What I learned and how I've used it

What did I gain from Quest English 8 and 9?

• Enough to be interested in philosophy books on my own time
• Enough to think about what is happening and make my own conclusions
• Enough to learn to not judge other peoples opinions

My favorite unit of all was absurdity and the stranger. I never really thought of it until now, but I feel like absurdity is very strongly tied to everyday life. Noah was telling me for a long time that I should join Cross Country but I recently decided to sign up this Spring because of absurdity. The regular Jonah would never do anything like that but I feel like absurdity is about doing thinks that are absurd to you. It also related to pain but that's a topic for another time.

During the last day of quest we all got to write a message to Mr. McCallum and mine said: "Sorry McCallum, gotta go write a blog". While it was true, I felt that there was a stronger message inside. A message that said that I was leaving your teachings to go and do my own thing out in the world. A message that said that you helped me so much, to discover who I am, and also help everyone you are around. This is the best part of you. I always feel that I could come to you with anything, and I only have feel that way about 2 people ever. I feel like I can come to you with more things then my parents. When you read this, you might think that you did something horrible by being there for me more than my parents but instead, think of how you created a relationship with a student so strong, that he values it more than most. This class was so important to me that I don't know how to describe it further.


See you in Journalism 2!

Noah and Jonah's Presentation Extravaganza!

This was quite a project. Never before have I tested my patience with another human being. Noah was brutally honest, lazy and at times incompetent. He criticized my work to beyond recognition and never could accept any of his own. Whether this pushed me to be better or discouraged me from reaching my full potential, we'll never know. At the start of this project I tried to be like other artists, I watched YouTube videos, I looked at lots of pixel art to get more ideas and I even copied other people's art and tried to change them slightly. In the end I realized that I could never get to that level of detail because 1. I didn't have a program to accurately do what I wanted it to do with brushes and fading and 2. I didn't have an artists experience to make what I wanted to and 3. I had a perfectionists mindset when entering this project. This means that I couldn't be happy with the slightest error and I had to have every mistake corrected, even if it made the overall project worse. Realizing that to make things perfect, I had to make things have flaws, made me a better artist in general. I became more happy with my work and I became more satisfied overall. This still leaves us with one, small, problem. Noah.

