Classmates

I have really had a great time in English I this year. i know we had a bunch of papers, and projects, and couple annoying little assignments, but i know that you all know that it has exponentially helped us in growing as a good English student. It was a very big leap from 8th to 9th grade English.I know it was tough but we made it.


Our English class was a very energetic class. We made Dr.D from an English Teacher that never raised her voice to one who yells out ideas from poetry. That credit goes to lauren and MMQ though. Anyway, even though we lost MMQ, we still had a very fun year but i am glad that one year of English is out of the way.

Blog post for 5/14

In the fourth quarter, I think that i have come to class prepared every day. I don't really think that i can remember more than like two times where i have come to class not prepared. The Free Reading the first couple of times were the only general procedures that i had trouble with. I have checked my E-mail and the website daily, i have made sure of it. Overall i do think that i have retained a very positive, helpful,, and cooperative attitude throughout the fourth quarter.  The lectures in class, honestly, were not the most helpful things to me personally, solely because i think i have the attention span of a 8 year-old child. I hate it. I do think though that i contributed to them many times and they contributions were useful and they provided good discussion topics sometimes. I think that i could have been a better listener though.

My group work this quarter was awesome. I think that this quarter for some reason i really go t serious about all of the little grades. My individual work was good too. I really tried to pay attention to the little details so that i would be ready for the tests. I think that i have been a good member of the group in that i kept my group on task. I think ( as i said before,) that i have had a knack to pay more attention to the little grades and details, and it has really helped my development as a student and has certainly improved my grades.

I read 170 minutes of The Hunger Games and i read 68 pages of the book. I really am enjoying the Hunger Games  the second time around. You see, when i read a book, the only way that i can understand it is that i see it going on in my head so that i can analyze the story in my head. That is why i have such problem with Shakespeare because half the time i have no idea what the words on the page mean. But in the Hunger Games the first time o just could picture it so i stopped reading. After i saw the movie it was effortless to try and in vision what was going on, i just got it better.

 

This time i really understood what was going on. The beginning of the book was a little different from the movie but not much. In the beginning of the book its starts of with demonstrating how Katniss is the one who provides for the Family and it isn't easy. Having seen the movie i think that her perseverance and struggle to keep the Family going is the primary reason that she (spoiler alert) wins the games. 

Free Post

So I am really looking forward to the end of my freshman year, i am really excited just to get it over with. The reason that i am excited to get it over with is because i think that i am ready to become a sophomore and do the work that has come with it. I have really enjoyed this year, that includes all my classes. In each we had some pitfalls whether it be too much work, not enough time to do it, or just not liking the class, we have all had some good times.

The reason that i think that i am ready to be a sophomore is that i think that what makes you ready to be a sophomore is experiencing freshman year. What it does is that it gets you to respect being in High School. Freshman year was really fun, i met a bunch of new people and they have all been really great to be around this year.

Writing This Year + common errors list

Cole Kennedy

Dr. deGravelles

Block 4

4/30/12

                This year, I have written so much more than I expected. I thought that high school was going to be very easy, that was until I got about a month into Dr.D’s class. We wrote so many papers compared to previous years that it was ridiculous. But I thought that doing this really has helped me become a better writer and has helped me identify my problems I have in writing. I have learned that my main problem in writing is just conventions. Overall I think that I have improved very much over the year.

                Ninety-five percent of the time the feedback that I have received has been regarding conventions and other grammatical mistakes. So far, the ideas that I have written down have been fine and the reason that I have been missing points, I think is because the way that I put them on paper is incorrect. The conclusions that I can make from these different papers’ feedback are that I have a need to read my paper over several times just looking for grammatical mistakes and I need to read it out loud so that I can make sure that it makes sense. Another conclusion that I can make from the feedback that I have received is that I need to pay more attention to the details of what Dr.deGravelles teaches in class because the details are the main things that have been missing in my papers.

