Reflection on AP Senior English So Far

Just to start off, I greatly enjoy the English class this year compared to previous years. Probably the most definite reason for this difference is the types of work that we did in class. In the past years, I thought English classes were all busy work which involved reading a passage and answering questions regarding it. This year, I don't think we have done this (well maybe once, but I don't remember it clearly enough) and I enjoy the alternate activities that we do instead. Possibly my favorite are the discussions, especially the ones in small groups with DIs. By talking to a few people instead of the whole class, it is easier for shy people to talk like me, and allows everyone to actively participate in discussion. I love this seminar type classes, and I believe more English classes should be like this.

One of the biggest benefits that I have received from taking this class is the expansion of my vocabulary. The weekly vocabulary words and quizzes allow me to learn practical words which I would have otherwise never knew the meaning of.

There has not been anything specific that I have been frustrated about the class. Class is fun, the workload is decent, and writing assignments come in a good page. Well, actually, one thing that I am frustrated about is the Drunkard quiz, the first quiz that I actually failed in High School.

Next semester I am excited to read Wuthering Heights in class, since I was wanting to read the book for part of my research project. I am also hopeful for the interesting in class discussions that we will have in class, such as that one time when we spent the whole class discussing existentialism.

This will probably be the last English class that I will take in a long time, so I hope to make the best out of it!

Thoughts about senior year so far

It is finally December  the last month of first semester. For some of us, it seemed so long to reach this point while for others it might have been a blink. I am the latter, since it still feels like yesterday coming to school on the first day of senior year. Since I have been writing about literary topics in my past few blogs, I thought I should write about my thoughts on senior year so far.

Senior year has been such a unique experience compared to the past three years. While we still have to take required classes, those are only 2 or 3 at the max, so the rest of the classes we can choose what we want to learn about. So, I greatly enjoy school this year because I get to choose my classes and take all science or math related classes except English. I also enjoy the fact that we get to take the highest level classes offered, such as AP Senior English, Organic Chemistry, and Linear Algebra. The feeling that I get thinking that this is the last time I need to do this for various topics is both pleasing and weird-feeling.

I can't talk about senior year without mentioning college apps. They have been my life for the past several months. I probably have written about a dozen essays so far, more to come in the next month. All this has been extremely stressful, since it seems like my 18 years of what I have done is all being judged. While it has been tiring, it has given me a great opportunity to reflect back on my life and think about what I want to do with my future.  I am just glad that I only have to endure about 3 more weeks of this one time miserable experience like no other.

I am extremely excited for second semester. There is robotics starting up, last season of high school tennis, senior dinner dance, graduation, and other fun activities. I might will definitely have senioritis, but I will mange and let my grades not drop too much. The english project will also be interesting, since I will be able to read The Count of Monte Cristo, a book that I have been wanting to read.

After high school comes college. I have a complicated feeling about this transition. I am excited for what is coming, but afraid of what I am leaving. I want to make the best of the remaining days of high school, and make it as memorable as possible, and go to college to experience something new.

What makes a piece of writing interesting to read?

This is a question that various literary critics have tried to answer for centuries. There has been no specific answer to this question, since the answer varies from people to people. For some people, it might be the master use of language by the author. For others, it might be the romantic plot that allows them to escape from reality. For me, the essence that makes a piece of writing interesting to read is the dark side of human nature illustrated by the writing: elements such as grief, death, desire, grudge, revenge, and so on.

What is it about this quality that makes me attracted to the writing? One literary critic that I do not remember the name of said something to the lines of "the dark side of human nature is what makes a piece of writing interesting". I totally agree to this statement, because if a story is all about love and peace and freedom, it would be such a boring story since there would be no action. On the other hand, if a story displays the dark side of human nature, it would be full of action such as murder, revenge, and other interesting elements. It is such more interesting to read about murder and revenge compared to love and peace.

