Cubing

            Ducks, what can be done with them? How can they be used? Ducks have many uses. They can be used in barbecue  pasta, & you can use their body to mount on your wall! Not only are ducks a delicious meal but a beautiful mallard drake can be a magnificent decoration. If you kill enough of them you can use their feathers to make pillows. Their leathery feet can be used to make handbags or shoes. Ducks are amazing creatures.

 Finger painting is made up of fingers & paint. Who would have guessed right? It’s a rather simple form of painting that kindergarten teachers have kids do to keep them occupied. The paint that is used is water based so that if it is spilled it will be easily washed off the floor or the kids clothing. The colors of the paint are all the colors in the world, or as the children would say, the rainbow! 

Cate Huston's narrative

                    I really loved Cate Huston’s “How I Learned to Love Traveling Solo”. She gave so many good points that so many different people could use. Not only could I use this for my blog posts, to interest people reading my blog, but I could use this in my essay writing. I can use tons & tons of different facts to keep them interested & keep them occupied on learning what it is they want to learn or want to hear what it is that I learned. Also, I almost forgot for a little bit that I was doing this for my English class. I kept thinking to myself, “I’m so going to do these things when I’m older & travel a lot!” but I knew that, that wasn’t what I was supposed to be focusing on. Her writing style & skill was so engrossing that I got caught up on that fact that I want to travel when I’m older & that she enjoys traveling alone & that it’s not a bad thing to travel alone, that I forgot that I was supposed to be concentrating her education narrative & blog. Her blog post was so well put together that at the end I just thought, I want my essays to have skill like that, I want my readers to be interested in my papers or posts. Could this be possible? Could someone who has a weakness in English, particularly writing, do that? Well, I’ll sure try. I’ll give everything to get one thing from my readers: interest.

Malcolm X vs. Mike Rose

                Malcolm X’s Essay & Mike Rose’s Essay were very different. I found it hard to see the similarities throughout these essays. The only true similarity that I saw was that both of these men struggled with equality. Malcolm X was a quite famous civil rights activist &, as it says in his title, Mike Rose, wrestled with “just being average”.  To be completely honest, I don’t think Mike Rose’s essay was at all like any of the other essays. If it was to be close to one of them, I guess it would have to be Malcolm X’s. But Truly, Malcolm X’s essay was about him learning how to read while Mike Rose’s story was about how he was trying to fit in, in his ordinary life. I found Malcolm X’s to be exceedingly more profound & I think I will have a better idea of writing my own narrative by reading his than Mike Rose’s. I think Mike Rose’s was a sad story & I thought that the way he used emotion to grad his reader’s attention & keep the feeling alive in the narrative was exceptional & I hope to do that in my essay, but I had a hard time following it throughout the whole thing because it wasn’t terribly exciting. Overall, they were more different than they were alike.

The Most Important Thing I've Ever Learned

                                 The very most important thing that I have ever learned was learning to read. I think the basic fundamentals of life are based on reading. You have to read numbers & equations when you're doing math, read the prompt when writing an essay, read chemical reactions in chemistry & so on & so forth. Reading is so important. I don't know where any of us would be if we didn't learn how to read at one point in our life. 

                                This is nothing profound but ask yourself, would you be sitting in this English 101 class, or reading this blog post, posted by a girl in an English 101 class if you didn't learn how to read? Why is reading so important in our daily lives? Why couldn't we communicate with hand signals instead of writing or reading? I can't answer those questions but the "why" to "Why is reading so important in our daily lives?" is simple. It guides us to where we want to go. Streets signs, GPS's, stop signs, & everything else engross our reading senses. We learn with our reading skills. Teachers write our prompt on the board, we read it. The text book shows us an equation, we solve it. Reading guides us through our lives.

                          

Types of Prewriting I've used in the past

                          Prewriting has matured as I have matured. It started out with Venn diagrams & charts, & moved onto explicit prewriting skills our AP teachers have taught us. Just last year in my Honors Sophomore English (yes, I'm a junior in a highschool) class my teacher poured on us prewriting tools that will stick with us forever. The biggest & most valuable one was TIME. Unfortunately this year, that is not the case. Just today I wrote a timed write in class. Prewriting is tough when you only have 35 minutes to write a detailed essay worthy of your teacher's time. The most beneficial prewriting tool that helps me is, brainstorming. I'm the type who says, "I know what I want to say but I don't know how to say it" just like it says in the Writing Simplified book. A lot of times brainstorming consists of just sitting there & thinking hard about how two things connect or how this applies to that or even what I should write about. Another thing that helps me out is listing each of the things I need to write about: the topic, the thesis, the body paragraphs, extra details, & the conclusion. I then jot down things next to these words trying to make my essay as best as it can be. 

Regarding our first assignment

                           I'm excited to write this paper! Reiterating a story of how I learned something that most of you wouldn't know how to do to you guys is going to be great. Some of you will be appalled, some of you will be excited, & some of you will be surprised. What did I learn? Oh... You will have to wait to find out.

First Blog Post

Out of these two Education Narratives I found Feross Aboukhadijeh’s “How I Learned to Program Computers” superior & most influential in how I could write my Education Narrative. Not only did he give great insight into how he learned to program computers but he gave valuable information on how to learn ANYTHING you set your mind to, not just programming computers, even though that’s what this passage was geared to.  Feross divulged into the very beginning of how he learned programming, gave examples of his first works, & gave specific details of what he did to learn programming. When he went on to talk about his other websites he enlightened us on the steps he took to update his first website & the reasons he built each one. I can’t think of anything of importance to his story that he could have left out. He left me with the urge to find something to learn & just do it! Maybe it could be writing essays? Or Blog posts? J

            Joshua J. Romero’s narrative was also very detail oriented & well thought through. When he talked about learning to do recover data, move emails, or whatever it was, he went into excruciating detail & articulated every step he took to figure everything out, & gave information about how much time it took. Over all he gave exceptional thought into his experiment, which is important, but it was extremely long & not terribly exciting which is not what I want to convey when I write essays.

            I learned many factors that I could put into my education narrative & in future essays. I learned that having specific details is important & it would be good for me to incorporate humor or something exciting in my essay to keep my reader interested.