During the year on papers that I have had to write I have not had any problems with them being too short. An influential part of my grading on the Wrap was that it wasn’t long enough. The reason for this is because I had felt very cramped.   I hadn’t had time to really think my ideas through and develop them into fluently put together phrases that would result in me getting a higher mark. On the first day, I started off with prewriting. In 7^th grade I learned a skill that has still helped me today. Instead of just throwing down ideas I make a chart. With 2 boxes plus however many other topics you have each getting one box. You write down the main idea and then however many supporting details as you can and then it is much easier to write. I did this and it took up all of the first day.  The second day I wrote till we had to stop and I found myself leaving out pieces of information that wouldn’t matter all that much. So overall I think that timed essays don’t really work with me because I feel pressured and think that I need just cut my losses and move on. That is not a good plan.

My experience with writing over this year has progressively gotten better because with the writing of more than just two major papers in a year I have learned many things about myself as a writer. Over this year I have learned that I have no problem coming up with ideas or organization or sentence fluency, the thing I have a problem with is the punctuation, grammar, and conventions that are involved in actually getting these ideas into an organized document.  The way that I know this is that almost all of the feedback that I have received on my papers was about comma splices or wrong use of a semicolon or a misplaced comma. I swear if I had just read over all of my papers twice just correcting the grammatical mistakes my grade on all of them would have been so much higher. One of the main things that I learned is how lazy I am. How hard is it to read over a paper?

The feedback that I received surprised me honestly; I thought that the least of my worries was going to be conventions.  Turns out that convention should now be one of my main concerns. I do think that my feedback has matched my understanding of my work this year though. I think that it matched the most in the sense that ideas are not a problem for me. The only thing that is, is getting them down. The way that I evaluate my work is by how much time I spent on in and how much effort that I really put into it and no; it has not changed throughout the year.

 A goal that I want to achieve throughout this next year is that I want to have no more than three grammar problems on any given paper. Another is to not get lower than a B on any paper that I have in English next year.  A plan that I have to achieve these goals is that I am going to read each of my papers over three times before I finish writing it so that I can minimize the grammatical mistakes. For the B that I need on the papers I am going to make sure that I have developed my ideas completely and I am going to focus while writing the papers.

During the course of this year I have learned many things about writing and about myself as a writer. One of those things is that I am a very lazy writer. I need to make sure that I read and develop my paper before I turn it in so that I can get the highest mark that I can in English. One of the things that I have learned also that has helped me is that the details count. In response to this I am going to pay much more attention to the little details that come along with the class that helps you learn how to be a better literate person. I need to make sure that during class whenever the teacher is going over material that I am not I another world mentally. I need to make sure that I do not lose focus and that I only focus on what is going on in the class.

 Cole Kennedy

Dr.deGravelles

Block 4

4/26/12

Common Errors List

Missing Comma – Ex. When his parents asked him about his day, he just smiled and said “just an average day”.

Run-on- Ex.After they were brought back they were forced to work as a slave labor force, Haitian farmers thought of them as a cheap, effective slave labor that really do not know any better and really could not do anything about it unless they were fed salt or spices because if they taste salt or any kind of spice they would suddenly realize that they were dead and have a strong sensation that would make their bodies return to their graves and they could not become slaves again after that. Run-on sentence.

Comma Splice- Ex. He nods, a starting gun is shot with a loud “bang” his heart starts to race and then he cringes, he is feeling fatigue from lunch because he ate too much.

  

Misspelled- word- Rampageous- I spelled that word wrong

Quotation marks-   “Bu Bu Bu.”

Wrong page citing - . (56)

Word Choice- Global warming is a very bad thing and needs to be stopped.  

Repetition- There is also a spread of tropical disease that will be an issue also. 

Free Post

I listen to music all the time. There are a bunch of reasons why,i listen to music, most of the time it is because i need to focus on whatever i am doing. Other times i listen to music because i need to pass the time or go to sleep. Most of the time though i find myself listening to music because i am unconciosly trying to distract myself and not do my homework and i think that that has a big influence on my homework quality.