Now that I have explained about what makes a piece of writing interesting for me, I want to mention a book that I want to read over winter break. This novel is considered a classic of the books that demonstrate the "dark side of human nature". The novel is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, first published in 1844. This masterpiece demonstrates my interest perfectly, since the story is about a sailor who was imprisoned by mistake, escapes from jail, acquires a fortune and seeks revenge against the people who are responsible for his imprisonment. This book is full of grief, revenge, murder, forgiveness, and grudge, making it such an interesting book. I can't wait to read it over winter break or during second semester.

Are Mangas a waste of time?

To comfort myself from the organic test and the outside reading analysis that I had to at school today, I was reading manga, which are Japanese comics. Some people think that reading comics are a waste of time and instead kids should go read novels by great authors Shakespeare or Hemingway. Today, I want to argue that some manga are beneficial to read and is not a waste of time.

First, I must admit that most mangas are written for commercial purposes. Manga is a huge business in Japan, the market representing approximately $3.6 billion dollars in 2007, and has increased since. Most mangas are commercial, but there a few out there which makes one think and is beneficial to them in life. One of these manga is the "Detective Conan" series by Gosho Aoyama.

The story is focused on Kudou Shinichi, a high school detective who was drugged when trying to observe a black deal, which caused his body to transform into a kid instead of killing him. With a body of a kid and the brain of a high school detective, Shinichi solves various murder and crime scenes which he comes across. You might be thinking how would reading this be beneficial? Let me answer that for you.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH4W8UrHxZcLRKVuqtbRAChT9Uky6zmV95lsLkH4qcpxmDf2Ts535YsrhrmTet9auKQZ8HjO9Y5R9OG78g_DMjWSd0L1bvOVKX3KAiHUbmJXud3l7WTe-Cb8SP5GS2viRd1F8JrnKhilQ/s320/Detective_Conan_Manga_Volume_61.png

Cover art for Detective Conan, volume 61.

The manga is formatted in a way so the reader finds clues of the murder and they try to discover who committed the crime before they reveal it in the manga. This develops analysis and interpretation skills.

The main benefit of reading "Detective Conan" is the education of science concepts along with other survival skills. Many science concepts are discussed in the manga and used as a tool to commit murder, such as crystallization and radiation. The book also educates the reader on survival skills, such as what to do when bitten by a poisonous snake and so on. One teenage boy in Japan returned safely from the woods after getting bit by a poisonous snake because he knew how to care for it by reading "Detective Conan" prior to the accident.

So as one can see, reading "Detective Conan" has many benefits, contrasting what many adults think. The translated title of this series is "Case Closed", so I encourage you guys to check this awesome manga series out!

Reflection on A Farewell to Arms and future reading

As some of you might know, for my outside reading I have been doing an author study on Ernest Hemingway. For the first book, I read his For Whom the Bell Tolls which I enjoyed greatly due to the amount of action combined with the flow of the plot along with the easy to understand sentence structure. The second book that I have been reading by him is, as in the title of this blog, A Farewell to Arms. I am about done with this book, so I thought for this blog I would share my thoughts about it.

Overall I did not enjoy the book as much as For Whom the Bell Tolls. One significant reason that I think this was the case is the difference in the plots. In the more interesting book the story was focused on a guerrilla gang and their encounters with the fascists. On the other hand, A Farewell to Arms was about an American ambulance driver and his love toward an English nurse. This made it less interesting for me and thus I provided less attention to the book.

I am not trying to say that reading A Farewell to Arms is a waste of time. This book has great literal values and important themes of life. One such theme is how much should one do for their loved ones. This theme is consistently present throughout the book which can be seen by Henry and his actions toward Miss Barkley. 

The third and final book that I am planning to read to conclude my author study on Ernest Hemingway is The Sun Also Rises. My experience with Hemingway has been extremely pleasant so far, and I believe that my final book will also be a good read like the previous two books.

An Interesting book on my shelf

I was looking through my family bookshelf on this typical Thursday afternoon and one book caught my attention in particular. With such an unique topic, I do not know why I did not locate this book earlier. While most people might find this topic disturbing and grotesque, I find it very interesting. The book is Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives by Robert K. Ressler, a former FBI agent.

