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Showing posts from October, 2017

ELA Blog Post for 29 October, 2017

    These last few weeks, my ELA class worked on our Harvey Oral History Project. This project consisted on conducting various interviews to Houston residents about their experiences during Harvey, and then bringing those interviews and their messages together to create a multimedia presentation that gave meaning to our work. I faced a couple big challenges during this project and learned a lot from it.     The first thing I had trouble with during this project was the interview itself. I came into it with just under 30 questions to ask my interviewee and a target time for the interview of one hour. As nervous as I was about the prospect of talking for an hour with someone I didn't know, I figured that just over two minutes per question was a pretty reasonable thing to expect, and especially considering that a lot of answers would be of above average length, I was convinced it would be a pretty straightforward affair and I had very little to worry about. I was very wrong. Fifteen

ELA Blog Post for 27 October, 2017

    This week, I'd like to write about a detail in Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" that, while small, really confused me. Or, better put, it being so small was sort of the reason it confused me.     On page 223, a very interesting thing happens. Marjane, having skated on through her schooling on her intellectual ability and not paying much real attention, suddenly realizes she is unprepared to take the French Baccalaureate, and will need "a miracle to pass". Then, one night, God himself appears to her in her sleep and tells her what the subject of the test will be, down to the specific work she'll have to test on. The next morning, she calls her mother (who she says she can always count on to pray and have her prayers answered), "who [calls] God, who in turn [sends] his message to the examiner." When the time arrives to take the test, the examiner gives her half an hour to prepare the exact work that God told her it would be.     These occuren