Speak blog

Jenny McDonald
Priest 2
3/12/10
Great Books
In a robust (longer than usual) blog entry, write about the ways in which you define who YOU are? Extend that to the characters in the novel Speak - how do they define themselves

I am me. I’m Jenny, I’m unique, and I’m weird. According to William James, we all have different selves, which others define, so everyone has their own perception of me. The me inside my head is my perception of me. I define myself by who I want to be. I see successful and happy people everyday and I’ve also seen unhappy people or what Zionsville considers “unsuccessful” people. I want to be happy because I have seen so many people live unhappy lives and I don’t want to be that! I only have this one life, I want it to be a good one, so I try and make decisions to make myself happy. For me to be happy, I have to be happy with myself.

In public schools, we are so often judged and a lot of us just accept that. When I was in Zionsville, I was a nerd because I was in the “smart” classes and liked to answer questions. I stopped doing things because I didn’t want to be labeled that. In middle school we all wanted to be cool and be accepted, which is simply human nature (James would agree).

Melinda from the novel Speak, by Laurie Hulse Anderson, defines herself of what others make her. She calls herself an outcast, when really she isn’t, but the student body created her to be like that, judging her because she crashed some party and how she acts. It’s all bullshit. That kind of bullying can ruin people; send them into depression. It doesn’t even matter. In 5 years it won’t matter if I was popular or not in middle school, it doesn’t even matter now that I transferred.

However, no matter how much your mommy tells you to ignore the mean kids and says that you’re special, you still hear them. You hear them gossiping in an Elite circle and some part of you longs to join while the voice in your head is telling you how much nicer your friends are. I don’t want to be defined by others, but it is hard to resist.

I define myself by my decisions and the way I treat others. I have and will make mistakes, but it is learning from them that matters. I want to think freely and be myself because after escaping the evil grasp of middle school, people can accept me for who I am and I’m no longer afraid to be it.

great books second semester blog #1

Jenny McDonald

Priest 2

2/4/10

Great Books

For a lot of classes at school, the question of “when am I ever going to use this later in life” often comes up. In math and science, it’s knowledge needed only for your education, or if you choose one of those fields when you grow up. In my previous English class, I got into an argument with my 6^th grade teacher because I didn’t understand why I needed to learn how to diagram sentences, where you separated the subject, the verbs, and all the different phrases. When I’m 50, I will never be reading and think, “hmm I think I’m going to diagram a sentence!” However, this class is different. My great books class continues to prod at the way I think and the way that I feel about certain things.

The novel Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, is a novel that has made me think about many things happening in the world around me that I have never noticed before. What would I be willing to do for my security? This boy that we are reading about is a teenager like the rest of us, and I found myself constantly putting myself in his situation while reading the novel. I found myself wondering what I would be thinking of when I returned to my parents after being captured for five days. While I was reading the beginning of this novel, I thought that it was completely set in the future because of all the advanced and complicated technology that was used, which I later found out is all real and used today.

This isn’t literature as what we think of it. All of our in-class discussions can change the way we think as well as teach us new things. When we read and study and analyze these novels and essays we get the big ideas out of them. These ideas are all relatable to real life. When we studied A Social Me by William James, we all realized that we do care what others think of us and how we act around people. Why Americans are so Often Restless by Alexis de Tocqueville portrayed my family’s dreams to always want to have more than everyone else, not because we need it, but simply because it is put out there for us to reach. This literature class isn’t just stories about enchanted lands long ago that don’t relate to the world that we live in, everything that we learn about and study has some way of linking directly to our lives, whether it is through ideas or actual tangible similarities.