The Seven Deadly Sins in Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies is a book all about sin and how a group of young and innocent boys descended into savagery. While I was reading this book I kept thinking about how the Seven Deadly Sins helped the boys into madness. In this blog, I will outline how each of the Seven Deadly sins
   It all started out so innocently when the boys went and elected a leader like a democracy. The problem with this is that it sparks a rivalry and Jack gets filled with envy “and the freckles on Jack’s face disappeared under a blush of mortification. He started up, then changed his mind and sat down again while the air rang.” (Golding 23) This leads to a power struggle which causes the divide between the two factions.
The second step that I saw the boys take into madness was the introduction of Sloth. Sloth is defined as physical laziness or spiritual laziness. This vice takes effect when the little un’s want to play and don’t want to work to keep the shelter up or keep the fire going. Ralph initially puts a system in a place reminiscent of work and civilization by simply building a shelter and keeping a fire going so that they can survive, but the little kids don’t want to go and work. They want to go and play and their laziness keep them from prosperity. It would have been much easier for the boys to keep order for a little bit longer if everyone worked like in a society.
   To add insult to injury, Jack gets insulted on his hunting ability by Ralph. Ralph complains about his lack of help putting up the shelters and insults Jack on his lack of hunting skill and his lack of discipline with his followers. Jack is very prideful of his backers and his hunting skills. He doesn’t want the clan that he has taken away from him in a rigged election and doesn’t want his hunting skills diminished by a lazy leader. Just like Jack’s boys, Ralph has his own problem with his followers. Ralph also shows his prideful side when he makes everybody call him chief when he gets elected.
   The pride that Jack had consumed him and turns to wrath. Wrath to get back at Ralph for what he said and to get back the power that he rightfully deserves. Jack bashes Ralph every time he makes a mistake and makes himself look very appealing to the bourgeoisie. This leads me to the final stage of my argument, gluttony, and lust.
   After the slaughtering of the pig, the boys eat a gigantic feast where they eat as much as they can fit in their mouths. This indulgence leads to the crazy atmosphere that kills Simon. Lust is apparent when the boy's cut off the pig’s head and put it on a stick to show even more that the boys have descended into madness, farther than they could have ever dreamed before coming here. “At last, the immediacy of the kill subsided. The boys drew back, and Jack stood up, holding out his hands.
“Look.”
He giggled and flicked them while the boys laughed at his reeking palms. Then Jack grabbed Maurice and rubbed the stuff over his cheeks . . .
“Right up her ass!” (Golding 135)
Many people see this as a rape scene and they see it as the part of the book when hunting stops becoming about the meat, but about bathing in their power over a helpless animal. They are far too young to be doing this kind of thing and this moment is seen as when the boys lose their innocence to evil.
   The defining factor of this island against any other factor that caused the outcome of the book is that isolation from society means that there are no laws. There are norms, but they can be changed quite easily due to the lack of order. Any sort of ethics that they once had are swept clean with civilization coming first to fill its space with the leader being Ralph. Ralph is a fine leader, but can’t get anybody to do what he wants. Then Jack comes in and takes the power from Ralph. He firmly establishes himself as the power on the island due to his ruthlessness. In the article Law, Morals and Ethics, the author makes a great point when he says that, “A community can change its sense of right and wrong only through initiative taken by someone within a community or acting upon it” (Hazard 11) When I was reading this I knew Jack was the bad guy, online sources like SparkNotes said that Jack was the bad guy, and our discussions in the classroom identified him as the bad guy, but I have to give credit to Jack. He made the boys great. Under Jack, the boys progressed further into strength than even before. The cost of this was that they lost their humanity. They became savages until they were shocked back to life by seeing civilization again in the form of the naval officer.

Hoping For Failure

Ask yourself this: What are you willing to give up for your dream? Maybe you’re a teenager with great drive and ambition searching for happiness in this big bad world of ours. Our maybe you’re a middle aged person with a stable job and enough to retire and never work another day in your life. What is your dream? While I give you a moment to think about it, here is a dream that was posted on a forum when asked the very same question.

Well? Is it a simpler dream like being able to pay off your mortgage or maybe it’s a spectacular dream like being able to visit every country in the world.  What if I told you that you could do it. That you could be whatever you wanted to be and do whatever you wanted to do. As long as you wanted it bad enough you could do it. This is hope. Hope is to be inspired by something and desiring for it to happen. Now what if I told you that you could do everything right and sacrifice everything for your dream, only for the chance that you could be successful. Mind you, it would be a good chance. But still, would you do it? I sometimes think that this really holds people back when they think; “I would try, but there is no guarantee that I would succeed”. This is fear and anxiety taking over and distracting you from your dream, because you see only the worst case scenario, as described in Murphy’s Law. Murphy's Law states that anything that can happen, will happen.

We typically think of good and bad as two sides of the same coin. Hope, success and goodness occupy heads while fear, failure and pain occupy tails. This is not necessarily true because fear can save your life from doing stupid things and hope may blind your judgement. It is important to realize this before jumping to conclusions.

