Final Blog

The technologies we have used over this past semester in English 11 have been a nice mix-up to the usual homework. When I am writing a paragraph response to a question online (much like I am now) it doesn’t feel like homework. It feels like something I would be doing after I have finished my homework. It is also nice because I can’t really ever forget something at school. I don’t need to bring all my English stuff home in order to complete the homework because most of the stuff that we are given in class is easily found on the wikipage. Using the internet and sources like wikipages and blogger make writing paragraph responses and doing other homework much more relaxed, but in addition to the normal writing, the technologies we have used in this class have also allowed us to have some fun creating different pages and personalizing them. There wasn’t really a strict way we had to create pages on books and authors, but we had freedom to create them almost however we wanted, even if that includes adding Sail Away by Styx or Tom Sawyer by Rush to a Huck Finn wikipage. The amount of different things you can do with these technologies is almost endless, from adding music and videos to just decorating a page with cool fonts and colors. The room for creativity in creating web pages makes it a lot more fun to do my homework. But beyond being more relaxed and more fun there is almost unlimited resources online, which makes it a lot easier to look things up while in the process of writing a response or creating a wikipage. It also is a lot easier discuss a book with a group of people by simply posting a discussion on a wikipage. With more time than just English class to discuss a book, the discussion can get a lot deeper, which expands the understanding of the book and helps us see the conflicts underneath the obvious plot. In conclusion, I have found this semester of technological pioneering in the field of English 11 learning to be more fun, more efficient, and unexpectedly more educational.

daggers in men's smiles

In Macbeth, Macbeth says, " there are daggers in men's smiles." I think what Macbeth was talking about is when someone smiles and it feels like it cuts right through you, a smile with malicious intent. those smiles can be either a " I told you so" smile, a " I trusted you" smile, or just a smile that makes you feel like less of a person. Everyone has seen a smile like this, or remember smiling like this. I have experienced smiles like this many times, and it is usually the smile that makes me feel like less of a person, or just unaccomplished. A smile that says nice "try but your just not good enough."I can remember getting this smile mostly when I was younger. I always wanted to play football or volleyball with my brothers and older cousins. I would try to get into the group when they were picking teams. I would get there and my brother would say something like, " Just the older kids are playing now" or just say, "Go play somewhere else." And he would always be smiling when he said that, and in my mind the smile was saying " Your just not good enough." I can remember that smile being the worst thing in the world. And even if they did let me play, I would never get to touch the ball. Sometimes, just to try to make me feel better they would all plan on letting me get a touchdown, which didn’t actually make me happy at all. But now that I’m older and am allowed to play with the them I can see why they didn't want me to play before. It is easier to play when you don't have to worry about hurting someone smaller than me, so maybe I just misunderstood the "daggers" maybe it was actually because he cared that he wouldn't let me play. Even if that is it, that smile was still painful when I was younger.