When i listen to music i think that it helps me focus because whenever i listen to music it kind of blocks out the rest of the noise around me and i would rather have noise that i like going on around me than having a whole bunch of noise that continuously surprises me an puts me off my train of thought. The only time that i restrict myself from listening to music when i'm doing my homework is whenever it is a reading assignment because if i listen to music then i can't focus on comprehending the words i can just read each individual word.

Free Post

I listen to music all the time. There are a bunch of reasons why,i listen to music, most of the time it is because i need to focus on whatever i am doing. Other times i listen to music because i need to pass the time or go to sleep. Most of the time though i find myself listening to music because i am unconciosly trying to distract myself and not do my homework and i think that that has a big influence on my homework quality.

When i listen to music i think that it helps me focus because whenever i listen to music it kind of blocks out the rest of the noise around me and i would rather have noise that i like going on around me than having a whole bunch of noise that continuously surprises me an puts me off my train of thought. The only time that i restrict myself from listening to music when i'm doing my homework is whenever it is a reading assignment because if i listen to music then i can't focus on comprehending the words i can just read each individual word.

Reading Response

I read 200 minutes. I read 50 pages of the Hunger Games and 47 pages of The Son of Neptune. In the beginning of my new book, The Son of Neptune, Percy has been chased by two gorgons for like a month and every time he kills them they wind up reappearing faster than he can get away from them. He has really run into some trouble buy whenever he finds an unsuspecting old woman in the median of an interstate, convinced that she is a god, he picks her up and runs to a door guarded by two guards who are kids from a roman camp for demigods. Percy then realizes that there is a completely new side to the whole demigod camp system. He is completely astounded by the idea.

 I liked the beginning of this book because i thought that it was very productive. i mean productive by the fact that i really learned a lot about the plot of the book in these first couple of chapters. I thought that i kind of felt the same way he did whenever he found out that there was a roman camp, you know that feeling that makes you feel like your entire world has been blown because of sime astronomical discovery, everyone knows that feeling.

Outside reading

this week i read 10 minutes of My poem and 140 of the Death Cure. Like i said, i have really understood this beginning of the book better the second time through. I understand the depth that comes with the opening of this book. The tension between W.I.C.K.E.D. and the former gladers, group B and some cranks is increasing drastically.

When Thomas was released from a cell after he has been in there for 3 weeks, intentionally disoriented so that he would not know what time it actually was, his meals were given irregularly. and it drove him crazy. Finally there was a pretty big load a news that was dumped on him. after a whole experience of the scorch with the thought that the flare was tearing him apart on the inside and then suddenly nothing, it turns out he was immune to it the whole time.

My Papa's Waltz Theodore Roethke

-in the first stanza the -b sound is used a lot.
-and the first and third lines rhyme
- in the second stanza there is a little rhyming but the -s sound is used a lot
- there is a bunch of rhyming in this poem
-more rhyming in stanza 4
I included my annotations of the poem

The major techniques that were used were assonance and consonance. This poem was about a little girl that was describing the "dance" that her father did whenever he got home most of the time. she had described in what she thought was a dance that her dad did with her all the time when in reality he was really just drunk and he could barley hold his balance. i think though that he was trying to dance with her.

The way that she uses assonance and consonance are that in each stanza she rhymes the same places in different stanzas. I think that she did that because she thought that it would make it sound more childish and realistic as if actually from a little girl dancing with her incapacitated dad. I don't think that she uses assonance on purpose in the sense that it doesn't change the way that you interpret the story.

Free Post

This week i went to see the hunger games and it was awesome. I know it's disappointing but sadly, i haven't even read the book yet. I have wanted too so bad and everyone has told me that the movie had left out some details that are important to the individual plot line of the book and i really do want to read it.

I can tell you right now what my next two outside reading books are going to be. Next, the son of Neptune. I started that add-on series to Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, my favorite series of books so far. (haven't read the hunger games yet.) It is just the third book in the series and i really need to get to it.  And Second the hunger games. "nuff said"

Outside Reading

So, recently i have run into some trouble. Because of this trouble i have been, let's say forced to restart my book. The Death Cure has not made any sense to me at all so i have restarted because a lot of it has been very confused. I have read 59 pages in 160 minutes. The beginning  was good the second time though. 

