Poetry

There are several different perspectives people have when they think of poetry.

Poetry can connect many emotions together. Poetry can just be a bunch of rhyming words left for individual interpretation. Poetry can bring together many thoughts and ideas and convey them in a very concise method.

When I think of poetry, I think of it the way Sir Isaac Newton does - "a kind of ingenious nonsense." The combination of literary devices and sound devices in such a short writing piece is amazing. The rhythm, the extended metaphors, and the themes (to name a few examples) are impressive and appear to take much thought and deliberation to come up with. However, I do agree that it is nonsense. The brevity of poems is what makes them amazing, but I do not think they can properly convey a theme. There are so many ways that poems can be interpreted that it makes the ingenuity behind them seem unimpressive (at least to me). I think the audience just over thinks many of the poems and that is what makes them ingenious. Sometimes, I feel like the poet is just writing about nature or a bird or a car. But no. Someone has to come along and interpret that bird as something abstract like selfishness and then this results in a open discussion on the possible interpretations of the poem. This just makes the writer seem like a genius for coming up with such a topic.

I hope my opinion about poetry can be changed this year. My experiences thus far (in middle school and ninth grade) were really bad and this is a major reason why I don't enjoy poetry as much as others do.

Financial Aid

As you all know, college decisions will be released soon. If accepted, the envelope will likely carry a sheet of paper discussing financial aid over the next four years. This leads me to my blog topic of the week: is the current system of awarding financial aid to students flawed?

I come from a relatively well-off family. I am not spoiled and my parents are still quite miserly (except when it  comes to vacations), but I do not need to worry about paying for my college education. My parents have saved money over the years to pay for it. After reading up about how financial aid is awarded, however, I have wondered whether or not my parents did the correct thing by saving up. Currently, the system works so that students who come from families who do not have significant savings or from a family making less than 250K will get some sort of financial aid. If, however, either of these requirements are invalidated, then the college gives little to no aid. My father and I were having a discussion about this and he gave me one piece of advice: if I think that I will be worth 250K (the sum of 4 years of tuition, room, and board), then I can attend (insert name of private school) over the University of Kentucky where I will not be paying anything to attend. This was really interesting because I believe that these private universities have a lot to offer in terms of cultural enrichment, research opportunities, and connections that public universities do not.

I have wanted to attend a private university (because of the abundant opportunities) for a long time, but now I am seriously considering otherwise. I do not want my parents to bear the consequences for saving money. Does anyone else agree with me that this system is broken? My family may be able to pay, but that does not mean 60K is a negligible sum of money.

To test or not to test?

Standardized testing was the bane of my existence last year. Free time was nonexistent because I was always studying for one test or another. From SAT subject tests to AP tests to the ACT, these standardized tests play a large part in college admissions and I knew that if I did not study, then it would be very detrimental come application season this year. Studying paid off as I did decently well on my exams, but I still do not agree with this method of testing students.

The biggest problem I have with standardized testing is that not all students have the opportunity to take difficult classes (i.e. AP classes) with good teachers. These students are automatically put at a huge disadvantage coming into the test because they did not study the material in school. Another problem deals with those who do not consider English to be their first language. This can create difficulty in comprehending the exam questions and, as a result, poor scores regardless of how well the individual knows the material.

Although I understand that there is no perfect way of judging a student, I think that standardized test scores should not play as large a role in admissions. If I could have a conversation with admissions counselors, I would ask them to consider AP test scores with much more weight because they actually reveal how much a student knows because only half the test consists of multiple choice. In addition, the material on the AP test is actually material that will be used later on in our life unlike tests like the ACT science section, which only tests ones ability to analyze data. In conclusion, I think AP tests should be weighted much more than the ACT and SAT because having a strong foundation in core subjects is much more important than timed reading comprehension or the ability to analyze random data.

Confusion

I'm going to go ahead and be very honest - I hate Beloved. It is a very tedious read and it requires so much thinking. I spent three hours the other day reading pages 60 - 146 (not including reading journals). Three hours. That means my average rate was a page every two minutes. Maybe it's just me, but it's taking me ages to analyze everything I read.

