Creative observation

·                                 My secret base

·        There is a pair of gloves under my pillow all the time. The color of these cotton gloves are black and white. They are more like woman’s gloves. Check pattern design are normal, we can see them everywhere. These gloves has stayed with me since I was in 8th grade in China, which was 4 years ago from now. These pair of gloves are my container of my memories. Since I first time got them, they always accompanies me every night. There are something I can not explain clearly between these gloves and me. They were birthday present but they don’t only have the meaning of birthday present for me. Most of the time I see them as a kind of spiritual ballast. If I have to describe them in a sense, they are nostalgia. I repose all my fine memories inside. People always have their bad days. Our hearts want to be placated when they are not strong enough. As if my gloves can give me strength, I can feel the warmth from them. Like there is a magic inside, it brings me out of the dark all the time. Even I have left the person who gave me the pair gloves half of the earth, I still feel the connection between us. Whatever the connection still exist or not, I can feel that emotion every time I see the gloves. That memory can not be relinquished forever. When I get old, I hope I can still see the scenes of those days when I am holding the pair of gloves.

Blog 7

                         I love those hard-working antagonists

Have you ever played with telescope? I think almost everyone did it kind of thing. There are a lot of kinds of telescopes in the world. For example, there are telescopes which are invented by Kepler, Newton and Galileo. This fall, our school varsity players gave us a brilliant show called “Galileo”. This two-hour show included Galileo’s whole life after he invented telescope. From the beginning which Galileo found that the earth goes around the sun, the conflicts between Galileo and the church has not stopped until Galileo’s death. Human nature was depicted so clearly in the show. Everyone has their own personality.

When the show started, I was attracted by the stage. Actually I haven’t enjoyed any reality show before. With the excited emotion, I completely focused on the show, Galileo. “The language was hard.” That was the first idea came into my mind. I did some research before the show. Writer of this show, Bertolt Brecht was a German writer. The first vision of the play he wrote was translated in old English. It was really hard for me, an international student to understand that kind of elusive language. On the other hand, it gave me more chance to focus on the performance of the players. Although Galileo was played by an female player, I could still feel a kind of heroic spirit that Galileo in the early period had. He was not afraid of anything, like all the scientists did. They were crazy about their experiment, they believed that the truth could mean everything. When Galileo introduced the solar system to his trainee, I could see his confidence and pride from the player’s face and intonation. 

The conflict between Galileo and the church was an important point in the show. The same as other plays, there is a protagonist in the show Galileo. The church tried to prevent Galileo’s experiment. I am not interesting about religion at all. I always think gods are fake things. On the players’ face, I could see the scorn easily. The performance was really vivid. Compare with the positive characters, I think some of the villains had a better performance.

I could say that this show gave me a brand new vision of Galileo. Before I watched the show, Galileo’s figure in my mind was a thoughtful scholar. He should be steady and ripe. After I watched the show, I found that, he was more like a self-opinion child. He chased for his own science blindly. He didn’t understand the ways of the world. As all the normal scientists did, he could give up his life for his favorite astronomy. By the contrast, I prefer to say that the antagonists drove the whole play. They pushed forward the plot. They gave me a deeper memory that Galileo does. It was really successful to create those antagonists.

Generally, the show gave us a lot of space to think about. How should we finish our aim, straightly or roundly? It was a awesome show and gave me a lot of fun.

Playwright Brecht research

Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century. His works include The Threepenny Opera (1928) with composer Kurt Weill, Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958). Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1898, and the two world wars directly affected his life and works. He wrote poetry when he was a student but studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After military service during World War I, he abandoned his medical studies to pursue writing and the theater.

A member of the Independent Social Democratic Party, Brecht wrote theater criticism for a Socialist newspaper from 1919 to 1921. His plays were banned in Germany in the 1930s, and in 1933, he went into exile, first in Denmark and then Finland. He moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1941, hoping to write for Hollywood, but he drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he managed to deflect accusations of being a Communist, he moved to Switzerland after the hearings. He relocated to East Berlin in 1949 and ran the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company. As a director, he advocated the “alienation effect” in acting—an approach intended to keep the audience emotionally uninvolved in the plights of the characters.

Brecht’s poetry is collected in Poems 1913-1956 (1997) and Poetry and Prose: Bertolt Brecht (2003). He wrote a wide variety of poetry, including occasional poems, poems he set to music and performed, songs and poems for his plays, personal poems recording anecdotes and thoughts, and political poems. Poet Michael Hofmann, in “Singing About the Dark Times: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht” for the Liberal,commented, “In the course of a mobile, active and engaged life, the poems were the intelligent, compressed, adaptable and self-contained form for both his private and his public address.”

Bertolt Brecht died in 1956. He is buried in Berlin.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bertolt-brecht

Galileo

Galileo was and Italian mathematician, physicist, astronomer and pioneer of scientific revolution. He invented the balance and thermometer and was one of the founders of modern experimental science. His law of free fall, found out by a famous experiment on the leaning tower of Pisa, made he became famous in people. This experiment completely overturned Aristotle’s ideas.Galileo’s  refuted Ptolemy's geocentric system and strongly supported Copernicus's heliocentric theory. He is known as "the father of the modern mechanics", "the father of modern science"now. The work for the establishment of the theoretical system of Newton laid the foundation of the .Galileo believed that experience is the only source of knowledge, we can figure out the truth only by using experiment mathematics method.  He strongly supported the sun is the center of the universe so he got punished by the pope. His later life spent under house arrest. He was the first person who got a large number of achievements by using the telescope to observe the celestial bodies. His telescope played a significant role in the in seventeenth Century's science and world outlook. Based on the experimental science of  Galileo, Newton began to look for natural rules. Galileo made the modern natural science grow.

