You will see below this five separate posts where you should write your responses to the essays in the summer reading section of your textbook. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me (Rayburn) any time before July 7 and after July 21. I will be away during that time and unlikely to respond.
All posts are due by 10 p.m. on Sunday, August 2. Do not be late in meeting this deadline.
In addition, remember that you are expected to read one of the following full-length memoirs and be ready to participate in discussions and writing activities based on them the first week of school.
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The Sum of our
Days
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Isabel Allende
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius
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Dave Eggers
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The Year of
Living Biblically
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A.J. Jacobs
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The Liars’ Club
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Mary Karr
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Kaffir Boy
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Mark Mathabane
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The Wild Truth
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Carine McCandless
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Angela’s Ashes
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Frank McCourt
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Hunger of
Memory
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Richard Rodriguez
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Wild
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Cheryl Strayed
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I Am Malala
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Malala Yousafzai
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4 comments:
Kayra Reyes: Reading about Walker’s and Sanders’ excerpts on their encounter with and thoughts on beauty, I expected beauty, to refer to aesthetic appeal. However, there was a contrast in ideas as Walker referred to beauty as one of appearance and Sanders referred to beauty in terms of the idea of opportunity, chance, and creation. Walker reflected on the times of her youth, as she shifted from being the epitome of beauty to being seeing as the complete opposite not only by herself but by those around her as well. Having lost vision in her right eye and being left with a scar, she is tormented by her peers and eventually brought to move away to where she can feel more comfortable hiding from those that rejected her physique. It is not until she has part of the scar tissue on her eye removed that she feels beautiful again. Yet, she once again encounters this conflict with her appearance when she is a mother and fears he daughter’s shame when noticing her hazy, rotating eye. It is only until her daughter refers to her eye as the “world” that she sees true beauty in her eye and its story, requiring a vocal acceptance of her looks in order to be discovered. On the other hand, Sanders thinks back to when at his daughter’s wedding as his thoughts transition from the beauty of the bride to the beauty of the moment to the beauty of the chance they all came to exist and live that moment and ultimately to the beauty of the universe and its creator. Rather than focusing on an outer beauty, Sanders sees a beauty in the abstract and unknown as he realizes that all the small and meaningful moments in his life and all that has come to be around him is seen as a coincidence and an accidental creation of nature, a nature that has come about on its own. However, Sanders believes that all the wonders the human race has encountered and come to discover are far too beautiful too be coincidental and fantastic to not be intentional. Sanders explains that true beauty is not what nature describes as appearance and attraction but more of what God has created and allowed us to discover and encounter and create. Beauty is in a moment and the chance of it ever happening and the rareness or such an opportunity to witness such joy.
After reading Scott Russell Sanders essay “Beauty” it left me kinda of surprised at first when I started to look at things differently. He started off telling the story of his daughters wedding to taking about the different stars, nebulas and galaxies in space which left me kind of confused for a moment but then he started to compare the similarities of beauty they both had. And talk about the beauty in things in other than just appearances but in simple things like numbers and math and nature as well and found pleasure doing that it made him feel at peace. He knows that peoples perception of beauty will constantly change but the way nature, space and number are will always be the same and it is important to admire that. I think the message I got from Walker’s essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” was completely different from Sander’s but still had an important point that i think most people tend to forget, finding beauty in yourself. After the accident that left her blind in one eye and was left with a “glob” she hid from almost everyone because she was self conscious and insecure with her looks she was not able to accept herself so she wasn't accepted by most of her peers at school. It wasn't until after she got surgery to get the “glob” removed it helped her a lot with her self confidence and felt at peace.I believe that both definitions were right in their own different ways because it is important to be able to find beauty in ones self but it is also important to be able to notice and appreciate the beauty of other things than just people and their appearances because doing that is not always easy.
In the Ted Talk by Bryan Stevenson he talks about the injustice that those in poverty face daily and the difference in race. How poverty should be addressed and stop being ignored, they are part of our society and should not be the last ones to be focused on not the irrationality of the different aspects of race. Stevenson reaches out to talk about how someone who is White and rich get less punishments than those who are of color. Why is that our color identifies who we are how we should we treated? We should all be treated equally just like any other white person would be. The importance is to bring together our community not tear them apart. He also mentions how those who are of color are more likely to receive a higher penalty than a rich white person would. Our society has this flaw of accusing others based on their physical appearance rather than the most important factor which is the crime that was committed. People with higher power agree to such things as these. The segregation that we left behind in history is now still facing many outcomes in our daily lives. Inestad of acknowledging these problems/issues we decide to just leave it aside and forget about it. These prejudices hurt or community and segregates is even more. Society shows this side of "if its not my problem then I won't acknowledge it because it does not include me or my family." Just like Stevenson said we should address this issues.
Everyday many of us go on about our lives, but do we ever really stop to think about other people’s lives? No, not just our friends and family, but the faces we don’t know. The people we have no real connection with besides our basic human race. In Bryan Stevenson’s TED talk, he speaks of topics that are very real and very much an issue in our world: inequality, poverty, and injustice. Stevenson speaks of these issues because he sees that our society is disconnected from them. Disconnected in a sense that there is a lack of attention. He states “We have this dynamic where we really don’t like to talk about our problems. We don’t like to talk about our history”. Stevenson brings up the valid point that most people don’t like to talk about their problems, and that’s because these problems are the hard truth of what is happening in our world. Some people don’t want to face those problems, and instead surround themselves with “bright and dazzly things” that serve as a temporary fix. In order to understand our problems and move on from them, we must be open to talking about them as well as our past, as Stevenson does in this TED talk, sharing a bit of his life and how his experiences have shaped him into the person he is today. All of our experiences shape us into the people we are today. We shouldn’t be searching for the “bright and dazzly things” in times of hopelessness, but rather attempt to surmount the hopeless situations together because, as Stevenson stated, our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity. Just because something isn’t happening to us doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
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