Thursday, February 27, 2014

Super 5

For my group's masterpiece our major role models come from some of our favorite documentaries. They each have gone out of their comfort zones to experience more, understand more, and help more.
  1. Tom Shadyac (I Am)
  2. Ben Nemtin, Dave Lingwood, Duncan Penn, Jonnie Penn (The Buried Life)
  3. Jeffery Azize (The Human Experience)
  4. Roko Belic (Happy)

LAUNCH

  • I am passionate about life, love, and happiness. Cliche as that might seem, it is the only honest answer. That was an easy answer. The difficult part was finding where to go with this passion. Through discussing this with my peers I found that many had a similar passion to mine, so we teamed up and created some direction. We are going to go on adventures, have new experiences, and document the last three months of our high school experience in a living scrapbook online. Surfing, hikes, "geocatching", frisbee golf, road trips, are just a few of the things we have on the agenda. This represents our passion for life. These adventures will be done and shared with our friends, the relationships we have built in our short four years here that will last a lifetime. Because our time all living together is shrinking everyday we want to make each day count. We want to create memories. This represents our passion for love. And lastly, while adventuring throughout the Central Coast we hope to shed a positive influence on the communities we visit. For example, picking up trash as we walk along the beach or giving out lunches to the homeless in downtown SLO. These are just little easy gestures that we can do that will improve the community. This all put together represents happiness, happiness because we have lived these last months to the fullest.
  • The tools we will mainly count on are collaboration and use of technology. We will need to collaborate in planning these adventures around group members' busy schedules. Also, use of technology will be needed to establish our living scrapbook. Our site of choice will be tumblr, so we can contact other classmates who have used this site to better understand its features.
  • To "feel the awesomeness with no regrets"by June, I will have to create these amazing memories I mentioned earlier. If I can look around me on Graduation day, at all my great friends, and have an endless bank of happy memories with them, I will be content.
  • My group's documentation of our adventures will be what stands out to others. Since it is only a few of us actually going through these experiences, we want to record them through video, pictures, or relevant quotes and songs, so others will have an idea of what we have done. Through our striving to live life to its fullest, we hope others will be inspired and do the same. We will inspire others to go out and do what they have never done and experience what they never have.
  • I will move beyond "What if's" by actually putting dates and times on these adventures, because it is easy to say I want to do this and that, but it is sometimes hard to fit this and that into your schedule.
  • The central group for this project is myself, Kylie Sagisi, Hannah Savaso, Meghan Martella, and Ian Steller. As for experts, we are thinking about trying to contact some of our inspirations from our favorites documentaries, like "The Buried Life", "The Human Experience", and "I Am".

I am Here

This first grading period has gone by quick, but it has been a productive six weeks. My group and I now have a basis for an idea to start our Masterpiece. It is going to be a crazy mixture of adventures, fun, and helping others. It was inspired by the uniquely senior feeling of the shrinking time we have here in our home town as college approaches faster and faster. It was difficult to come up with this idea, although it is basic, because there is so much left we want to do here before we leave and now that our life as we know it has an expiration date the stress to do these things is heavy. So our project has to do with completely this "bucket list". As for the other traditional part of AP Eng Lit Comp, I am up to date on Literary Terms and am fluent with most of them. First Literature Analysis is done, and number two is in process. Overall, this first grading period has been successful and a good way to set the stage for my last three months of high school.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Literary Terms 6

Simile: a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison. 

Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage. 

Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.

Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.

Stereotype: cliché; a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story. 

Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s
thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them.

Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.

Style:  the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking. 

Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important  structures of language. 

Surrealism: a style in literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the nonrational aspects of man’s existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal. 

Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it. 

Symbol: something which stands for something else, yet has a meaning of its own. 

Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense. 

Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole. 

Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence.

Theme:  main idea of the story; its message(s). 

Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or disproved; the main idea. 

Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the author’s perceived point of view.

Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; a.k.a. “dry” or “dead pan”

Tragedy: in literature: any composition with a somber theme carried to a disastrous conclusion; a fatal event; protagonist usually is heroic but tragically (fatally) flawed 

Understatement: opposite of hyperbole; saying less than you mean for emphasis 

Vernacular: everyday speech 

Voice:  The textual features, such as diction and sentence structures, that convey a writer’s or speaker’s pesona.

Zeitgeist: the feeling of a particular era in history