Some of you might be wondering why such a grotesque topic interests me greatly. I was always interested in mystery novels as a child, challenging myself to try to figure out why the criminal did what he did. As I grew older, these mystery novels was replaced with more realistic murder novels. These novels challenged me even harder than the mystery novels, and I gained great pleasure from them trying to figure ow the murderer committed his crime and why he did it. I even thought about becoming a detective in the future, that is how much this topic interested me.

The book is a report of a study conducted by the FBI to further enhance the understanding of sexual homicides and the reasons for their actions. 36 psychopaths were studied by thoroughly investigating their history along with having personal talks with them in an attempt to understand their personality. This realistic investigation of sexual homicides and the insane murderers will allow me to deeper understand criminal profiling and psychology of psychopaths.

I can not wait to read this book and learn in great detail the patterns and the motives of sexual homicides and psychopaths. I want to take criminal psychology classes at college, and I hope this book will provide me with the basic information that I need for it.

Outside reading book choice and similarity between the Hemingway works

For my second outside reading book, I chose A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway for my author study. I chose this book for various reasons, mainly due to the fact that it is considered one of his major works.

A Farewell to Arms takes place in Italy during World War I. It portrays a story of a pair of lovers, an English nurse and an American ambulance driver. At the moment I have read up to the part where they initially meet and talk about their lives.

I am only about a tenth of the way into the book, but I have already noticed many similarities in Hemingway’s work. A common theme that I noticed between the works is a man’s importance of love. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway shows the love between Robert Jordan and Maria to portray the importance of love to a man. As they spend time with each other they get attracted, and near the end they are attached so much that Maria refuses to leave Roberts even though she will get killed if she stays there. This portrays the power and importance of love between the lovers.

In A Farewell to Arms Henry and Catherine attracted to each other immediately and start to spend time with each other. At the part where I am, they clearly show their affection for each other and this hints at me that this love will play a great role in the story later on in the plot.

The main similarity I noticed between the two Hemingway works is love. I am sure there are more similarities, and I might write a blog in the future expanding on them.

College Applications

Early action college applications are due in less than two weeks. I think I am not the only that is getting anxious about them due in such a short amount of time. I have basically all my application done except the essays, which are the hardest part by far. In a limited amount of words, you need to convey who you are along with your knowledge of grammar and the English language.

I am not a good writer. If you have seen my writing, you probably know this. My vocabulary is limited and my grammar is often times awkward and grammatically incorrect. In addition to this, the time it takes for me to write an equal quality essay compared to my peers time is double, even more. This has put stress on me along with fear that I am not going to get into my colleges because of the lack of my writing abilities.

The common app essay is by far the most important essay for the application, since every college that you apply through the common app will read this essay. This essay needs to convey who I am. I thought about this essay for a long time over fall break, thinking about what topic I could write it about. Several candidate topics formed in my mind. One was about the shogunate Takeda Shingen and how he has affected me. Another idea was about raiding in the game World of Warcraft and how it has affected me. I decided to go with the latter, since this topic is pretty unique (I mean who writes about World of Warcraft?) and I thought it would convey pretty well who I am.

Now I got this blog out of the way, I will resume my essay writing process. I wish good luck to everyone else who are working on their applications as well.

Reflection on For Whom the Bell tolls

First things first, I need to rant about the test that we just had. That was the hardest English test I have ever taken. This class is extremely challenging and I like that, but I am worried about my grades.

So now the main topic of this blog, a reflection on For whom the bell tolls.

Overall I liked the book alot. There were some confusing scenes such as the Gaylord scene, but other than that the story progresses at a good pace and Hemingway's style of short sentences makes it an easy read. 

The topic of the story contributes to the positive experience of this book. As I was reading and my eyes were starting to close, Hemingway always threw in a combat scene or an description of Robert and Maria's interaction which made me awake to continue reading the book. This happened everytime that I got sleepy, and I wonder if Hemingway planned that.

The plethora of characters made the story interesting to read. At first it is hard to recognize who is who but after a while you start to notice their differences from each other. Out of all the characters, my favorite character was Pablo. He is one of the most bipolar character that I have encountered in fiction. At one time he is serious but the next moment he is drunk and an a**. But at the end, there is confusion but he does care about the gang and the outcome of the war.

