College Essay

The Great Gatsby Presentation

Blog Post #5

The results of my profile share the overall pattern of what the ideal time perspective looks like, just not as extreme. All of my results lie along the middle of the graph. The past positive and present hedonistic were my two highest categories, which is good, because that means I focus on the good things. Past negative and present fatalistic were a little lower, but still not that low. My future number was a little lower than the ideal number, but not by much.

            I think that these results are pretty accurate. The future category is definitely right because I tend not to focus on the future too much. I don’t plan things ahead, and am usually a spur of the moment type of person. Some things I do think about in the future though. If there is a big event or something fun coming up, like a vacation, I tend to think about that more and what it will be like. If something bad happens, I don’t like to think about it anymore, I just try to focus on the good things. Like if I have a bad play while playing a sport, I forget about it and think about the next play.

            From this article I learned that the category that needs to be highest to have the most effective life is the past-positive time perspective.            

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Blog Post #4: Fragmentation, Postmodernism & Imaginism

Presentation Responses & Reflections

The Garden

I liked the intro to this presentation a lot. It really helped the message that the author was trying to show. The picture on the screen looked exactly like cherries, but it turned out to be the most poisonous fruit in the world. The message is to not take things for face value. Ezra Pound was influenced by medieval literature, and uses vivid imagery to convey his message. An example of this is “skein of loose silk blown against the wall”, and this shows that she is adrift and alone. The theme is that what’s pleasant to the eye is not always what it seems. So some good things may actually be bad.

Poetry

I learned from this poem that what makes something a poem is the personal interpretation of the author. Marianne Moore is the author of this piece and went against the tradition. Animals had a very big influence on her and her poems. We saw this with the repetition of animals. Even when the poem sounds a little strange to us, it still has a meaning.  Moore used symbolism to convey more meaning. Like with the baseball fan, how the fan admires the team like an author admires their work.

The Red Wheelbarrow, The Great Figure, This is just to say

These poems showed us the reality and surrounding of everyday life. William Carlos Williams did this through short, simple poems. He just describes what he sees with very plain descriptions. The poems are very superficial with not a lot of meaning. An example of it is, “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water besides the white chickens”. He does this using free verse. I learned that the stanza structure is the physical appearance of a poem. For some of the background on Williams, he graduated from Pennsylvania and became a pediatrician. He tends to focus more on the environment in his poetry.

Somewhere I’ve never traveled

This poem by E.E. Cummings showed us that love is never out of reach.

I learned about conceit metaphors in this poem. These are more than just regular metaphors, because they are reference throughout the entire piece. E.E. Cummings used this to compare his love for spring with his love for a woman. He compared himself to a blooming flower and a dead flower. Cummings also capitalizes “Spring” to show just how important it is. The theme of this poem is that love is never out of reach.

Red Slippers

I learned to appreciate good items from this poem. People in this poem don’t notice the amazing red slippers because they are distracted by other, normal objects. Amy Lowell, the author, was very influenced by the imagist movement, and pioneered the use of polyphonic prose. She doesn’t use any rhyme scheme but instead uses other literary devices. This way, it doesn’t distract the reader from the image. An example is, “they spout under the electric light, fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain”. It doesn’t have a rhyme scheme and uses alliteration to help the reader picture the image.

I feel that my presentation went well. At home, I went through and edited a lot of the power point. I fixed up most of the grammatical errors, as well as adding the pictures. There were a few words misspelled, and some sentences that didn’t make much sense. Also there were some titles that were missing, and the bibliography. I added pictures that related to the poem, like images that the author was describing, and red slippers. In class I helped with the topic sentences and the ideas for most of it. So I ended up doing a few hours of work for it.  

I think that the power point looked very well. The presentation could have gone better in many ways. We could have had better eye contact, because most of us read from the screen. For next time, I will try to work on this. Another thing is the pronunciation. I think I did well with this, so I am proud of that, but others struggled with it. With this project I learned how to use the google account. I thought it was cool how we could all work on it at one time.

            

Red Slippers