier in the morning by myself I can overcome procrastination too.

P.S: Mr. Sutherland, you have made freshman year, a great year to remember [:

I must admit when I first came to Asti, i was not expecting a teacher like yourself. Your style of teaching was nothing I had experienced before and I wondered myself in the beginning if it was good. However through this year, I have found that although it is laid back, when a student is willing to learn what you have to offer, there's a lot to learn. I really appreciated you being our teacher this year

Final Game

The book I'm currently reading is called "Ender's Game." It is a book by Orson Scott card and the plot of the story is simple. It tells of the life of the main character Ender who is a military genius. In the begning Ender is described to have been chosen to lead an army against the buggers, a notorious race of ant like creatures who will kill anyone without mercy. Making them perfect killing machines. Although he is a genius, Ender is a 6 year old boy who is hated and confused..
In this story there are chosen ones and unchosen ones. In the beginning everyone is chosen and they receive monitoring from the government. After a year or two, many of them are eliminated and they return to their normal 4 year old or 5 year old lives. to most kids, this is good, but for the ones tht have learned of how they can help losing their chosen one privilege is like saying that they are not talented.There are some, however, that keep the chosen one privileged for 3 years like Ender. These are the ones who are talented and are chosen to go into military tactic school out in outer space.
At the age of 6, Ender is chosen to go into the military academy in outer space and Ender tries to fight his mind on either wanting to go or not. He debates in himself that it would probably be better if he did go, but if he did his parents and his sister wouldn't be there for him. Due to his 3 years of chosen privileges, the other kids around him hates him. His own brother resents him because he was only chosen for 2 years.
Ender is a fragile child. Even with his extreme brilliance and superior strength, his mind is injured by the life he lived and is forced to live. His worst fear is to be alone with no one who cares or loves him and that is exactly what the military commanders are trying to do to him. He is but a young flower stranded in a wide open grassy area first with his sister flower next to him, but then he is forced to leave his sister flower and travel into another wide open grassy area with no one around him but the grass of resentment.
In the second part of the book, young Ender faces many challenges from his teachers and his peers.
After stepping out of the rocket from earth, Young Ender and the rest of the first time participants learn about the rules of Military School. Here, Graff, a military instructor who took Ender away from his family, picks on Ender and causes the other kids to hate him. After Graff dismisses them to go their dorms, Older launches start bullying him. He was forced to choose the worst bed in the dorm, and he has constantly been  shoved around.
As Ender matures through the story, he faces many challenges. One big challenge he faces is his genius-ness. Through his life, he has been educated to exterminate the buggers. He has been taught battle plans, military tactics, and has been trained to fight the buggers in every way. In his journey through military school, Ender was challenged by a few peers who resented him because he, a 9 year old commander boy at the time, had beaten them in a war game and has been placed as the number # 1 commander. He was forced to fight a boy named Bonzo in a shower naked, due to an attempt to kill him. Instead, Ender killed Bonzo without knowing it, and this was extremely hard on Ender because he had not wanted to hurt anybody. 

"Ender is a closet pacifist and doesn't want to hurt anyone."

 When Ender graduated military school and moved on to tactic school, he was unknowingly leading Space  War 3 against the buggers. Over the battles, he had thought that he was fighting with a simulated army against his teacher in a war simulation. In reality, he was actually leading a space fleet sent 50 years before (takes 50 years for earth spaceships to get to the bugger world) to fight against the buggers. When he had lost a spaceship, he didn't know that and actual spaceship had died. When he had killed his teacher's space fleets, he did not know that he was actually killing the buggers. After he had won all but one battle, he was told that his final battle would be another battle against his teacher but this time with real generals watching him. When the battle started off, hundreds of bugger spaceships were shown and Ender only had 16 measly 50 year old technology spaceships. He was certain that he couldn't win and he had actually given up the battle halfway through. In the end though, he decided to *cheat* the simulation and sacrificed his whole fleet to nuclear split bomb (atom split) the home planet with the -little doctors- (atom splitting lasers). The battle ended with everyone dying and the entire population of the buggers disinterested into dust. Then, the simulation room filled cheers and cries. The generals hugged each other and they thanked Ender over and over again. Confused, Ender asked what happened, and was told that he had just finished off the bugger race. Unwaivering to realize that he had just killed off a entire race, Ender went to bed.
Due to this trickery, Ender was shattered. Even when he hadn't wanted to kill anyone, even the buggers, he was tricked into exterminating them all. His mind was never able to repair itself after this event. this brings me t my point of how Ender is a true pacifist. His character is the meaning of nonviolence. It's not his fault that he had to do all this. In the quote

"So they didn't know what they were doing?"

Ender refers to the buggers. He thought that the buggers didn't know what they were doing; he was right. At the end of the book, Ender finds out that the Queen of All Buggers was actually trying to communicate with the humans but couldn't. He also finds a baby pupil of a queen bugger and decides to help it find a place where it can grow . For Ender to do this is I think really nice of him, and it portrays how much of a caring person he is. He feels no terror from the buggers, and he believes the buggers words of how they are sorry. Because of this Ender is truly a caring human being and a pacifist.  
After finishing the whole book I decided to think about what the author’s purpose of the book was. In my opinion the authors purpose of this book is to show how fear is dangerous in many levels. In the beginning, a simple human spaceship went up on a suspicious dark moon to see what was going on. The buggers who inhabited this moon slaughtered the humans out of fear. The buggers have never seen any other type of intelligent life form before and neither have the humans. The humans first tried to settle this by talking, and sent signals to the buggers. However, the buggers could not understand them and so the humans actions concluded un-useful. In the end, with the slaughtered space troop and frightening new life forms, they humans also developed fear. They concluded that the buggers had to be stopped because they were too dangerous -scared of them-, and there was no way to communicate with them. This then led to a whole entirely new war, space-war. The opponent was the buggers, and the home force was the humans.

"The tug transmitted its videos,, including buggers boarding and slaughtering the crew. It kept right on transmitting through the entire bugger examination of the boat."

This shows how fear affects a person and even a society. When danger shows up and there is no way to communicate, fear is spread quickly. With this spread of fear, a reflex of ours tells us that there must be something done. A conclusion must be made and fast and this conclusion is usually violence-related. This reflex is what I consider, the survival of a human. When in danger, the human body reacts to protect itself.  As a whole world, such a danger will cause the human population to react and try to survive. Fear contributes to this because it is the danger. In my opinion it’s human nature and what the author is saying is that fear leads to war.