Writting
Marlene Lopez
Humanities
January 20,2015 Overcome your Pride
It is said that “The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.” In the story "Scarlett Ibis" by James Hurst, the narrator has a hard time accepting his disabled brother. After he finds out his brother is crippled he wants to turn into a "normal kid" that can run,walk,and work. He tries everything to change him because he is embarrassed to have a disabled brother.The author teaches his audience to accept people for who they are.
The narrator's younger brother is crippled and because of that he is ashamed to be related to him. For example, when Doodle the narrators younger brother is around two years old the narrator decides to change his name and said, "if you call him, he'd turn around as if he were going in the other direction, then he'd back right up to you to be picked up. Crawling backward made him look like a doodle bug, so I begin to call him Doodle, and in time even mama and daddy thought it was a better name than William Armstrong." This shows how embarrassed he was to have him as a sibling. In addition, the narrator begins to teach his brother to walk, run,swim, etc. so Doodle could be like everyone else. This shows how he wasn't accepting his differences. This also shows how the narrator believes his brother is not useful and treats him different as if he were not a normal kid. The narrator doesn't want to accept his crippled brother.
The narrators is blinded by his pride and trying to change Doodle once he overcame it; it was too late. For example "I did not know then that pride is wonderful, terrible thing a seed that bears two vines; life and death." This shows how the narrator realizes that pride wasn't useful to change his brother. This also shows that after a while he regrets trying to change his brother to be a "normal kid." In addition "we never spoke (What are the words that can solder cracked pride?) the narrator said when doodle had failed. This shows the narrators pride is more important than his own little brother. This also shows how the narrator was to focus on pride than his brother. When the narrator realizes he did wrong treating him bad it was too late to take back everything he did.
Don't discard people for how they are. The "Scarlett Ibis" by James Hurst has a great theme towards the end of the story. The narrator treated his brother badly by not accepting him for who he was; so they had trouble being happy with each other. Happiness can exist in acceptance.
I wrote this essay after reading the Scarlett Ibis. I got a C+ (46/60). My goals for writing is to improve more and more because since I got that grade I was upset with myself to get this grade and with writing I would try extra harder. By the end of the year I would like to get as much help as possible to improve my writing and try to get a better grade but not just for writing but for every class.
Projects
The last couple of weeks we worked on a project called the Greek Play project. I was paired with Mariana she was my main partner through out the whole entire play. We went from arguing on what topic we should write our script since we didn't agree on to getting the winning script to be act out. Our play was called "The Red Card". What our play ended up to be about was about how parents now days over pressure us kids now which can lead kids to make the wrong choices. I Marlene wrote our very first script. But when we had to make a very change when us got chosen Mariana decided to be a writer as along with other four people. The requirements we had in order to make this play was had to have:
Prologue
Parados
Scene 1
Chorus 1
Scene 2
Chorus 2
Scene 3
Chorus 3
Scene 4
Chorus 4
Exodus
Resolution.
Overall we were very happy our play got chosen.
The great Dionysus Project Page
Out of 12 groups of two, and then decreasing it to 6 groups of four, then 3 groups of four out of 3 groups "The Red Card" got chosen. The chosen play for the whole class to act was ours; my groups. We had to vote several times but at the end "The Red Card" got chosen.
The Red card was about a girl who plays soccer her name is Isabella. Her father Jose is a police officer he is rarely home. He only has some weekends off. However those weekends he spends them with Isabella playing soccer. Her dad is those kind of people who think its soccer over anything. However one day Isabella got home from soccer practice and asked her parents if she was allowed to go to a party on Saturday. Jose said no because he scheduled a private practice with a scout from StanFord. From there on Isabella got irritated from always having to be about soccer soccer soccer. So she started hanging out with her boyfriend and his "crew" which started to lead her to the wrong path by ditching practice and lying to her parents. Mark her boyfriend decided to rob a liquor store and she gets caught by her dad and they both end up facing the consequences.
During the production of this play i participated to be an actor. I acted the role of 'Ashley'. Ashely was a very close friend/soccer team mate of Isabella. Ashley was the type a person that was always there for Isabella ad who always encouraged her to do whats right. However I also another role I had was Costumes. I helped out with costumes. What I/we did was plan what every after was gonna wear base on the story and we made sure everybody brought what they needed.
Overall throughout the whole project what I learned that working together , together as a class everything will come out better and funner. With play I got to talk and know more people from my class that I didn't really talk to and I'm proud of that.
Here is a picture of my partner Mariana and I's story board. Where we exhibited to our classmates in order so they can vote for our play.
What I have learned about writing this semester is so many amazing things. This second semester with Erin we mainly focused on writing. To be more specific we focused on writing essays. I learned that I still hadn't learned many things about writing when I thought I learned everything in middle school. I improved on writing a larger amount of words on an essay. I was used to writing only up to 3 paragraphs from middle school because they would always give us the format on paper and we would only have space to write up to 3 paragraphs. But this year I learned that when it comes to writing there is many many different things I can do. What I still need to improve on is with my grabbers. I have a tendency to have simple boring grabbers. For example I would start it off with a question like " Have you ever done something like this? How would you feel?" I wrote this on my draft of my essay of Scarlet Ibis but I ended up changing it. Boring right? I struggle on having good hooking grabbers. So next year I know what I should start working on first thing. My goals for next year as a writer is to work really hard to make strong grabbers and to keep or add more length to anything I will be writing.