When i read the beginning the second time i really thought that i connected with it more, the second time , for some reason, I just feel like i understood it exponentially better. It just clicked. The first time i didnt even get that he was being imprisoned. the only thing that i got was that he was immune to the flare and they just went out and said it. 

Free Post

I think today i am going to write about how easy it is for me to forget things. So i lose stuff all the time. Whether it's me hiding something and then forgetting where i hid it, or me forgetting to pick something up somewhere or me forgetting it at a sporting event, all of these things have something in common. what is it again, oh i forget..., oh that's it i forget.

I forget things so easily, if i'm not paying attention to something then normally i wouldn't remember it unless it's something direly important. For example, my mom is always telling me about how i shouldn't use an alarm because i forget to turn it off on weekends well, i went to my dad's house this weekend and my alarm is still on back at mom's, she is not going to be happy in the morning.

Outside Reading 3/12/12-3/19/12

i read 160 minutes and 50 pages of The Death Cure. Th book, well the beginning anyway is turning out very nicely. I was kin of disappointed because towards the end of the Scorch Trials Theresa died and it kind of angered me because he was like the perfect match for the other main character of the book. Her dying completely threw off my final prediction of the book.

Whenever she died in the last book i felt awful. in my head i had a whole little plot line going., i was sort of predicting the book as it went along. I was so disappointed whenever she died because i felt like i didn't understand what was going on in the book at all after that. It completely threw me off of my bearings because that had nothing to do with my plot line but i guess that's what makes a book a book

THE END OF NERVOUS CONDITIONS

It's finally over, nervous conditions wasn't the greatest book i've ever read but it did have it's up sides. whenever i was reading this book i was really thinking about what this book was about and what the theme was and whenever we finished, whenever i had finnially just gave up on it Dr.D laid the page before the begining on us. i had one of those "wow" moments.

It was such an easy concept, i don't know why i didn't look i just didn't. when she sprang that on us i was so just puzzled. i mean i guess i just didn't know how to actually put it together in words. i really think that the author did that on purpose and it kind of made me mad.

The death cure

I read for 150 minutes and I read  45 pages of The Death Cure. So while i was reading this chapter i was really thinking about how this book really relates to my life. i mean you have this kid with all this wait on his shoulders, no one wants t be in that position all the time. his job is to find a cure for like 20 kids or else they will go crazy and become completely animistic.the organization which i believe caused all of this is setting up all these obstaces for them and i feel like people are intentionally putting obstacles in my life but to make me better. 

I think that the author inthis book is trying to mmake us use our human instincts and our different connections we make with this book to our normal lives to try and predict what will happen and so that we will understand the book the way it was intended to be. The author is very clever in the way that he does this and it would be interesting to learn it. 

Free Post

So this week I kind of got worried a little bit about my grades. not that there bad or anything its just that i am worried because im not sure if what im doing is really the best that i could be doing. for example, whenever i checked my grade the other day i had a C in world history, i really dont think that i should have a  C.

Whenever i found that i had a low C i realizxed that i really need to start working harder that i am. My mom is always telling me that i have been just getting by because i am just doing whatever it takes to get by, i dont study. i think that if i studied then there is no way i wouldnt have the kind of grades that i wanted.

Free read

This week i read 150 minutes of the death cure. i also read 52 pages. so whenever i read this i was kind of amused because it opens up abd it is exactly were it left off in the end of the last one and almost nothing has changed. i was amused because in the first book, its like a week later.


So reading this opening of the book,  i felt that i was very dissapointed because i thought that the opening would have more to it than this, it was kind of disapointing because there was really no suprises. i think that even though the beggining was slow it will speed up soon enough.

Free Post

So last week i really didn't so anything spectacular. All i did all week was sit at home and i kept thinking about how a lot of people actually get to do things over their breaks and as far as i remember the only time i have actually gone somewhere on a break from school was in 8th grade whenever i went to visit my uncle that lives in Florida for a weekend. Fun right. 

