To be honest I had trouble thinking of something, at first. There's nothing specific to English class I have trouble with. This is more addressed to all my teachers than just one.
I'm at school or on the bus for 13 to 14 hours a day, and I have 6 classes. 2 are college courses and the rest are high school courses. All of those classes have teachers that say that their class is the most important and the one I should focus on at all costs. The amount of homework and projects I get reflect this attitude.
Most of my homework cannot be done on a bus. A great deal has to be done on a computer. I do what I can on the bus, but it's never enough to keep from having too much when I get home.
I also have chores when I get home and I still have to eat dinner. My chores take some time to complete, and I have to do those before I do homework.
Sometimes I have light weeks for homework, which I'm grateful for. But every two weeks are so, all of my teachers will assign complex projects that take a long time to complete.
Whenever there are projects, I often stay up to work on it for all of that week. I'm naturally an insomniac, but the insomnia and projects combine until there are days I get 2 hours of sleep and still have to go to class.
We also have to do volunteer hours, which are sometimes fun but take time away from school work. They are difficult to get set up and there's no room for events being rescheduled or cancelled. The volunteer requirement is all well and good, and I enjoy parts of it, but they are also time consuming and the amount we are required to do does not match our workload. If I had the time for it, I would volunteer a lot more than I do. As it is, I have done an estimated 100 hours this year, only to have a small percentage count.
My religion is important to me. I am not Christian, Jewish or Muslim, so many of our holidays do not fall in line with breaks. Since I was 9, I have been training to be what is roughly our equivalent of a priest, and I have recently hit the second of several milestones for this.
There are a total of 8 holidays, and the celebrations largely consist of prayer. These prayers can be long, and some can last for over an hour.
For the past two years, these holidays have all been during project-heavy weeks. If I can't spare the time to go to sleep, I can't really spare the time to pray.
I find most of my classes easy in terms of content, and extremely difficult in terms of time management. The grades I get- good and poor- all come at the cost of sleep, a social life, time with my family, time to relax and religious observations.
If there was one thing I wanted my teachers to know, its that the assignments they give do have a cost in their students' lives.
I doubt this is a problem at every school in the country, but our school has a lot more complex parts to it, not just the odd schedule, and assignments that would have worked at a typical high school can't always be applied to students at an early college. Every student at this school have the same things demanded of them as most adults. 13 hours X 5 days = 65 hours a week, which is considered a full time job. We also have lives outside of school with it's own demands, just like adults do.
We have adult schedules and demands, even though we are teenagers. Pretty soon, we will actually be adults, but the 'best years of our lives' will have only been demanding schedules and little sleep.
So please, when a teacher gives out another assignment, think about whether or not you would want to have to do it (or be able to do it) on top of the workload and schedule you already have.
Friday, April 17, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
De profundis and Oscar Wilde
“At every single moment of
one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.” - Oscar Wilde
I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. It's extremely circular in nature and very confusing. Oscar Wilde is a good author, and I like some of his plays, particularly The Importance of being Earnest, but he seems prone to some very long, flowery sentences. There have been times where I've forgotten the beginning of a sentence when I get to the end of it. Admittedly, the above quote is not long, but I can't make sense of it, especially the first sentence.
Some of Wilde's works are great, an filled with a lot of humor as well. As previously stated, The Importance of being Earnest was a good read and a lot of fun. I like his sense of humor and the little jabs at Victorian society. I've read a lot of his works- including some of the children's stories- and they are all well-written. A lot of his epigrams are true as well, and my favorite is "in life there are 2 great tragedies: one is not getting what we want, and the other is". I think he had to be very in tune with human nature to be able to write things still relevant even after the time period and culture they were written in.
Wilde's thoughts are art a bit hard to place. It seemed to me that he liked art for art's sake. He said, in de profundis that he lived for pleasure, and he cited a lot of types of art as he made that point. I would have thought he liked art simply because it existed, and because it was something a bit out of the ordinary. I've never quite gotten, for example, how a painting of what looks like a yellow apple is symbolic of freedom and open fields.
