1) “Most Beautiful Work Award” - I'm most proud of my abstract for the inquiry project. It was very interesting, and actually fun to connect my book to poems with similar themes, and study such a philosophical topic as dependency. Throughout the essays in the class, I've developed the habit of planning them. Before actually writing the essay, I've found it helpful to plan what my paragraphs will be about, and how the essay will flow. I'm proud and happy that my work on the abstract could be turned into a oral presentation, since it is something I am good at, and immensely enjoy.

2) “Lesson Learned” - I enjoyed learning the skill to plan essays, as I mentioned before. For our in class essays, I decided to plan them before coming to class, often writing a draft of the essay to give me ideas. I wish I had done that in the past, because it was incredibly helpful. Instead of wasting precious time trying to mold together unconnected paragraphs, I could write with a goal in mind, and create coherent, logical writings.

3) “Lessons I’d Like to Learn” - I want to develop the skill of analyzing readings. I've always had trouble with questions such as "What tone does the author take?", because to me, it could be interpreted any way the reader thinks. Learning to write about readings and analyze other author's writings would greatly help me in college, in English class, and in other classes where writing is involved

This week I worked a lot on my poetry essay. As I mentioned before, I had trouble finding a poem in the first place, but thankfully I remedied that by finding one that was named "Dependence," by William Cowper. This poem was really perfect for my topic, since it heavily focuses on dependence, and also made a great poetry essay. I'm excited to work on my abstract, and answer my essential question this coming week.

This week we have been working more on our inquiry project, and have been getting closer to finishing it. I have been struggling to find a poem that would help me answer my essential question, but I am thinking of just finding a poem about love, because that would talk about dependency. I am in the progress of finding sources to answer my essential question, and soon will be able to write a thesis statement.

This week we turned in our tragic creation.
Here's my group's:

This week we worked on our tragic creations and our essays.  Unfortunately, I was sick this entire week except Monday, but I still worked on editing my essay and helping my group write a script for our creation.  I'm hoping our creation will turn out, because we realized filming will be a very difficult task, considering how busy many of us are, and that I'm sick.  We'll see, but meanwhile our studies on tragedy continue.

Essay

This week we worked on our essay for the tragedy project.  I turned in my essay, here is a quote from it: "Character development is also very important. To me, Oedipus
was a mean person. If Oedipus was a selfless philanthropist that helped people less
fortunate than him to live, and saved children every day I would love Oedipus a lot more.
With that said, the character has to be loveable; it has to be a character the viewer can
really connect with."

This week we responded to many readings that talk about the definition of tragedy.  The reading were very interesting, because while some defined tragedy using Aristotle's definition, others edited or completely changed the definition.  I agreed much more with the edited definitions of tragedy, because in our modern society, a hero is very hard to define, and a different definition is needed.

More Oedipus, and a tragic project!

         This week we continued reading and interpreting tragedies.  We finished Oedipus, the so called "perfect tragedy" that was the first use of a modern tragedy.  It was very understandable, but to me slightly contrived.  It seemed that every possible thing that could go wrong to Oedipus happened, and was slightly over-tragic and unrealistic.  It was still interesting however, and I'm Looking forward to starting our project where we will create our own tragedies. 

Great Tragedies and Oedipus

This week we started learning about more of the greek contributions to our modern world, but about one in partucular: the modern tragedy.
This came about when a rich greek man decided to create a play that involved tragedy, and thus the modern tragedy was born.  We all wrote down some examples of tragedies today, such as movies like "The Boy with the Striped Pajamas" or "The Wrestler."  These movies are all examples of tragedies that were influenced by the greeks. 

Socrates was misunderstood

         This week we read a lot about Socrates, the famous greek philosopher.  It's interesting to me that people disliked him so much, and were not smart enough to overcome their own jealousy at being bested by him, but as he said, killing him did not accomplish much, but only made him a martyr.  Socrates really believed in what he said, so much actually that he rejected escaping a prison, and instead was sent to his death.  This dedication really defines a hero: someone who will stand for their ideals, no matter what.