I dont really know why i picked this to blog about. I guess i just couldn't think of anything else to blog about. I mean so far the only thing that i have really done that was interesting was that i got to spend a whole week at my dad's house. I really shouldn't complain

Outside reading

I read 200 minutes and i read 100 pages of wonder struck. Wonder struck is about a girl who, recently after her father died had realized that her dad has working on something something that was way beyond what she thought her dad was capable of. She had no idea what was about to take hold of her life and really change her whole opinion about her father. 

Honestly, i could not find out a way to relate this to myself. i mewan this kind of thing really never happened to me before. i can't really speculate on it except for saying that i think that her situation is very diffficult. If something like that happened to me then that would make me question my father in a lot of ways and i wouldnt be sure what to think.  

Free Post

So this morning me and my mom had a talk about homework. She said that it isn't healthy to stay up late and do your homework. I agree with her to a certain extent. I think that sometimes i am just not home. and i realize that there are 8 hours that i can use for homework and i use it efficiently.

I'm not saying though that every night you should stay up until one doing your homework and never get any sleep. I am simply saying that some nights that i have no time during the day that i will stay up at night and do my homework. i know i growing, and i know i need my sleep its just i can take one night. 'm

Free Post

So this morning me and my mom had a talk about homework. She said that it isn't healthy to stay up late and do your homework. I agree with her to a certain extent. I think that sometimes i am just not home. and i realize that there are 8 hours that i can use for homework and i use it efficiently.

I'm not saying though that every night you should stay up until one doing your homework and never get any sleep. I am simply saying that some nights that i have no time during the day that i will stay up at night and do my homework. i know i growing, and i know i need my sleep its just i can take one night. 'm

Reading Response

This week i read 120 minutes and i worked on my paper for 30 minutes. My paper and i have actually gotten along fairly well. i have really been able to work efficiently on this paper. Most of the reason for that is that my outline was very well written. all i fad to do was put in the information and glue to together. I have really had a lot of success with this paper.

This paper has really come quite easy to me. One of the main areas of writing that i excel at is putting information together and making it flow. Some of the areas that i am not so good at writing are coming up with ideas and i am not the best with conventions, usually i will have to go over my paper 4 or 5 times to get them right and i still don't always get a 10/10.

Nervous Conditions and Research paper

I spent 3 hours writing the draft to my research paper and i read chapter 2 of Nervous Conditions for 20 minutes. When i started working on actually writing my research paper i realized something. That if you state your opinion you are really defeating the entire purpose of writing  a research paper because the point of a research paper is to state facts and to compile information to understand something better.

When you put your opinion in a paper that is meant for pure information then you are really kind of falsifying the paper. you see opinion is not fact and since it is not fact then the purpose of the research paper(to do research and compile it) isn't valid anymore because in a sense you are not really stating fact. 

The Superbowl

How can you expect me NOT to blog about the single most exciting moment of this year so far. My favorite team, the New York Giants beat the Patriots for the Second consecutive time in the Superbowl.I watched the entire game and, to be honest i was kind of disappointed. Not at all at the game ,the commercials, the famous Superbowl commercials were actually not that spectacular. There were a couple of good ones but i had already seen them in the ESPN report on them. 

When i was watching the Superbowl it always kept me on my toes in a way that i never wanted to stop watching . The way we were down at the half it really got me interested because i absolutely knew that the Giants were going to come out with a fire that the patriots couldn't match. When they came out in the second half and the Patriots scored I began to become pessimistic. But i knew that Eli Manning was going to be able to go and win the game and guess what, he did. 

Homework

I worked on researching for about 120 minutes and my rough draft for about 30. My homework is getting to be a little overwhelming and i almost go to sleep at midnight every night because i if spend my free time doing my homework then i don't have time to do anything else. believe it or not i enjoy doing things with my family, (Dr.D i promise i'm not talking directly to you) I am almost at my breaking point

I'm not saying that homework is a bad thing though, it really helps me actually understand what we are doing in class, in a way i like doing homework because that is how i study, i just happen to do it late at night. whenever I complain about being up late doing my homework it is usually just because i procrastinate all of the time.

