Burr

Another knowledge filled week of English class.  Our class had a rough draft of a personal narrative due this past monday.  The personal narrative was to be 750+ words and had to be about an experience with language,  either positive or negative.  On Monday and Wednesday our class got into our grammar shmammar groups and we helped each other revise them, by reading them aloud and getting our peers input.  It's always good to get a second opinion when writing essays or other assignments, to help find grammatical errors or other mistakes.  Aside from the essays, our class also takes part in an assignment called grammar schmmar.  We were broken into groups and instructed to make a video, or powerpoint presentation to show the class about a certain grammar rule. 

Week of class

This week in English class was pretty chill.  On Monday we met in the library conference room, or whatever its called, and a librarian took us on a tour of the library.  The amount of knowledge in the library is astonishing.  There are books on books on books in there for anyone that needs to use for research, or to enjoy reading them.  They have a quiet section upstairs for anyone who would like a quiet place to study, or rooms for group projects.  There are even more books up stairs for someone to use.  The library has about 20 more stacks of books with hundreds if not thousands of books for use.  A new edition to the Richard Bland school library is a collection of dvds and movies for students to check out.  Thousands of dvds were generously donated to the school by an anonymous donor.  Computers are also available to the students who wish to access the internet library or online databases for research.  Overall our class was informed about the benefits that the library can provide us.  Class on Wednesday went well.  The students that had to do grammar schmammar 1 presented it to class.  It was okay, they talked about the uses of apostrophes and gave examples of sentences without apostrophes.  Overall it was a good week of class.

Superman and Me

Superman and Me is about a young Spokane Indian boy living on a Reservation in eastern Washington.  The young boy lives on the Reservation with his family and to which some standards may be considered poor.  His father attended Catholic school and is absolutely in love with books.  He reads anything from novels, and murder mysteries to backs of cereal boxes and bulletin board posts.  The man would read anything he saw and his the young boy saw his fathers love for books and that is what made the boy love books.  He soon understood that all the books his father had, they all had paragraphs of words which he couldn't read.  When the young boy picks up the Superman comic book for the first time he sees that there are pictures with words under them and and they are in  paragraphs or grouped under them.  He then realizes that those words under the picture are saying what the picture is doing. The boy is incredibly smart and gifted that read the "Grapes of Wrath" when he is just in Kindergarten.  If he wasn't on a Reservation he might of been called a Prodigy.  He talks about how it was hard for people on the Reservation to really make it far but he was determined not to fail.  He now visits schools and teaches creative writing to Indian children on Reservations.  Its a great story

Mother Tounge

For Mr. Sweeneys English class we had four readings that had to be read.  One of those really fascinated me and is why I am going to blog about it.  It is called "Mother Tounge" and is about a woman who talks about the different kinds of English that everyone speaks and uses differently.  Her name is Amy Tan, A Chinese American Writer who is writing about her experiences with a "broken" or "limited" English language.  She discusses the type of English her mother speaks and the language she speaks with her compared to other people.  The writer says how her mothers English is "broken" in the sense that other people might not be able to understand but very understandable to her.  Amy Tan talks about how her mother is a main influence on her writings and uses her as mother as the reader for her stories.  She uses all the Englishes she grew up with which are the English from her to her mother, her mother to other people, and the translation of Chinese to English.  Amy Tan uses her mother as her biggest influence and is what she believes makes her stores "so easy to read"