Small School, Big Impact

      It's 8 am, and you don't know where you are. After looking around you realize it must be the halls of Lake Mary Prep. Few places have the same smell of pencil shavings and sweaty middle schoolers. You dread first period. First period means math, and math means Mr. Herold who can be the biggest pain in your butt always asking you to integrate and derive- will he ever leave you alone? It takes all of your energy to put up with his boring personality and undying silence in the classroom. The clock ticks by and it feels you haven't; you often feel school does nothing for you at all.

    It's second period and you are finally starting to wake up. You shuffle along with the other monotone students, awkwardly avoiding eye contact because you hate confrontation. You resort to your favorite drug: your phone. Apple products are like cocaine for teenagers- they are constantly sought after, expensive, always getting better, and let you escape reality. You snort your first dose since this morning. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, snapchat- all the same faces, the same posts, yet you cannot stop scrolling.

    You look up and Mr. Chestnut is staring you down. It's time for AP Gov which means unexpected quizzes and political discussions that make everyone cringe at each other's opinions. He caught you on your phone, again, so he decides to give you a new assignment. Oh, and he decides it is due tonight. Doesn't he know you have track and then work until 10? Of course he doesn't care, he is the most unreasonable, irrational person in the school. You accept the assignment with grace because at this point all you have is your pride. Francesca and Guto offer to split it up with you but that would look weak, and appearance is everything in high school.

    You begin your impossible task the next period. You have to write a two page essay about the Articles of Confederation. How could he expect you to do this? After looking up other essays you decide you need a break and head to the school store. You browse the selection but cannot make up your mind. You end up choosing goldfish but immediately regret your decision. After Ms. Carmen scans your finger you again cannot decide if you are grossed out or not by the thousands of fingers that have also touched the scanner. You decide to stop thinking about it and head back to your drug- your phone.

    Right when you look up you see her, the light of your school day: JJ Howard. She cruises down the hall with ease laughing with everyone who passes by. You envy her energy and purpose in life. She has it all figured out with her books and brilliant students. You try to work up the courage to talk with her, maybe about joining her class next year but back out in shame of your lack of writing and sense of humor to keep up with her. Your dream in life is to be in her esteemed AP Lang class, but every time you work up the courage to begin to write, you fail miserably. Maybe one day, things will turn around.

Baby, I Was Born This Way

Imagine not marrying your true love for he was not in the same social rank as you; it is as tragic as if Meredith and Derek were not together only because she was an intern, while he a fellow. Thank God Meredith and Derek worked out, yet the same happiness was almost not true for Anne and Wentworth because Anne’s birth did not mean she was naturally of high class, she had to marry someone who had built up wealth. When Anne first met Wentworth all those years ago, he was perfect except for his class, “Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common”(Austen 15). Even though his name made him sound of high class, he was not, and should not be associated with an Elliot. Anne could not marry him simply because she loved him, her birth into a high class family would not hold power enough for her to stay in such a social circle. Fortunately, since times have changed, Wentworth was able to move up in class and wealth due to his work in the navy, dispute his lesser birthright. He is now eligible for Anne to marry for they both fit each other’s rank and love.

Mr. Elliot is another example of a character who is not born into a high class yet makes his way into one. He is very different from Wentworth however, for he does not work hard to move classe,s he manipulates. Austen introduces Mr. Elliot to display the worst type of people at this time, the ones who take advantage of other people for their own benefit. Austen directly characterizes him as, “a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; whom for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character” (Austen 201). He marries a woman of money, yet low class, just so he can become wealthy, and the pursues Anne so that he can reassure himself as being high class. Mr. Elliot moves up in class but completely diminishes his true character and loses the respect of most people.

Class is a very important part of Persuasion, yet Austen uses ironic twists and satirical elements to show the odds and ends of people during this time. People are extremely vain, sensible, or devious, yet they all are associated with one another. Anne, the protagonist who falls right in the middle of all the extremes ends up happy with the perfect man. In the end, her love does trump the social rank of her husband although he was respectable enough to gain the approval of her father.

