Sunday, January 10, 2010
Generating tension
Pick a possible situation that you might use for your literacy event narrative. Make a list of all the problems, challenges, or issues that you associate with it. Pick two or three that are most interesting to you. In a few sentences describe the tension. Give us more context. What’s the conflict? How were these tensions resolved? What was significant about this resolution?
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Lose of Faith/Becoming an Atheist
ReplyDeleteProblems
1. Where do morals go?
Resolution
Social structure, follow to uphold society
2. What happens after life?
Resolution
My conclusion, my existence is over so I must come to term with that by living a full life.
3. Satre ultimate question is life worth living?
Resolution--
Existentialist Sartre describes the position of Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' L'Etranger who is condemned to death, in the following way:
The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions ... and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the "divine irresponsibility" of the condemned man.
The transformation from which this all came started with Transcendental thought from authors like Emerson and Thoreau. (But also ideals from novels like Grapes of Wrath)
The tension was that faith in God was not giving me motivation to live a full life and when I went through the process of changing my views the aforementioned texts were what inspired me. However, from my new viewpoint there is tension because ultimately life may be meaningless. But in my daily life I find so much good and find joy in experience so this tension must be resolved.
When I went to camp in third grade and was very homesick. My older sister was there and when I tried to talk to her she told me to go away, the one friend that I went with didn't want to do the daily activities that I wanted to, I didn't get any of the letters until the middle of the week and then I got them all at once.
ReplyDeleteI thought that my parents had forgotten about me and disregarded the promise to write to me. I went to my sister and tried to talk to her and she told me to go away thus prolonging and intensifying my feelings of homesickness. I got the letters all one night then the rest of the time to re-read all of the letters. I never went back to camp again and realized how much my family means to me. I was curious to see how this would affect me in my life as a college student and even though I have grown since I was in third grade my mom will still send me the occasional letter because of it.
1)Comparing your writing with your friends
ReplyDelete2)Grades
3)Writing differently in every class and transitioning
4)Not feeling that you are not a good enough writer to be in the class
5)Opening up
The tension with some of these items on this list would be that if you are most worried about not feeling that you are good enough to be a certain writing class and feel that you are not that good of a writer, this creates tension with yourself. You do not have that confidents in trying to write well because you feel that it is not good enough. But the way you can actually solve this tension is writing something that you feel strongly about and have the confidents that someone will like your writing. This tension with not knowing that you are not good enought may also relates to comparing your writing to your friends. This may make you feel as if you are stuck in a class that you are not good enough in and you just want to do well but your friends. And if they are editing your pieces of writing and they feel that they want to change it all because it is not like their kinds of writing and you feel kind of bad because you are getting the sense that you are not a good writer, but just know the way to fix this tension is know that no one ever writes the same way and it is your goal to find your own voice.
My senior year high school english class
ReplyDeleteProblems-
-My writing was immature and bland going into the class
---Coming into this class, I had never been successful at writing, I don't think I ever reached the A range for writing prior to this. The first day, we were asked to write, about anything. And I wrote nothing. Nothing came to me, I sat there, pencil in hand, thinking that there was a lot of other things that were more worth my time.
-The teacher, at first, seemed incredibly boring and uninteresting
---His voice was soft, almost a lullaby voice. The first week was dedicated to writing.
-I did not like english class.
---My freshman year english class involved me getting terrible grades, having a dictator for a teacher, and a few overacheivers that would not let anyone else talk.
Finally, after the first week, we began to read _________ and the story really engaged me, the discussions in class were really open for almost anything about the story, and the teacher and I started to hit it off really well. He recognized my struggles and helped me break through. For the final, we had to write a paper about a book we had read and I chose _________. I saw the paper as a culmination of the class. I used all that I had learned, wrote my first A paper, did a supplementary photo shoot to go along with it, and made a life long friend in my english teacher.
1. Questioning if I am different and why
ReplyDeletea. Why can I not read and everyone else can?
b. Why can I not focus easily and everyone else can?
2. Discovering my learning differences
3. Learning to accept them as a part of myself
4. Learning to accept myself intellectually
a. Realizing I am not stupid, I just learn differently
5. Learning to cope with my differences
a. Life long experience, learning what works and what does not (use of assistive technology)
b. Landmark College, High School Summer Program
6. Where I am today and goals for future
a. Academically independent and doing well
b. I have reached where I want to be academically
1.Not having confidence of what I wrote.
ReplyDelete2.Worrying about others not understanding what I wrote.
3.Showing how weak my English is when my passage is compared with others.