In-class Writing Activity

10th Nov. 2014

Dear Ms Guarino,
    I am writing to apologize for my late homework. The assignment you assigned on Friday was due on this Monday, but I did not even start yet. I am so sorry that I did not hand on the homework on time.
    My tortoise gave a birth this weekend so I was in a muddle. I never helped somebody deliver  before.  It was so hard for me to take care about my tortoise.  Unfortunately she died because of dystocia. It broke my heart. I could not control the sadness so I lost myself for the whole weekend. I could not leave her little eggs alone so I used a lot of time on taking care of it. Therefore, I could not get the  necessary information from the library. As a result, I could not hand on my homework on time.
    Now I am fully recovered with all the information. I will hand on my homework as fast as I can after I finish it, and I will try my best to hand in my homework on time next time. My hamster is not pregnant yet.

Sincerely
Zen Fan

OMG My goals...

                         OMG! My goals...

My three goals to the classes.

First one is finishing homework on time.
Second one is writing good articles.
Third is getting a good grade in writing session.

Those were my 3 goals at the beginning of the year. Actually I forgot about some of those goals after I wrote them. But I follow the main direction I chose at the beginning of the year. I worked hard on writing essays. These two months were so different with last year. For writing class, I felt the homework was too much at the beginning, because I seldom wrote for 500-600 words in English before. I was not familiar with it. After these two months, I feel my writing skill improved a lot. I can not believe I have done so much work. That was amazing. 

For the first goal which is finishing homework on time, I was so sorry that I did not figure out when should we due blog. For real, that was the first time I heard that students should due homework on Saturday. I thought a lot about it when I heard I was 2 days late. I can not understand at all at the beginning. I have a bad habit that I never look at the portal until Sunday evening. Ms Guarino’s writing class helped me change my bad habit. Now I will take a look at portal on Friday evening and finish the homework on Saturday. When I heard I was late to due my homework, I knew that I must improve that and now I am improving it.

My second goal was writing good articles. I can not say something absolutely for this goal. My grammar was not that bad so I can say that I did kind of well in my grammar part. As the significant moment essay said, I did too much in analysis. I thought that motions can affect people the most so I misunderstood the importance of stories. My analysis looked fell into parts when I didn’t have enough stories. It can not called pathos if I even do not have logos. I tried to change this after Ms Guarino  told me, and it worked. My essay looked more colorful that before, and I have more interests in writing it. I feel happy about I am keeping improving.

My third goal was getting a good grade in writing session. This one is the thing I am worrying about the most. The only subject I can not predict is writing, because I got some 70+ points in blogs. This may hurt my grade a lot. If I got a B- then I can not get a high grade for my first GPA this year. I wonder that at least I can get a B then I still have chance to get First Honor. 

I knew that I still have a lot of thing to do in writing. After waste the first two month chaotically, I think my writing lesson will walk on a right path.

blog

                                   Task my brain

When I first time got this homework, I thought it was so easy. I am really good at writing essay about mental actions. When I first time finished this essay I feel confident. But when I heard a about stories and analysis, I found a big problem of my essay. Instead of writing too much stories, I put too much analysis in the essay. Classmates read their essays in the class, then they start to count sentences for stories and sentences for analysis. My result was 10 and 50. My essay was totally different with theirs. With nearly 40 differences of stories, I found that I should add a lot of stories in my significant moment essay. What I thought about the significant moment essay was using a number of description of mental action to describe a scene. Through my mental action, readers can figure out what the environment was. Ms Guarino asked us to write 500 words for the essay. That was a lot of work I thought. It was very hard to use 500 words to write about a significant moment with half stories and half analysis. I am used to write analysis in essay because it can show my true feeling to affect the readers. It was a useful way to get higher grade. It seems like this way has a problem. Without describing the stories, it can not arouse people’s sympathies. I really hate to have the same thing with others, writing paper, playing games or having vision angle. So when I found I was different with all my classmates I was a little bit happy even it was wrong. When I tried to fix it I found another problem. It is really to add stories into an significant essay. When I tried to add some more stories about my Chinese and American life, I found that my theme was away from my topic depression, fear and expectation. I focused on depression, fear and expectation for my whole essay and the significant moment was I stayed in the airport and waited for the plane. What I thought should be my main part of the essay. I thought analysis is always good for anywhere but I am wrong. Sometimes too much analysis makes the essay became boring. To writing an interesting essay, I must add some more fun stories although my topic was depressed. I wrote about what my grandparents reacted when I left my home which is part of my flashing back. Then I wrote about some predictions of the future, which have happened now. It became most of my stories in my essay. I think it is fun to read about it. How a good significant moment attracts people is it has a point with can catch readers sympathies. If people have the same thoughts with me and they read the essay, they may fill the same ways with me. But I wrote too much analysis in my essay, so it makes it harder to catch people’s sympathy. I still need to work on adding more stories in my essay.