My pets

I love my dog. He turned 2 in November and i really am thankful for him. about 3 years ago whenever I first entered 6th grade, my first year at my new school, and i had really wanted a dog. we had 2 cats at the time and we had always needed to go to pets mart for either dog food or cat food and one day i remember that they had these dogs for adoption and i thought that a puppy was the cutest think in the world. I remember asking my mom for one of them so many times. My mom said the time wasn't right yet and i knew what that meant. 

It was Christmas time whenever i had come home for school from my dads house and it was the first time i was at my moms since Christmas morning and whenever i walked in i turned to the left and to my surprise Mr.David, my step-dad, was trying to catch this little Grey bundle of energy and whenever i realized t i was wonder-struck, never would i have thought that my parents would actually give me another animal. I felt amazing. 

GO GIANTS!!!!!!!!

O my, i just witnessed the best football game ever. Eli is going to the Superbowl. With a OT field goal by Lawrence Tynes to win the game the giants fight there way through a really tough season and made it to the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP. There is one thing that I find funny though, the last time either of these teams went to the Superbowl was versus each other and the Giants won.

This game was amazing. it made me feel like my dream was coming true. ever since the giants got into the playoffs i knew that they were going to make it to the Superbowl because they had worked way too hard to get into the playoffs and there is no way Eli Manning was going to have let them just let it blow away by losing a game. Eli Manning feels like his team has worked to hard to not make it and why not win, we've already done it once.

Reading Response

This portion of my book was somewhat interesting. The story kind of shifts to focus on Teresa and where she is. So while she is trying to escape her prison, she keeps thinking of the time whenever Thomas  and her kissed in the shack because she couldn't really tell him what was going on because she was being manipulated into saying what the creators wanted her to say. This week i read 150 minutes and 57 pages of the Scorch Trials

This got me thinking. Why would the creators allow them to meet only so that Teresa could try and  break free of the bonds they somehow had on her. earlier in the book there was a point made that all of the remaining children actually had the flare and i bet that that is how they are able to control everyone. I bet that whatever the point of that organisation was to give everybody the disease so that they could gain something. and i wonder if bot of their names, Thomas and Teresa both starting with T, have something to do with that.

Reading Response

This book is interesting now that i started reading it again. The Scorch Trials is the sequel to the Maze Runner. they are both very interesting books.  they bot involve a young group of boys and a young girl who, coincidentally the fate of the modern world depends on. I read 71 pages in 150 minutes and the book is the Scorch Trials by James Dashner.

In this portion of the book Thomas(the main character) is with a girl he met while looking for civilization when he was trying to cross the scorch as the second part of his journey to save humanity. He comes in contact with these so called cranks that have been infected with the flare, a disease that strips away all of your humanistic qualities. The cranks are i need of some new noses and wind up chasing Thomas into a cubee where he almost evades them but at the last second their location is realized.

Free Post 1-15-12 Giants Game

I could not believe it, my favorite team the New York Giants actually BEAT the packers. I think everyone thought that the packers were going to wipe the floor with the giants but no, Eli Manning came through. When I saw that the Giants were up by 10  at the half, I honestly though that they just got lucky and that the Packers were going to come back and dominate the rest of the game, I was off. in fact the Giants didn't give up the lead for the entire rest of the game.

When i found out that they one it immediately started to make me think about Superbowl XLII, in 2008 when they played the patriots and beat them. If the same thing happens again I will LOSE IT. That was actually when i first started to like the Giants. Before then i had never really payed any attention to football. But when i watched that team and they won i just couldn't stop myself. Ever since then i have wanted to go to colege in new york and i have just loved it.

The New Semester

The new semester should be a lot better than the last, my parents have pushed me to focus more in the second semester. Also I will push myself more throughout this semester, i am planning on studying more even though i really, really, REALLY, don't want to.

There is this little website called Quizlet that really helps me learn things, it's a study tool that allows you to learn material at your own pace and it is very helpful especially if you are doing vocabulary because you can just sit there fir an hour and go over vocab or you can also stop in the middle of a lesson and come back to it.