March 21 - March 27

This week we went over the first drafts of our essays. I however managed to not see my email and then when I went into class at the normal time I discovered that I had my meeting later that day. I am probably one of the only people in the world that could fall asleep sitting on my common room couch, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, and miss my class. Since I didn’t manage to make it to my class and since that was my only class this week, I guess that I will just go over what I think about my paper in this blog.

I think, judging from my grade and how it was graded on the first paper, that I will do fairly well on this paper. It is my opinion that it is well written and has a good topic sentence. I have has two of the English majors that I am currently living with on campus to read over it and they said that it wasn’t a bad paper and offered plenty of helpful advice. After making some of those changes I believe that I should do very well on this paper.

The Lottery

This past week in class we read the short story "The Lottery." After we talked about it in class we had to write about a possible theme we found in the story. I wrote about how people cant change traditions that easily. I think that people are stuck in their own ways and it takes alot for them to adopt a new ability or tradition. Even if the person's current tradition is harmful for themselves or others around them. If a person is raised in a certain mindset or a way of doing things they rarely change those ways.

Animal Rights

We read the freedom and confinement poetry section  this week. It was about animals and i'm guessing animal rights. The one titled snake by D.H. Lawrence was about a snake coming up to the narrator and the narrator debating on what they should do about it. They finally decided to throw a stick at it after it was on it's way back down the snakehole. I am not a big fans of snakes but this one made me look at them in a different light almost. They descibed a different side of snakes that i'm not used to hearing about from stories or poems.
Wookchucks was written by Maxine Kumin and was about some woodchucks that were pestering the narrator's garden. The narrator tried to gas the woodchucks at first but it did not work so they resorted to shooting them one by one. The narrator auctually seemed to be having fun while killing the little chipmunks and auctually turned it into a kind of game. It kind of highlighted how killing animals can be a bit addictive.

Poetry: Robert Frost

We have been reading poetry for the last few days of English class. One of the more recent assignments were some poems by the author Robert Frost. In that set of poems there was one titled “The Road not Taken.” I translated it as a poem with the simple message of just be yourself. I think that I translated it that way because it talks about making a choice between to paths to go down; one of which was well traveled, and the other was very seldom traveled by the looks of it. He took the path that was less traveled which sent me the meaning that he was talking about doing your own thing instead of just doing what everyone else does. However, there can be many different translations to every poem so there is no telling if that is what he had in mind when he was writing the poem, but that is the upside of poetry: it’s real hard to be wrong in your translations.