Blog Post #10

1) “Most Beautiful Work Award” - Which piece of writing (formal or informal) are you most proud of and why? What other skill or habit have you developed (maybe as a reader?) that you are proud of?
-I would say that I am most proud of the short story I wrote for the Tragedy Project. I really liked the setting of the story and would have liked to have gone more in depth with it. My writing and editing skills have definitely improved as a result of writing essays in class and the numerous college essays I've written.
2) “Lesson Learned” - What content do you feel you have mastered? Or, which skill(s) did you enjoy learning and feel that you have had some success in developing? How so?
- As said I have become better at writing. I also feel that I've become better and faster at reading. Atlas Shrugged had very small font, was extremely long, and very complex. This forced me to develop stronger attention span while reading and the ability to read faster. I also became better at analyzing texts. The many annotation we had to write on articles, poems, and novels all helped me to develop this skill.
3) “Lessons I’d Like to Learn” - Which skills would you like to develop before graduation? What content do you feel that you need to know in order to feel ready for college? Do you have any project ideas?
-I would like to improve upon my creative writing skills. I already feel that these are strong but I simply enjoy writing stories and think it would be fun to have an assignment of this kind. I would also like to do another reading focused project. There are many books that I want to read next semester after hearing all of the presentations. 

Week of 12/5-10/10

This week in class we have continued to work on our presentation and abstract for our reading project. So far my abstract has been going well and I think that my partner and I, Stephan, are going to do a Socratic seminar to present our book, Atlas Shrugged. I'm still unsure of how we should run the seminar. Right now we have two potential options. The first one is we could present our findings and Ayn Rand's beliefs on selfishness and then have the seminar where the class would discuss whether selfishness is ever moral and/or practical. The other option is that we have a general discussion on selfishness and morality and then afterwords we present our findings and show Rand's take on it. I feel that both ways have their merits and strengths but I'm unsure which one to go with. Opinions?

Atlas Shrugged Product

For he reading project my group read Atlas Shrugged.Which is essentially an 1,100 page novel that tries to prove that selfishness can be moral and practical. We need to show this somehow in our presentation and we're not quite sure how.
One idea I had was to set up a game that the class would play where by do doing some action they earn pieces of candy and my group would act as administrators. After a few rounds we could then start "redistributing the wealth" by taking candy from the successful people to "support" the unsuccessful ones. We would design it so that as the game progressed the system would collapse upon itself as the successful loose their incentive to work because it's just going to be taken from it and the unsuccessful will loose their incentive because the successful will support them. This cycle is what happened in the end of the novel so it would be fitting. However, I'm concerned that it may be too difficult to design the game, and that it might not work out how we want which would be embarrassing.
The other idea we had was to arrange a Socratic Seminar where a few members of the class would discuss whether selfishness can be moral and/or practical. We like this idea but we are hesitant that the group will just all agree that selfishness isn't moral or practical, seeing they haven't read the novel and generally society looks down upon selfishness. We were thinking that maybe we would sit in on the discussion so that we could make it more dynamic but we feel that that may be a little weird.
Opinions?