This week was a little crazy with the ACT, however, we did finish watching Hamlet. In the conclusion of the play almost all of the characters died. The only one who survived was Hamlets closest friend Horatio. Hamlet ended up achieving his goal of killing his uncle and getting revenge for his father, but it wasn't without a price. He caused the death of many other people in the process including his own.
We also had a speaker come in from CMU who specializes in Shakespeare. She cleared up any questions we had about Hamlet and helped us to grasp a better understanding of it. The most helpful part for me was when she explained the politics in the play. Throughout watching the film i didn't quite get the gist of what the marching army was representing, and she explained it clearly. It was also nice to get a different perspective of the play from someone outside our classroom.
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Throughout the week we continued viewing the play Hamlet. We are nearing the end of the play and lots of things are beginning to happen. Hamlet killed Ophelia's father by mistake thinking he was the king, and Ophelia goes crazy. She ends up jumping out a window and drowning. Meanwhile, Ophelia's brother has come to town seeking revenge for his father's death. He and the King came up with a plan to kill Hamlet and as we continue watching next week we will see how their plan plays out.
Also we have been preparing for the ACT as it is coming up next week. We answered some practice questions on the English portion which was very helpful because whether you got the answer right or wrong it gave you an explanation why. We also looked through some sample writing pieces for the writing portion of the ACT which helped me to get an idea of what i need to do to get a high score. Throughout the week we have been analyzing Hamlet. It is the story of a prince who's father was murdered by his uncle. His uncle then became king and married his mother within a matter of months. Hamlet, like anyone would, is having a hard time with everything and is feeling a bunch of different emotions at once. When he finds out that it was his uncle who killed his father he swears revenge. We ended off at the part where Hamlet is beginning to carry out his plan for revenge by acting crazy.
Instead of just reading the story we are watching the play version of it. By watching it and reading along it helped me to have a better understanding of what was going on. However, since it is written in old English is is also helpful when Mr. Schoenborn stops the play to explain it to us more in detail. The music connections also help to get a better understanding of how Hamlet is feeling throughout the play. By making a digital story of the Pardoner's Tale and by watching my classmates' digital stories I got a really good understanding of the Tale. At this point, I feel like I know the story like the back of my hand. It was also neat to see the similarities and differences between all of our videos. Each of us interpreted some parts of the tale in different ways, therefore it opened up my mind to viewing the story in more than one way.
This was my first time creating a digital story and I thought it was a pretty cool thing to learn how to do. I learned how to add music and words to pictures, and even how to incorporate my own voice into it. I feel like this will be a really good skill to have in the future when it comes to my senior year, college, and possibly even in my career. It's crazy to think about how the English language has changed throughout time. It has gotten much simpler and a whole lot less descriptive. When looking back at writings such as Old English poems you can really notice the difference.
This week when we read "The Seafarer", "The Wanderer", and "The Wife's Lament" we noticed a few key elements that each poem contained. A big one was imagery. The poems were very descriptive and used a lot of metaphors. Another key element was the mention of faith and religion. In two of the poems they mentioned go and the belief in a higher power getting them through their hardships. They also each had a sad and depressing mood to them and a sense of loneliness. We also read "The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale." This poem portrays the greediness of man. The pardoner himself is greedy by lying and selling certificates of forgiveness for money. The men that are looking for death in his moral story also portray greed. When they find the gold coins they all want it to themselves without sharing and all end up killing each other. This week my actual English teacher returned from his maternity leave. It was weird at first because I had gotten used to the way the class was being taught during the first two weeks that the sub was here, and this week it was almost like starting the class all over again. However we did begin a new topic upon his return, which made it a little bit easier to adjust to.
Over the course of this week we read the short story "Beowulf." We reflected upon how Beowulf's heroic journey relates to almost every other heroic story ever told. That was really cool to me because with that, I could relate this story to other stories such as "Star Wars" and "The Hunger Games." Because of the connections i was making I feel that I understood the material a lot better because it was relating to other stories that I know really well or that I am more interested in. Also this week I read a couple of pages of "Beowulf" out loud which helped me to become a better reader and go out of my comfort zone. The fact that I was reading the story out loud also made me understand some parts of the story better. The main ideas we learned this week were about heroism. We discussed the eight steps of a hero's journey and reflected upon the Star Wars movie. The first steps include the call and the threshold which invite the hero into the journey and launch the hero into the journey. The next five steps are the challenges, the abyss, the transformation, the revelation and the atonement. During these steps the hero faces and overcomes challenges, goes through a dramatic change, and become at-one with themselves. In the final step which is the return, the hero discovers a gift as a result of their accomplishments. To go along with these steps we watched the first Star Wars movie and reflected upon Luke Skywalker as a hero and how these steps applied to his journey. This activity really helped with my understanding of these concepts, however i am still a little confused on how to identify the different steps throughout the movie. Some of them were easy, but steps like the challenge were hard to recognize because to me there were a couple different scenes that could have fit with the definition of that step.
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