Work Cited

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. e-text. The Replubic of Pemberley. 2015.

Fake It 'Til You Don’t Make It

In the short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Joyce Carol Oates uses caked on facades and personalities to show how faking who you are, will only hurt you in the end. Connie is an average fifteen year old, who does not have a real sense of herself. Instead of trying to find what she likes, she becomes a new person as soon as she steps foot out of the house. Oates explains that “everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head” (Oates 1). Connie never left the house without a full face of makeup, and an attitude of someone much older just because she knew it would impress boys. Nothing about her was really her.

Similarly, Arnold Friend was presented as a picturesque teenage boy for Connie to fawn over, but it was quickly revealed that he was even more fake than Connie. But was he really? Yes, he made himself appear taller and used slang that was clearly not natural for him, but he wore makeup just like Connie, and talked the way he thought she wanted him to talk just like she did for all her boyfriends. In “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”, Wegs discusses that Friend is actually more truthful than Connie, “What is frightening about Arnold is that he voices, and makes explicit her own sexual desires...Connie’s reaction is one of horror: ‘People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy’” (Wegs 4). The brutal honesty that Friend exposes to Connie is the scariest part about him, not his wig or makeup.

By the end of the story, Arnold Friend has stripped Connie of her happy, beautiful facade and she is left with “just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either” (Oates 9). Connie no longer has a purpose to pretend she is happy, she has no reason to fight for her life; she realizes without her second personality that she uses out of the house she really has no personality at all so is willing to walk away with Arnold Friend. Friend, on the other hand, “is far more than a grotesque portrait of a psychopathic killer masquerading as a teenager; he also has all the traditional sinister traits of that arch-deceiver and source of grotesque terror, the devil” (Wegs 3). Arnold’s real personality is not nonexistent like Connie’s, his is one of pure evil. He knows exactly what he wants. He manipulates girls who have no sense of identity, and who seem so extremely confident that their naivety is their weakest point for not only do they briefly trust strangers, but they trust themselves: this fake personality they have depended on for so long but can be taken away so easily. Connie thought she could withstand any boy, any remark of her mother, any comment by her jealous sister, but Arnold seems to take away her confidence within minutes and she hands herself over.

WAYGWHYB is a story that grotesquely reveals how the common tendency of girls to “fake it til they make it” leaves no real person to rely on. Connie is stripped of her confidence not only because Arnold catches her without her makeup or “out of house” clothes on, but because he does not act like every single other piece of Connie’s predictable life. He catches her off guard and thus finds her weakest point: her family. While she acts like she does not care for her family and that they are just jealous of her because she is pretty, her family is the final straw for Connie to let go of her facade. She normally would have just gone to the mall and planned to go hang out with boys later, but once Arnold leaves Connie with just a soulless body she does not have an answer to where she was going or where she has been.

Works Cited

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2002. Print.

Wegs, Joyce M.  “’Don’t You Know Who I Am?’: The Grotesque in Oates’s ‘Where Are

You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Journal of Narrative Technique 5, 1995. Print.

Matthew Gray Gubler

Criminal Minds has Matthew Gray Gubler in it so it is clearly the best show on television. Aside form this adorable boy; the show is very unique in how it presents each episode, often in medias res. The beginning of the show may show the serial killer himself in his home doing very normal things. Only after, will it show flashbacks to his crimes and display two different stories throughout the episode of both the FBI, as well as the criminal. This postmodern way of showing the story leaves the viewer more connected to the criminal and the dramatic irony of knowing who the bad guy is gives an eerie sense of anxiety. The narrative is linear only for one episode; in fact it is two separate narratives (bad guy and good guys). Rushkoff elaborates on shows like Criminal Minds and their linear structure, “(shows) may not be capable of conveying a neatly arced storyline, but the slowly moving ‘metanarrative’ creates sustained tension-with little expectation of final resolution” (Rushkoff 34). The show itself has a metanarrative between the characters, building relationships and going through their own hardships. The viewers know there will never be an end to their own drama, so they are satisfied with a resolution only through each individual episode.

