blog.

This week we basically focused on the presentation on the Good Earth. I guess I didn’t do as much research and preparation I ought to have, because I didn’t present fluently. Comparatively, the other group did a great job introducing the film and it’s nothing tedious. They had a lot that I can learn from. Hopefully next time I can reach my own expectation. 

We have finished watching the Good Earth, and start moving to learning about the analysis of the movie. I have to say the movie is unexpectedly better than I thought. I was truly touched by the efforts O-Lan made to the family although she eventually passed away. Anyways, we were assigned into groups and discuss theme, characters, settings, conflicts, symbols and such. The Thursday after we got back from Chinese New Year Break will be our presenting day. Our group really had to get it going.  

Okay, I’m combining all we have covered in class, so i will only be emphasizing on the main things we have learned.

We then had few more writing assignments after reading some stories in the textbook. Writing vignettes was the first thing we did. Vignette is like taking a part from a story, so it has no ending, at least not a specific one. For the first one, we had to observe at least two people and their interactions in a room. For the second one we had to come up with a vignette with three pictures: two people and a place. I didn’t do quite well on the second one, perhaps it was because my grammar really sucked.

After the excercise from the Vignette, we had to write a short story. It was quite challenging, but also entertaining at the same time, because you get to pick settings, characters, and even their personalities. The challenging part was to create a story for those. At first, people were confused by whether they should add an ending or not. Answer is yes. A short story cannot last without an ending, or a conflict.

As for grammar, we have covered a lot of parts, some forms I have not even heard of, like nominative adjective, gerund… We had a quiz on one of the sets. I did not do so well… I guess it’s because I still don’t quite get what’s going on with them.

After the Latin and Greek roots, we went on to Prefix. A Prefix is also from a part of a word, but you don’t change the spelling from it, for example, circum is a prefix from circumstance–you don’t change the spelling. I realized that there is one thing good about prefix… most of them mean “not” or “against”, like im-, in-, dis- all meant the same thing.

We have published two newsletters for November and December! My job has become easier as people’s grammar skills are improved! Haha. Learning those grammar from the book do help a little bit, and of course it helped me editing too.

Recently, I think last week, we watched a movie called “the good of earth”. It is a revision from a Chinese novel. The film is black and white, and the “chinese” in the film were acted by white men, so it looks a bit funny in some ways. The purpose of this film is to let us know more about how to do a play analysis. By watching and leaving notes down I discovered that there are actually a lot of sumbols in the film. Although I didn’t finish the whole thing with my fellow classmates, I got the idea of the film from some classmates’ desceiptions.

Wednesday was Halloween! Everyone dressed up in their costumes to class… Oh my gosh I can’t stop laughing at Alex’s costume, I admire his courage to even dare to come to class! As for me… well, it was not so easy to sit on a chair in my spongebob costume. Haha.
Other than that, we read a short story from the textbook, about a girl who resisted to make changes, thus lost a lot of chances in her life… it was quite sad, but we learned how to paraphrase the story.

We finally published our newsletter this week! Overall it looked very nice, and every articles were related to the school, which grabbed the audiences’ attentions.
For Grammar we went on learning more about noun, adj, and adv. I never knew there are so many other forms of adj and adv that could be taught and since they are new to me, I gotta spend some extra time on them!

We are done with the Greek basewords! yay! now we go on to Latin Basewords.

We went on to a new topic this week… the Oral History. Basically it’s retelling a story about a person, and the story itself had a great impact on that person. I decided to interview my mom about her first job experience. I chose this topic and my mom as an interviewee is because first of all, I have great respect for my mom and her deeds, and secondly, she is a successful entrepreneur now; i wonder how she got to her position today. Oh and also because I wanted to learn something out of her experiences.
For textbook materials, we covered abstract and concrete nouns. They aren’t that hard to differenciate once you get the concept. Glad they aren’t that hard.

We focused on newsletter this week. Man, publishing a complete newsletter takes a lot of group efforts. Reporters send articles to editors, and editors send those articles to publishers after done editing. As an editor, I had to push the reporters to hand me their articles, becase we didn’t have much time to the publication date.
I can’t wait for our first PASPort!!

Courses of Capitalization is finally over! We had a test on it and the ancient civilization, and I ‘think’ I did an okay job… could’ve been better though.
We looked through the processes of writing a college essay. It is perhaps a place where we can use what we’ve learned in writing a reflective essay throughly. I really needed to get a good hand on it, since I’m applying to colleges currently.

We had another basewords test… they all looked alike!

This week we didn’t do as much, because we only had 2 days of class!
Our group presented the Babylon Empire by PowerPoint. I think we did a good job presenting it, ’cause I didn’t see people falling asleep… and of course, if anyone was, s/he must be in big trouble…

We discussed some newsletters features this week, like what section to be put in the letter. I’m sure that we’re publishing very soon.