This is it. The best title on my blog.

APA is fun! I like it more than MLA format. I learned APA last year and used it in a few of my classes, so I knew most of what was going on. Some of the formatting things confused me though, like punctuation in quotes and stuff like that. It is still much better than MLA though because I hate numbering pages.

Trying to find all of the parts needed for a citation was difficult with some websites. I hated it when a website had useful information but not enough credentials for me to cite. Keeping my paragraphs under 150 words was also frustrating. I need to learn how to summarize everything while keeping it short. Life is hard. Another frustrating thing is that I’ve completely forgotten MLA, so when my younger brother (a junior) asks me for help formatting his MLA paper for Mrs. Bearce’s class, I am useless. I’ve learned APA, but at what cost?

I know that I’ll have to use APA in college with my sciency major. In my high school airplane class, I had to write my papers in APA because that’s what the teacher had to do for aviation in college. I’m very glad that we are focusing on APA in this class because I think it will be used much more than MLA in college.

(AKA the Social Commentary blog)

I try not to care too much about anything so this blog is Hard for me.

I guess one thing I dislike about society is how judgmental people can be toward people with different opinions of their own. Many people with different opinions can get along just fine, but there are several bad apples who ruin it for everyone. I want to be able to like or dislike the president without being judged for it. I want to support or oppose abortion without being judged for it. I think that if my opinions don’t hurt or slander anyone else, I shouldn’t be judged for them. With American society, especially with political parties, one extreme side judges the other to the point of dehumanizing the other side. It isn’t very cash money. People have different cultures where different things are normal, like in Things Fall Apart, and we shouldn’t judge other people for things that go against our own cultures. 

The current trend of cancel culture is also a little bit wacky. If someone makes a mistake in the past and it is unearthed, everyone jumps on the bandwagon of judging them. Although some things are really bad and messed up, I feel like old online posts that sound a little funny shouldn’t be enough to end someone’s career. Extreme racism within the past 60ish years is a bad thing and I feel like that is a reason to judge someone, but I don’t think it’s right to try and “cancel” a popular author from the early 1900s for being racist because the times were different. I feel bad about drawing a line between what is and isn’t acceptable so it’s weird to talk about it. Overall, I just think that judging someone for an action that was normal in their time isn’t okay. Judging someone who knows better is one thing, but judging people for something that was accepted in their time is wrong.

(AKA The Poetry Reflection blog)

This poetry project was great! I feel much more confident about analyzing poetry now than I did at the beginning of the year. I learned a lot of terms for figurative language that I never knew before, like magic realism and pluralism, and several terms from my Anglo-Saxon period. I also learned to take my time reading and marking up my poems so I would understand it better. Honestly, I feel like I did a lot better with understanding our MC Monday poems than the poems given out in class, so it’s been kind of annoying trying to make sense of things. At least I’m getting more experience reading poems I don’t understand.

I learned so much about Anglo-Saxon poetry through this project, even though not much Anglo-Saxon poetry exists. I picked it because elegies were mentioned on the sheet and I love elegies. I also love how unknown everything is. I really wish there was more research about what happened during the Anglo-Saxon times because after looking into it, I’m really interested. It’s neat. I love the mystery behind everything and how scattered and unclear the information that exists is. The historical context is a little blurry, but I like how most works are sad and about warriors or sailors or destruction, since all of those were common things during the time. Things weren’t about politics or civil rights back then, it was just war and vikings and sadness. The good old days. Also in the Anglo-Saxon period, no authors are recorded and there are only 4 manuscripts from the period that contain poems and other writing. I think its neat that everything is so limited, and there’s little known about anything! And the Anglo-Saxon period lasted for so long!! So much happened and we know so little of it and its so cool!!! A side effect of the project is that I’m now passionate about Old English poetry. Also, a fun fact that I completely forgot to mention during my presentation, someone wrote an alternative/rock song based on the poem I analyzed “The Ruin” and it’s the creepiest song I’ve ever heard. It’s called “Imperial Walls” and it’s just eerie. I don’t think the song has the same vibes as the poem, so I didn’t include it in my presentation, but it’s really cool that someone from the 1970s decided to turn a poem from the 1000s into a tune. Also, throughout my entire project, I replaced the word poetry with the word “pottery” because it’s prime humor and then when I presented I kept slipping up and trying to say pottery instead of poetry. My humor turned me into a fool, so I continued my foolishness with this post.

Everyone else’s presentations will really help me with the exam. I feel like I will remember the different types of poems and events that affected the poetry since we went over the presentations. The presentations also refreshed my knowledge of figurative language and I am much more confident with analyzing those aspects in poems. I’m still working on finding the overall meaning of a poem since sometimes it takes me a while, but everything else involving poetry is golden for me. I’ve gotten a lot of tips from the other students about what is the most important from their time periods, so hopefully during the exam I can remember all of their advice.

Here’s a link to my Prezi because I will most likely lose my log-in information:

https://prezi.com/view/TO1MffErMGuDvumBou7i/

Long story short: I’m thriving

I’m really happy about all of the AP prep we have done in class. So much of the stuff we are doing in class is prep work, but it feels like a normal English class, like how for Fences/Oedipus Rex we prepared for an essay while learning about APA formatting. I’m glad that AP prep is combined with other, more normal English assignments so it feels more natural.

Doing timed essay writing is new to me. We did some in AP Lang, but what we’ve done seems more formal and realistic. The multiple-choice prep we do on Mondays is very helpful to me. Usually, I am not in the mood to answer the MC questions, but I probably won’t be in the mood to take the AP exam so it is efficiently preparing me for my worst possible performance. I am confident that if I walk in to take the test and I feel like garbage, I will do just as well as I do in class (which is usually pretty good) so I will be fine.

The vocab tests that we are doing in class really help me out. For all of the sets (not including the poetry vocab), maybe ¼ of the vocab words are new to me. I love that I’m learning new words and becoming more comfortable with the words that I do know. Most of the vocab words I’ve only read in context, so actually learning the definition and retraining my brain to use it will be really helpful for the AP test. I can only hope that the new words will be on the AP exam so I can feel accomplished with my vocab skills.

I also really like the pink sheet of descriptive words we have. It has been helpful with the poetry project and the Fences/Oedipus Rex unit. I frequently have to stop my writing to get the right word and the packet usually has it. I like the words merciless, resigned, and wistful from the pink sheet, and the words decrepit, supplication, amorphous, blithe, and deign from the vocab lists.

When writing intros, I usually mention the author and their piece and how it relates to the prompt. Then I throw in some conflicting words to make it seem deeper than it actually is. For my Q3 essay about a character responding to justice/injustice, my intro was:

“In Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” justice is found while bringing the downfall of the characters. Oedipus, blinded by his friend’s death, seeks retribution by searching for the killer to punish him and avenge the death. Oedipus’ search for justice is harsh but successful. In “Oedipus Rex,” Oedipus’ merciless view of justice leads to success, but at the cost of his way of life”