            One aspect of Criminal Minds that is very presentist is that it can be binge watched on Netflix. Unlike traditional narratives or shows that are paced out, Criminal Minds is often watched all at once. People are living in the present: only thinking about what they want to do for themselves in that moment and not about the future. The do not acknowledge the time wasted nor the lack of episodes to be viewed later. Watching the show is not a small pastime; it is an event or an entire evening. This act of watching a show so much at once changes the way the viewer perceives it. The individual narratives seem to fade away and the focus is drawn to the metanarrative. However, this overarching narrative really has no resolution for the show would not go in if it did. Therefore, the viewer is stuck in a trance of watching the show waiting for answers that will never come. Hotch will never get back together with his wife, JJ (yes a girl on the show is named JJ but she is not as cool as our JJ ;)) will never find out what happened to her husband and Reid will never find his true love. Rushkoff discusses how viewers have changed because of streaming, “sponsors no longer have the luxury of captive viewers who will sit through commercials. Many of us are watching entire season’s worth of episodes in a single weekend through streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix. The traditional timeline of television schedules vanishes in an on-demand world” (Rushkoff 36). Watching Criminal Minds is no longer like watching traditional television, for with no commercials, no breaks and a seemingly endless amount of episodes to view, we feel like we are in the show. We become completely disjointed from reality.

            Criminal Minds often has random episodes in a completely different structure just to mix things up. Maybe the whole episode is only through the killer, or we never see the killer, or it is only through the victim. In any case, the viewer is sucked in to a new story; they live in each moment with the killer, the victim, or the FBI. The familiar sense of consistency with most shows whether how they are filmed, the same few sets and camera angles, or how each episode is structured is constantly being broken. The show feels more like real life than many viewers realize. It can engrain certain ways of thinking on you and make you paranoid of serial killers. The “narrative” of Criminal Minds is more like a disjointed reality that never really ends, There is always another serial killer to catch.

Work Cited

Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print

Hemming the Way

Some people give so much detail to their stories, you feel like you know way too much about them. Ernest Hemingway is one of those people for he is always painting the picture down to the ugliest wrinkle on someone’s face so that the reader can get a glimpse of what life was like for him in his novel. He is very particular in describing people’s faces; whether they looked warm and pretty, or were just unbearable to look at it. He has no shame in admitting he judges people very harshly for their looks, yet supports his initial judgments with more background on the particular character. For instance, when he first meets Fitzgerald he describes him in detail, “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty,”(Hemingway 153). Hemingway does not say whether Scott was particularly ugly or handsome, more in between. This judgment coincides with his relationship with Scott for it is very strange full of moments of complete disgust and other moments of being best friends.

Hemingway focuses on the seasons of the year, for his feelings and life go along with the weather. He has harder, poor and starving times in the winter yet is very hardworking and happy in the spring. Specifically in A Moveable Feast, each chapter does not necessarily go in order; more show important stages in his life and how he evolved as a writer and a person. The season of winter itself is what he considers to end his time in Paris, and therefore end the novel. Thus, the work is very much an example of form following content; the content is misplaced and incoherent, so the novel is set up following seasons of his emotions and specific people who impacted Hemingway’s life.

AP Lang centers on the words and tone an author uses and how they change one’s argument on a subject. Hemingway’s works seem, from a distance, to be just detailed stories of people forming relationships and drinking, but when analyzed from an AP Lang viewpoint, we can reveal how his specific word choices and straightforward tone really reveal another layer to the novel. We can understand his raw emotions, and how the confusing format of the book shows Hemingway’s evolution as a writer through his different experiences and friends he met along the way.

The novel fits under the genre of autobiography for Hemingway portrays events that according to him really happened and show how he grew. His novel reads more like a journal than a book, for it is a combination of mixed events and people that is hard to follow yet all were important to Hemingway at some point.