During military holidays like Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day we salute those who have served in the U.S. military but we treat the dead like they lost at life or that they failed to come home. Most times this isn’t their fault. A gunshot out of nowhere or a random fragment of artillery is all it takes to end a person's life. This leaves life and death to chance most times. This is where Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five gives a prime example of hope and fear. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a skinny little kid drafted into the army and fights at the Battle of the Bulge. Fights is a very broad term because the only thing he did was get lost behind enemy lines. This is where he finds Roland Weary, a decorated war soldier in his own mind, who saves Billy to fulfil his own fantasy. Although it seems sometimes that Billy doesn’t care what happens to him when he walks in front of a live battlefield, he lives while Weary dies of gangrene, cursing Billy’s name. He curses his name because Billy succeeds without even wanting to live while Weary dies, trying his hardest to stay alive. Weary is a war hero who everyone looks up to as an ideal and Billy is the cowardly fearful boy that everyone hates. During a battle, Billy loses the will to live.  Roland then says, "He don't want to live, but he's gonna live anyway. When he gets out of this, by God, he's gonna owe his life to the Three Musketeers." (Vonnegut 2). This quote further illustrates how heroic Weary is in this war. The picture below is from MAUS II. A book set in Nazi Germany during WWII. This comic illustrates the point that I made in the previous paragraph, about how living through a tragedy is seen as winning while dying is seen as losing when it simply isn’t true. There is a large amount of luck involved in surviving and if you die, it is most likely based on bad luck rather than bad choices.

The fear to achieve is truly crippling. Society says that we can be and do whatever we want to be. We could be a policeman, fireman, soldier or teacher, helping society and being the best that we can be. But this is just not true. Our internal struggles and the pressure that we put on ourselves limit us to mediocrity and hopelessness. People who understand that they can’t be perfect and realize that they have all they need to achieve, actually achieve. This reminds me of a quote by Henry Ford that says, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.”. While the fear to achieve is difficult, achieving doesn’t necessarily bring hope.

The bus ride home after my teacher had us put hope and fear against each other in a duel to the death, I made a chart describing the parts of speech for fear and hope. I was thinking that hope and fear didn’t actually make complete opposites. What I found was that fear had a past, and future term, but hope only had a past and future term. Fear had feared and fearful. You do fear something, you did fear something and you will fear something. Hope had hoped, and hopeful, but it doesn’t really make sense. You hope for something, you did hope for something and you will hope for something. You see, hope is a future term about things that will happen, while fear is a present term about things that are happening now, so you can’t compare them, even if you try. Instead of arguing which is more powerful, it would be better to compare inspire and terrorize. Both are stronger than their counterparts and are stronger antonyms to each other. Now, instead of trying to compare things that are harder to see in today's society, you can see firsthand with inspiration and terrorizing how people create and do amazing things like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, but they can also destroy like ISIS. This lets the battle between light and darkness have meaning, rather than just to argue.

Censored! A Look At Censorship in Plato's The Republic

When I hear censorship or censoring things I always think of the bleep that happens when someone swears on a TV show. This is obviously for protecting the ears of our young so they don't go and swear in public. This is sensible. Being exposed to these things early on in a person's development could cause them to internalize or interpret their place in our society incorrect, thereby causing children to develop in a way that harms their ability to integrate into our society effectively. To expand on this idea, if a child sees swearing on TV or some other media source, they add that idea of swearing and add that to the culture of what they know and how they act. Before this, the child fit perfectly in society’s culture of how to act. The child confused a culture very different from his own, as his own and because of this, began to extend past the breaking point for acceptable behavior. In The Republic, Plato talks about stories and how for a perfectly just society, there has to be only good because if there is evil or tragedy, there is unjustness. “The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.” (Plato 49) It is commonly accepted that censorship is bad but censorship laws allow individuals to speak freely in the United States. No individual may be censored, as long as their speech does not encourage violence, hatred or disregard for the law. Most countries have censorship laws but the most harsh as China’s. China censors things like democracy, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 police brutality and corruption. The United States has never gone to this kind of restriction but 1920 was the start of prohibition. To put it simply, it was a disaster. Because alcohol was banned, it went underground and became an illegal drug which made it even more popular by encouraging organized crime. The reason that I talk about this is because of my curiosity about if no one knew anything of evil, if it would exist. My theory about why Prohibition didn’t work is because people already knew about it. If nobody knew anything about drugs, guns, violence, or evil at all, would evil exist? To answer this question, we need to look inside who we are as human beings. Because God created free will he also created evil, or was it a byproduct of survival of the fittest?