4.Being worried when I don’t know how to translate what I thought from Chinese to English.
When I was writing essay in the university study, the biggest problem is that what I want to express sometime is just what I can’t explain in English. I need to use my entire mind to think another way to solve it, which is just like a diver losing his way and trying to find the way out. Especially for some time I should finish the work immediately, such kind of conflict will really bother me. What I can only figure out such problem is to find another worse but easier sentences to explain it. But you know, such way will never be as good as the original one and there are always some small differences between. Even at some time, it will make the readers confused or mistaking what I try to tell
Tension: writer’s block struggle to continue, but the big story is the back flashes—the path of learning (more specifically literacy) the journey is worth more than just passing the finish line.
ReplyDeleteStarts at middle of exam , writer’s block, take a break look around the room know that there’s extra time allotted
Flashback to senior year expectation (from a regular student) vs IB
Throughout the year…. Practice exams…. Orals…pressure
Flashback at 10 yrs reading / learning about colors…
Inspirational plow through
Doesn’t matter what happen it’s the journey
Cliché for a reason its true, maybe not in the moment but eventually, with the big picture
• Didn’t know if he was ok
ReplyDelete• No one would give us information about his status
• The look on his mother’s face
• Writing about the event, how this affected me, and his mother
His mother looking at his seemingly lifeless body, her face in pure agony. The look of her face as she read my paper. The
feeling inside me as I watched the tears roll down her face.
This story is significant to me because it changed my perspective on life. Being a daredevil 16-year-old one second, and then seeing life as the most precious gift in the world in the next. Experiencing pain through others, for others.
Tension: Life never ends to death can affect people so much. Gratefulness and care can heal wounds. Love is the most powerful thing in the world. Appreciation for care. People deal with things in different ways.
Visiting my Hispanic family in California
ReplyDelete• Surrounded by my family I rarely see
• Them all knowing Spanish and conversing
to each other
• Myself feeling somewhat excluded for
not understanding
• Feeling as if they were talking
negatively about me even if they were
saying good thing about me
• Feeling like a stranger to my own
family; although I rarely see them so I
am somewhat of a stranger.
Ever since I moved away from California where my Dad’s side of the family lives, I have rarely seen or talked to them. Because that side of my family is Hispanic, they are very family oriented and reach to form some kind of connection with me. The summer before last me and my little sister went to visit my family and stayed with my grandma for a week; this being the first time in 7 years that we had seen another. The first day there we had a fiesta in which all of my extended family came to see me and my sister. It was very strange to be surrounded by Spanish speaking people gaping at me with me having absolutely no idea what they were saying. Before this I had never even thought about speaking English or how Spanish speaking people could feel living in an English speaking country. I felt ostracized by my family because of the language barrier; they all were bilingual, but Spanish was their first language. Something that really helped me cope with that was having my grandma make such an effort in speaking English to me and when around me, even though her English was not very good. My grandmas reaching out to me helped me create a relationship with her that I never had before. That relationship has evolved to the point where we talk on the phone every few weeks and she even flew out to Colorado for my graduation.
Problems, challenges, issues:
ReplyDelete-Language barrier
-living situation
-trying to express gratitude
-trying to be respectful
-trying to make a connection
-wondering what to take from the experience
While in Guatemala for a month two years ago I experienced several instances of tension as I found it difficult to express myself in certain situations. The two that really stuck out to me had to do with homestay mothers in two different villages. The first one was when I confused the Spanish word for cow with the word mouth. I was trying to ask what kind of meat we were having for dinner, cautious that it might be something, well lets just say something I wasn't used to. After this mistake, I was able to open up to my family and we were able to continually joke about my lousy Spanish skills. It brought us closer in this way.
Problems:
ReplyDeletePicking a topic: who/what?
Detailed information
Making it stand out
Representing & explaining my grandmas life
While struggling to write my college admissions essay, I couldn't think of a topic to pick. Finally I chose my granmother. However, I needed to be careful to explain her life and represent her the way that I see her. It's a difficult thing to do, to try and make the reader feel as if they know her. Finally I figured out that I needed to write this essay from a personal perspective rather than an analytical essay.
Conflict - how to maintain composure in church full of more than a hundred people, before it had even sunk in that the person being eulogized had been lost - that the person in the casket in front of me was no longer in the pew before me, smiling back.
ReplyDeleteTension - the feeling that the accident had no closure; the teen who had taken my grandmother was let go - his license couldn't be taken until he had been convicted, which in Florida could be months (and as we have come to see, years), and he was free to go out and party - while we mourned, he celebrated.