In the last few lines of de profundis, Wilde says, however, that art is a symbol, because man is. I could see the argument for the creation of man being symbolic for whatever man is symbolic for. The problem is I don't think man is symbolic for anything. We can create symbols in our literature and works of art, but that doesn't mean that the literature or art itself is symbolic of something else. People in stories and paintings could be used as symbols, but that doesn't mean the humans, as a species, are a symbol.
Individual humans and individual works of art can be symbolic of something, but not all pieces of art and not all humans are symbolic. A symbol only exists because humans make it into one. This means that while the things humans make can be symbolic to other humans, that doesn't mean the act of creating art, or that art as a whole, is a symbol. I don't see how the creator of symbols- humans- could be symbols themselves.
I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. It's extremely circular in nature and very confusing. Oscar Wilde is a good author, and I like some of his plays, particularly The Importance of being Earnest, but he seems prone to some very long, flowery sentences. There have been times where I've forgotten the beginning of a sentence when I get to the end of it. Admittedly, the above quote is not long, but I can't make sense of it, especially the first sentence.
Some of Wilde's works are great, an filled with a lot of humor as well. As previously stated, The Importance of being Earnest was a good read and a lot of fun. I like his sense of humor and the little jabs at Victorian society. I've read a lot of his works- including some of the children's stories- and they are all well-written. A lot of his epigrams are true as well, and my favorite is "in life there are 2 great tragedies: one is not getting what we want, and the other is". I think he had to be very in tune with human nature to be able to write things still relevant even after the time period and culture they were written in.
Wilde's thoughts are art a bit hard to place. It seemed to me that he liked art for art's sake. He said, in de profundis that he lived for pleasure, and he cited a lot of types of art as he made that point. I would have thought he liked art simply because it existed, and because it was something a bit out of the ordinary. I've never quite gotten, for example, how a painting of what looks like a yellow apple is symbolic of freedom and open fields.
In the last few lines of de profundis, Wilde says, however, that art is a symbol, because man is. I could see the argument for the creation of man being symbolic for whatever man is symbolic for. The problem is I don't think man is symbolic for anything. We can create symbols in our literature and works of art, but that doesn't mean that the literature or art itself is symbolic of something else. People in stories and paintings could be used as symbols, but that doesn't mean the humans, as a species, are a symbol.
Individual humans and individual works of art can be symbolic of something, but not all pieces of art and not all humans are symbolic. A symbol only exists because humans make it into one. This means that while the things humans make can be symbolic to other humans, that doesn't mean the act of creating art, or that art as a whole, is a symbol. I don't see how the creator of symbols- humans- could be symbols themselves.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Satire and a modest proposal
We started a modest proposal recently, and it is creepy. It is a satirical essay by Johnathan Swift, where he proposes a solution for the potato famine in Ireland at the time: eating the babies of poor Catholics.
Obviously, this is not meant to be taken seriously, but the subject of satire has always been a bit odd for me, since I can't easily identify it. The first time I read it, I though Swift was being serious.
The thing I feel the need to focus on is that he specifies catholic infants.
To be catholic at this time was almost like a curse; to be Irish even more so. Anti-catholic sentiment started due to the strained relationship between Mary I and Elizabeth I. Mary I preceded Elizabeth to the throne, and was catholic. During this time, Catholicism flourished and protestants were prosecuted.
Then Elizabeth took the throne, and things completely reversed, Protestants who died were put into a book known as Foxe's book of Martyrs and used as a form of anti-Catholic propaganda. Elizabeth began to enact things to discriminate against Catholics, and made worship in the Church of England mandatory.
Those who didn't comply- the Irish, especially- were treated horribly. This treatment led to a lot of Catholics being reliant on potatoes, because that was the only thing they could feasibly grow in large enough quantities to feed their family on the small plots of land they were given.
Then a disease known as blight began to ruin the potato crops, and many Catholics found that they could no long pay their protestant land lords, feed their family or do much else.
This is when many people began to become indenture servants, in hopes of a better life in the colonies that would later become the US.
Indentured servants proved profitable, and many ridiculous crimes began going on the books, to the point an Irish child could be arrested for stepping outside their house (remember, people were losing houses). The parents would be charged for any food the child was given while in jail, even though they were rarely fed, if ever. If the parents couldn't pay, the entire family was shipped off as indentured servants.