Most of the confusion in the book comes from Beloved. I simply can't grasp my mind around the fact that she is a human and a ghost. For example, in the scene when Sethe is at the clearing, she thinks of Baby Suggs caressing her neck and then she suddenly starts feeling like she's being choked. Although Denver accuses Beloved of choking her mother, Beloved denies all this. In my mind, this was very odd because Beloved was able to choke Sethe even though she was sitting next to her (not behind her). It makes it seem like she is half ghost and half human. The whole scene was very supernatural.

It is possible that I misinterpreted that scene, but that was the part where I just got really annoyed with the book. Why is it so difficult to read?!? It's probably a good thing that I am reading these challenging books because I'll have to take a few English classes in college, but it makes me so much more thankful that I am going into engineering. I don't like thinking about such abstract and interpretive texts.

Water for Elephants Review

Water for Elephants was a book that really piqued my interest. The story line was simple - Jacob Jankowski, a senior at Cornell University who was studying Veterinary Science, was told that his parents died in a car wreck. This story took place during the Great Depression, though, and consequently Jacob was left with nothing. His tuition at Cornell was not completely paid off, so he was forced to drop out. With no home or any relatives to return to, he made a spontaneous decision - to jump on a train. The train turned out to be the circus. He was given an ultimatum when he asked to join: become the veterinarian and get limited pay or get red-lighted (thrown off the train in the middle of the night). He joined and from here he went on to have an amazing adventure with Marlena, the amazing horse rider, and Rosie, the elephant. 

This story really answered my research question on how humans react when they are put in life-or-death situations. Jacob responded to this situation by creating alliances with others and using his knowledge from college to help him get a job. This shows that people will dig deep into their skill set to find a way to survive.

I recommend this book to everyone. It has a lot of humor and the plot is very interesting. Some scenes, however, are very sexual and graphic, so I would not recommend it to younger audiences.

Is outlining bad?

Yes and no. You must be asking, "What kind of answer is that??" Well, to be honest, it depends on the situation. When it comes to academic writing (such as an on-demand paper or research paper), outlining can be a valuable asset. Time constraints, at least in my case, make me very tense. I go through a writers' block, conveniently enough, for the large majority of the time. After I started outlining for occasions such as this, I found a new confidence in my writing. I did not have as much trouble putting my thoughts on paper because I knew how to structure each paragraph and what to discuss. This helped me to write faster and more effectively; my words had meaning now. 

On the other hand, I think outlining is an awful idea when you are writing a creative piece. Creative writing is supposed to be very free. If an author tries to plan it out, then he/she is losing many opportunities to make something crazy happen. It’s almost as if our brains are wired to follow an outline if it is written. As a result, many authors follow the outline even if the story could flow better with another plot twist. I agree with the author of the article (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/outlining-in-reverse/?ref=opinion) when she says that it is better to outline after the writing is done. That will help consolidate the writing, yet allow the creativity and whim to affect the plot. 

The Next Chapter

Although I found the end of the book to be very deep and satisfying, I would have enjoyed an epilogue. Here's one of the many possible endings I thought of -

The boy goes back to the veteran's hideout and learns many trades and skills. He grows up to become a jack of all trades, which is perfect for the conditions. He must make use of everything he gets his hands on and must not let anything go to waste. As he grows older and more independent, he leaves the family that helped nurture his growth and heads south towards the location where his father had originally wanted to go. There, he finds the rise of a new civilization. It is almost as if everyone is rewriting history. There is order and peace in this civilization and the boy learns the ways of this new society. From here, the boy helps rebuild the human race and lives happily ever after. This ending was like a  fairy tale.

My other alternative endings dealt with death and despair. One of my ideas was similar to Mrs. Wells' idea about farming the boy, except I thought the boy would be shot immediately, not farmed. Another idea was that some of the blood cults would arrive at the hideout and kill the entire family. These possible endings were so depressing because it played along with the tone of the rest of the book. A happy-go-lucky ending would seem out of the blue and very contrived.

In summation, I think Cormac McCarthy left the book at a very good point. A lot of speculation can be made about what happens to the boy, which is what I love about the text. My endings were on opposite sides of the spectrum - either really happy or really sad. If only McCarthy wrote an epilogue ...