Work Cited

Hemingway, Ernest.  A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print. 

SAT's Are Stupid!

The most stressful days of most people’s lives are the days of big tests. The days of your SAT, ACT, AP exam, MCAT, LSAT, and many others seem like the most important day of your life; they determine your future. School today creates a public that is set on numbers defining us, because we are too lazy to find another way to define intelligence.

Lazy may not be the best word, but as a society, we have become so accustomed to technology solving most problems for us. Technology calculates, searches, and stores information that we just have to access at the click of a button. Schools have fallen into the same technology trap, with public schools always using scantrons to grade tests for the teachers, SAT scores to decide if you should be admitted to college, and a certain GPA to determine who is smart and who is not.

Schools today aim to create students who are well informed and prepared for college, and furthermore, jobs. However, instead of creating well-rounded, knowledgeable students, schools create robots of students. Students become reciters, not learners, they know what is needed for tests and what will bring them success: high scores. Instead of schools being learning-centered, they are grade-centered. Postman explains how numbers cannot define how smart someone is, “In schools, for instance, we find that tests are given to determine how smart someone is or, more precisely, how much smartness someone has. If, on an IQ test, one child scores a 138 and another a 106, the first is thought to have more smartness than the other. But this seems to me a strange conception—every bit as strange as "doing" arthritis or "having" criminality,”(Postman 183). Postman is referring more to the language of ‘having smartness’, but the point is still valid. People cannot really HAVE smartness; they can act smart, make smart decisions, and answer hard questions.

Smartness is not an object to be obtained; it is an act that schools should teach students to strive to do every day. Instead schools are creating false goals for students of obtaining smartness that cannot be obtained through rote memorization and finessing tests; smartness is an act that can be expressed when students understand concepts and can use them effectively.

Works Cited

Postman, Neil. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New

York: Knopf, 1995. Print.

Let's Get Locke'ed on Frankenstein!

           Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein displays how experiences rather than innate knowledge shape one’s daily life, even if you are a monster. John Locke would approach the novel as an accurate representation of the birth of life. One of Locke’s main points is explained in Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner, “Locke's claim is that all our thoughts and ideas issue from that which we have taken in through the senses. Before we perceive anything, the mind is a 'tabula rasa'--or an empty slate," (Gaardner 242). He thought that our knowledge is developed through experiences of the world, as the mind does not just receive sensation, it processes them.
            Frankenstein’s monster is the perfect example of how someone develops knowledge once born, for the creature is not a baby so in Shelley’s world, he learns quick. The monster seems to be born a complete ‘blank slate’ for it is not until the doctor screams in horror and leaves him alone, that the creature develops a personality. The monster’s main source of knowledge is from Paradise Lost, which teaches him about Satan and how he should speak and act. His other source of learning is from watching a family in their house and hearing them discuss their hardships; it is from his experiences, that he learns what revenge is and how wrongly he was treated.

Frankenstein creates life from nothing, which is a controversial topic in and of itself. However, Locke would view this sensation as a representation of the fact that God does exist, for someone has to do the creating. He was very focused on rationality, “Locke believed that it was inherent in human reason to be able to know that God exists,” (Gaardner 244). Locke would view Frankenstein as the God of the novel; a way to allude to God in a more approachable and relatable character. Shelley of course takes this a step even further, dealing with Frankenstein’s inner struggles and mental instability. He still, however, is a creator of life. Life cannot exist from nothing; the only rational explanation is that God exists.

In general, Locke’s views on life are shown throughout the novel in the ways the monster learns and the fact he had his own creator. In fact, the monster is always set on Frankenstein either wanting to connect or disconnect with him. People treat God the same way, either always praying to him for help or comfort or cursing him for their hardships. Nobody really knows if God does exist, or if we have knowledge before we are born, yet according to John Locke and Frankenstein, both of those questions can be answered.

Work Cited:

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World. New York: Berkely Books, 1994. Print.