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ELA Blog Post for 12-8

In Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the story is dynamic and constantly moving, thrusting its characters quickly from their everyday life to a situation that pushes the limit of their character. [Despite this, The Grandmother's personality does not change throughout the story, instead it remains consistent while different occurrences reveal it to differing degrees to the reader]. This is shown in that, while she reacts to different situations in ways that may seem ever-changing, her two main traits, stubborn selfish manipulativeness and ignorance of the feelings of those around her,  remain consistent and dictate all of her actions. For example, while her desperate pleas with The Misfit to pray to Jesus, insistence he recognize he is more than a common man, and sudden revelation she is her mother may seem like a new development in her character, they reflect exactly her warnings of a murderer in Florida, lies about a hidden hatch in the house down

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

ELA Blog Post for 29 September, 2017

     In the autobiographical graphic novel "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi, the protagonist's personality is largely a product of both her family's teachings and her concept of what family is. It is because of them that she learned not to allow hate, authority, or tradition to drive her, but rather love, self respect, and moral righteousness.      As we learn very early on in the book, Marjane's parents are revolutionaries. They instill her with a distrust and disrespect for authority, and an attitude of questioning any rules or regulations she doesn't understand. This rebellious attitude later leads her to speak up against them, questioning their decisions and seeking to get her way against their authority (pages 39 and 113, for example). Through it all, though, she still cares for them in time of need (pg. 74) and loves them very much. On rare occasions, such as their reason for lying to her about being able to come to Europe with her, she decides not to