I strongly recommend people to read this novel, a novel that is often regarded as the best war novel ever written. If you think it is irrelevant because it was written over 70 years ago, give it a try and see how much it can be related to the current society.

Class Today

Todays English class was both the best and the worst English class I have ever had. I think I will start off with the good part first. I enjoyed the discussion we had about existentialism, selfishness, and the meaning of life. Not only did I learn various facts about existentialism, it got me thinking deeply about the topic. When we usually have class discussions I am not focused as the one we had today since the topic does not appeal to me. I propose that in the future we have more class discussions about this topic, since clearly we did not finish discussing and analyzing the topic completely. Todays discussion will definitely go into my "English class that was interesting" list (the number of things on here can be counted with one hand).
Contradicting with the above paragraph, it was also the worst English class that I ever had. The reason is the Drunkard Quiz that we received at the beginning of class. I did not get to read the story since the block before where I usually complete my assignments, I was typing up the roster for National Honor Society for Mrs.Wells. Therefore I did not read the story, but I thought just like any other English quiz I could BS my way through it. Well, it didn't turn out that way. I failed this quiz (not magnet fail, actual fail aka <65%) which was kind of expected but shocking at the same time since it was my first time ever in high school failing anything. This brought my grade down 4%, which just added to the depression of the failure.
I will remember todays English class as the worst and best one of my high school career so far.

Art of War

I am time deprived right now due to college applications. I do not have much time to play video games, my main source of entertainment, which is stressing me out. Enough with the wining, now to my main topic of this blog.
The other day I was surfing the internet and came across a book that caught my attention. I heard many good things about this book but never got around to reading it. Reading the book review on Amazon, I was wanting to read the book (this happens maybe once in 20 books) and immediately bought it. It has arrived about a week ago, but I do not have the time to read it right now. You guys might be wondering, what is this amazing book that has caught attention of a book loather like Hayato? The book is Art of War written by the ancient Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu.

The translation that I bought, regarded as the best one out there

There are multiple aspects of the book that caught my attention. I have been interested in military tactics since when I was a boy and this literature is considered a classic in the field. Another reason is that my favorite general, Takeda Shingen, has been inspired by this book and adapted a slogan from it which represents his army and himself as a whole. This slogan has inspired me and has shaped who I am. This slogan served militaristic purposes but in the modern era it has a different connotation: Act accordingly to the given situation.

            Fast like the wind,

Silent like a forest,

Intrusive like the fire,

Immobile like a mountain.

Update on outside reading

For my outside reading I am currently reading "For whom the bell tolls" by Ernest Hemingway. This reading is my first book out of three on my author study of Hemingway. I am currently around page 80 of the book, where things are starting to get interesting.
Aside from popular beliefs, the book is not that hard of a read than people think it is. Even though the book was written more than 70 years ago the language is mostly the same, and it is far better than reading Shakespeare where you can't understand half of what he is saying.
The book has a slow start, but apart from that I like everything else about it. The plot is interesting since it based on Hemingway's experience during the Spanish Civil War as a news reporter. The protagonist is a dynamiter named Robert Jordan who's mission is blow up bridges behind enemy lines.
Now to the caviar of the blog (As Mr.Mullins would say) on why this book is an AP-Caliber work. As I said previously I'm only 80 pages into the book so don't bash me if I leave out something later into the book. I believe the element that makes this book AP-Caliber is its unique language. It uses specific English words to make it sound like a Spanish word with the same meaning. For example instead of saying "you" Hemingway writes "thou" which is similar to tú, the Spanish word for you. This unique form of writing, called archaism is what makes this work AP-Caliber.
To summarize, I would recommend this book to anyone, especially to people who are interested by war theme. I will probably write a blog in the future to further talk about this amazing piece of literature by Hemingway.