Even if there was no record of anybody being unjust to anybody else, would injustice still exist inside all of us as a possibility of another choice. A just society can’t exist without just people and when given a choice between just and unjustness, even though you have done the just thing your whole life, you might not be able to stop yourself from trying something different. People can go their whole lives without being unjust, but some people can’t and even with no knowledge of evil, they can still do it. When people are given a choice between just and unjust, it is inevitable that not 100% will be good. And when one person is unjust, no one is just unless this hidden seed is stamped out immediately. Curiosity is man’s greatest enemy and The Republic can only function without curiosity. Without curiosity, there is nothing to strive for, and then, does life have a meaning?

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pe9l7/eli5_why_do_we_censor_things_like_nudity_and/

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2g.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

Things Fall Apart. How Being Strong Makes You Weak

“As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, “My father, they have killed me!” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak” (Achebe 7).

My favorite part of the book, Things Fall Apart was Ikemefuna because he reminded me of  ‘Poor old Edgar Derby’ from Kurt Vonnegut’s, Slaughterhouse Five. In the book when Edgar Derby’s name is said, he is always referred to as Poor Old Edgar Derby and when he was first introduced the author outlined his death even before it ever happened. Chinua Achebe kind of does this but still never reveals the true details and cause until it actually happens. It is nice to foreshadow a death to keep the reader engaged in the story. The other thing that is really important about this quote is how Okonkwo is so afraid of appearing weak that he will kill the son that will most likely be his ‘perfect child’ and be just like him. Ikemefuna is a hard-working young man and seems even more manly than Nwoye, Okonkwo’s true son. Nwoye is lazy and doesn’t work very hard, but it might not be his fault. Some people believe that we all are damaged goods which means that all/some of us have had parents or other things that messed us up mentally or socially. A good example of this is the relationship between all of the characters, father to son. Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, is a very talented but lazy person. Ikemefuna is damaged when he was separated from his family and dragged into an unknown situation when he could die any day. This situation early in his childhood would allow him to achieve greatness because he knows what despair is. At a very young age, Okonkwo vows to never become weak like his father and this shapes his personality and his actions for the rest of the story. In the end he becomes weak because he never wants to appear weak. When he kills Ikemefuna he doesn’t want to appear weak, but in reality he is weak for not standing up, or at least speaking out, against the Oracle. Okonkwo always strives for achievements but he loses out on the biggest achievement he could’ve ever gotten. Seeing his adopted son be the heir to his honor in Umuofia and the villages beyond. A big connection I saw in this book is the connection between Unoka and Nwoye. They both don’t work very hard, but they aren’t bad people. I think that being like damaged goods is like having an Achilles Heel. This is an ancient greek story about how as a little baby Achilles was dipped in the river Styx by his mother, Thetis, and the river changed him and granted him strength and other cool things. But it also magnified his weaknesses and gave him a spot on his Achilles where he was vulnerable. This relates to this story because Okonkwo’s vow to never become like his father grew his strengths tenfold but it also made him weaker than he could have ever imagined.

A very interesting part of this story is how gender roles and masculinity affects decisions and create power in the village. It is very unlikely for a woman to have power in this clan because most positions of power are filled by men, but the most important spots are the Oracle, which is a woman, and Chielo, the priestess of Agbala. Many women in this story grow up knowing nothing other than doing housework and getting beating and always think they are inferior. “Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper” (Achebe 2).

At the beginning of this story I was told not to judge the culture. Observe and don’t judge because you might judge them badly for not knowing any better. I think that it is interesting to think about the ethics of drastically changing a culture liked the Christians tried to do to the village. Is it good to try to change a culture? What if changing a culture is for the better? In my opinion it is best to observe and gain knowledge to improve yourself and leave cultures alone so they can grow and develop on their own.

I am from

I am from you

From monotony and pattern

I am from the same

I am from the same

The happy family

Whose long gone limbs I remember

As if they were my own

I'm from Grandma and Grandpa

From Night and Day

I'm from sister and brother

And from love

I'm from sit down and shut up

And open your books

I'm from no friends

Broken promises and no dreams

From deal with it and 

Taking it day by day

From coming back

Without a smile