English week of 4/6

We are getting closer and closer to our Inquiry Project paper due date. I have been thinking more about my ideas for the paper and am getting ready to start writing the first rough draft which is due wednesday.  I turned in my outline this week and have a pretty good idea of the direction I want to take my paper in. This weekend is Easter weekend so I plan on taking the extra time to get a lot of my paper done.  In class this week we learned about MLA formatting for our paper. We also discussed our final portfolios for the semester.

Week of 3/30

This week in english we made more progress on our MIP. We turned in our pieces of rhetoric and did a presentation to the class. There were some really great ideas and creative pieces from my fellow classmates. In class we talked more about designing a thesis statement and creating our outlines. I started working on my own thesis statement and after tweaking it a bit I have finished that and finished my outline and hope to get started on my paper soon. The semester is really getting busy now in all my classes so Ill be working on improving my time management in the next weeks and keeping up with all my work.

English blog week of 3/23

This week I have worked on and finished my rough drafts for my pieces of rhetoric. One piece was an email to parents that told them about the importance of health and their kids. It is extremely important for parents to be invested in their childs health since all of the childs habits and behaviors will more than likely form from the parents. In my second piece of rhetoric I designed a poster that could be used to encourage kids to choose to be active rather than sitting inside playing video games. The poster uses two pictures of fat kids playing video games, and fit kids playing basketball having fun to show kids its more enjoyable and healthy to get out and play.

This past week in English class we discussed creating our two pieces or rhetoric. We were given many ideas to help us along with our process and given links to different online tools to assist us. For my project I am hoping to reach and inform parents and elementary school students. I think that kids at such a young age can have a hard time making decisions for themselves that are right and need parental guidance and discipline in order to stay healthy. My first idea for rhetoric is an informative text, possibly email, that will help teach parents about health and how they can better nourish their child and help prevent obesity and future unhealthy habits. My second piece will be something that is visually appealing to children. Kids at such a young age are very impressionable and I want to create something that makes it look cool to eat healthy and exercise.

Collage

My collage represents a little of myself and my identity over the past four years. Four years ago I started playing poker for a living. I worked very hard at it and it ended up working out very well for me. A photo of one of my bigger wins is in the center because poker allowed me to live the life that I have over the past years. After success at poker I traveled a lot, I lived in las Vegas, and I spent a lot of time just having fun. I have some photos of my travels, some from Las Vegas and some of me doing things I love all represented in the collage. I think this collage represents that i'm a very laid back, fun person who enjoys traveling, being outside and just living life to the fullest.

      Images and identity are linked in several ways.  Without speaking to someone, or without knowledge about them, images are the only way we could try and figure out someones identity. What people do, who they do things with, and the images they choose to show people can show a lot about their identity and character.  By looking at images of someone, you can tell what they like, the type of people they surround themselves with, their values, and many other things about that person. I think the type of images I associate with are those of people having fun. I was a very straight kid in grade school in terms of being very disciplined and goal oriented. I never even had my first drink til I was 21. I think I started to associate and try to emulate pictures of fun and partying after my poker success because I had never had any time to just let loose and experience some of those things I had missed out on. Now that I have gotten that phase of my life out of the way, I now see myself associating more with images that display success because I am ready to settle down a bit and work hard to achieve my new goals.

America 24/7

In this article, Patrick Cox talks about the collection of photos in "America 24/7". He mentions that the photos are "the true essence of American character and communities". Without seeing the pictures, I would assume the pictures are just of everyday people like he talks about, doing everyday things. The pictures are not biased or trying to persuade you of anything, they really just show what Americans are doing and how they act. After looking at the photos in the album, I have to agree with him. The pictures look like they really are just people doing normal everyday things in non staged situations. It looks like they are just caught in the act of doing whatever they are doing in the pictures and it really shows how diverse and similar Americans are.

NPO

http://linksinc.org/heartlinks/charlotte_chapter.html