Johnathan Swift recommends eating the children of Catholics, to cut down on numbers. He may of been satirizing the treatment of Catholics as well, but its hard to say. He could have had the exact same opinion of them as everyone else at the time seemed to.
Obviously, this is not meant to be taken seriously, but the subject of satire has always been a bit odd for me, since I can't easily identify it. The first time I read it, I though Swift was being serious.
The thing I feel the need to focus on is that he specifies catholic infants.
To be catholic at this time was almost like a curse; to be Irish even more so. Anti-catholic sentiment started due to the strained relationship between Mary I and Elizabeth I. Mary I preceded Elizabeth to the throne, and was catholic. During this time, Catholicism flourished and protestants were prosecuted.
Then Elizabeth took the throne, and things completely reversed, Protestants who died were put into a book known as Foxe's book of Martyrs and used as a form of anti-Catholic propaganda. Elizabeth began to enact things to discriminate against Catholics, and made worship in the Church of England mandatory.
Those who didn't comply- the Irish, especially- were treated horribly. This treatment led to a lot of Catholics being reliant on potatoes, because that was the only thing they could feasibly grow in large enough quantities to feed their family on the small plots of land they were given.
Then a disease known as blight began to ruin the potato crops, and many Catholics found that they could no long pay their protestant land lords, feed their family or do much else.
This is when many people began to become indenture servants, in hopes of a better life in the colonies that would later become the US.
Indentured servants proved profitable, and many ridiculous crimes began going on the books, to the point an Irish child could be arrested for stepping outside their house (remember, people were losing houses). The parents would be charged for any food the child was given while in jail, even though they were rarely fed, if ever. If the parents couldn't pay, the entire family was shipped off as indentured servants.
Johnathan Swift recommends eating the children of Catholics, to cut down on numbers. He may of been satirizing the treatment of Catholics as well, but its hard to say. He could have had the exact same opinion of them as everyone else at the time seemed to.
Amadeus
So, I just realized that I forgot to do this this blog for a few weeks.
Two weeks ago, we watched the play Amadeus done by professional actors. It was a great play, and really enjoyable, but not particularly accurate.
In real life, Salieri was also a very respected composer, and even taught Mozart's son. Mozart was actually wealthy, he just didn't know how to manage it.
There was an orchestra on stage, that played all of the various compositions that were referenced in the play, which I really enjoyed. It was kind of like a musical, except there wasn't much singing.
The play seemed based partially on the real life Salieri and Mozart, and partially on the story of Cain and Abel. In the play, Salieri was jealous of Mozart's talent and angry at god for not giving him even part of it. He felt Mozart didn't deserve it, and conspired to ruin him.
There is also a movie version of Amadeus, which follows the same theme.
One ting I didn't understand was why so many lines of dialogue were in Italian and French, because the play is supposed to be for an English-speaking audience. I understand both Italian and French, but I know that most of the audience didn't. If the intention was for the conversation to be private, why was it even part of the play, instead of it happening off screen or as part of the narration?
This blog is shorter than normal, which you've probably noticed. I just can't think of much to talk about.
If youA have an answer for the language question, can you please post it as a reply?
Two weeks ago, we watched the play Amadeus done by professional actors. It was a great play, and really enjoyable, but not particularly accurate.
In real life, Salieri was also a very respected composer, and even taught Mozart's son. Mozart was actually wealthy, he just didn't know how to manage it.
There was an orchestra on stage, that played all of the various compositions that were referenced in the play, which I really enjoyed. It was kind of like a musical, except there wasn't much singing.
The play seemed based partially on the real life Salieri and Mozart, and partially on the story of Cain and Abel. In the play, Salieri was jealous of Mozart's talent and angry at god for not giving him even part of it. He felt Mozart didn't deserve it, and conspired to ruin him.
There is also a movie version of Amadeus, which follows the same theme.
One ting I didn't understand was why so many lines of dialogue were in Italian and French, because the play is supposed to be for an English-speaking audience. I understand both Italian and French, but I know that most of the audience didn't. If the intention was for the conversation to be private, why was it even part of the play, instead of it happening off screen or as part of the narration?
This blog is shorter than normal, which you've probably noticed. I just can't think of much to talk about.
If youA have an answer for the language question, can you please post it as a reply?
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