Expansion on today's bellringer

In our AP Senior english class today we had a interesting bellringer, "If you were to make everyone in the world read one book, what would it be?" I came up with several books while writing my journal so I thought I would share it here.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
This is the book that I wrote about today in my journal. I believe the theme for this book is universal and can benefit everyone, teaching the reader multiple lessons. This book teaches that everyone needs to go on a conquest to find himself and also the effect that terroism has on a society. Along with its appliable theme the book is a good read in general. The plot is well developed, and the printing of this book is appleaing. There are Oscar's photobook and his drawings, giving the reader a visualization of Oscar's works.

2. The Thief Lord - Cornelia Funke
This book is considered commercial fiction but I believe this book should be read by everyone in the world. Multiple themes are present in this book which can be applied to many people. The one theme that I want to focus on is the theme with Scipio and his identitiy. He hides that he is from a loyal background to the gang, being afraid that the gang might not respect him if he tells the truth. The theme presented here is ones fear of presenting his real identity to others. This can be seen in multiple situations in society today, affecting many people. This book also has a appealing plot along with the multiple themes, making the book an enjoyable read.

There were some other books I wanted to share about, but I didn't want this blog to be too long so I will write about the other books in some other blog.

A little late post on American Gods

Since I have nothing else to write about at the moment, I decided to write about a book that I read over summer for AP Senior English - American Gods. This book is a novel by Neil Gaiman and won both the Hugo book award and the Nebula award. From this point on I will be including details of the book so if you have not read the book, I advise you to not read any further.
Overall, the book was extremely enjoyable. In the case of summer reading, I usually tend to rush the book and not pay attention to the content. I was planning the same course of action for American Gods but once I started reading it I found out how great of a book it was. The novel is action-filled with enjoyable characters, along with some prostitution scenes. In addition to those aspects the plot evolves at a decent pace, which keeps the reader going.
My favorite part of the book was probably the interactions between Shadow and Wednesday throughout the book, especially on their car trips. Their conversations are intelligent at times and blunt at others, educating and entertaining the readers at the same time. By the middle of the book the reader starts to think that Shadow and Wednesday are real father and son.
Again, this book is a well-written piece of art, having a well-developed plot along with characters that one can relate to. I would recommend this book to anyone who is craving a good read filled with adventure and suspense.

Hemingway

I think that the time that I am writing this blog, only a small portion of class will have an idea of what they are going to read for their independent reading. People might wonder that since I am writing about independent reading that if I have a book already decided for it. In fact, I already do. Instead of reading three books by three different authors, I decided to concentrate on one single author. The author I chose is Ernest Hemingway, one of the most influencial writers of the 20th century.

Photograph of Hemingway



People might ask, why Hemingway? There are various reasons why I chose Hemingway. It was in 7th grade that I read my first novel by him, The Old man and the sea. I enjoyed the book alot, and I tried reading his other major works but back then my reading skills were not high enough for Hemingway's writing. So given an author to study for our independent reading, Hemingway was definitely the first author that came up in my mind.

Out of Hemingway's works, the three novels I chose to conduct his author studies are For whom the bell tolls, The Sun also rises, and A Farewell to Arms. These three books are all considered his major work and his masterpieces. For my first reading I chose For whom the bell tolls since it is the longest out of the three, and I am least chained by my college apps right now compared to the following months.

Some thoughts about the last year of high school

This year I am finally a senior after 3 long years of high school. One more year of high school and then onward to college, where everything is new. I am extremely excited for high school to end and for college to begin with everything being new: friends, location, and education. If i get into my first choice college (which i hope i do), a year from now I will be walking the streets of the quiet city of Pasadena.

The college that I am interested in is the California Institute of technology, otherwise known as caltech. It is one of the top tier colleges in America, ranking fifth overall. Everything about this school is great, and by everything I mean everything. The food is great, the campus is great, the weather is great, everything is great!

Since caltech is a top tier college, the application is extremely competitive. To increase slightly my chances of getting in I am having a miserable high school life which will last through first semester. Go to school, go to research, get home and do homework, write essays, look at scholarships, work on the application, rinse and repeat.

It is miserable but I am hoping all this work pays off. I want first semester to be done and over with, like now.