REHUGO 2

Reading:

     The Phantom of the Opera, a mystery novel written by Gaston Leroux in 1910, is mostly known for it's antagonist for which it gets it's namesake. One of the more important parts of the Leroux's novel was the mental complexity of it's antagonist and Leroux's questioning as to what we believe a monster to be:"Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'someone,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and in the end had to content himself with a cellar. Surely we must pity the Opera ghost!” While as dark and mentally unsound as the Opera ghost may be, Leroux makes sure that the reader see's both sides to the madness and tragedy in him.

Entertainment and Arts:

   Hedgehog in the Fog was a Russian animated short film made in 1975 directed by Yuriy Norshteyn and is one of the most highly acclaimed animated films of all time. Wether it be the ominous yet mystical atmosphere or the dream like surrealism, Hedgehog in the Fog has become the influence to many well known animators including Hayao Miyazaki. The film is about a journey into the unknown, as the hedgehog descends into the fog, he encounters strange creatures veiled by the fog, which cause a sense of suspended reality, adding mysticism to an everyday routine. The film is mainly known for it's captivatingly unique animation skills, but it is it's poetic simplistic which brought in most of it's prestige.

History:

     This is the Antikythera mechanism and is estimated to date back to 87 B.C. Going only by the picture, it would seem to just me another old artifact, but what make's the Antikythera mechanism unique is that it is the oldest known scientific calculator, used to calculate astronomical positions; no other machine like this would be created again until the 14th Century. It is one of the most significant artifacts ever found and still more is being discovered about it and how much more advanced ancient civilizations were then modern society gives them credit for. The Antikythera mechanism could be the key to understanding the amazing abilities of ancient civilization's and the outstanding potential of the human mind. 

Universal Truth:

   "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"

   Mahatma Gandhi said this during the Indian Independence movement, which he played a crucial role in. Gandhi used this as a rebuttal to the use of force against the British who were committing crimes against humanity against the Indian people. Gandhi's practice of civil disobedience proved effective in India and would also become the inspiration to the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. This universal truth does not only need to apply to world wide events but also to any form of injustice; whenever getting even, the result is never just and both sides become guilty instead of one. 

Government:

   "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed"

   This is a quote from Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Jeffersons point is that government, in order to be just to it's people, must be decided by it's people. His purpose in the Declaration was to point out the unjust and illogical rule of the monarchy which is decided only on devine right instead of popular need. Jefferson's reasoning for what should be the institution of government, appealed to anyone who felt that their political decisions were being done without their consent and without it, it was a time for a new government.

Observation:

   

   One of my favorite things about spring is the blossom trees, but this year, a cold front has killed a large portion of the blossom petal's, causing them to fall prematurely. Most of the tree's were yet in full bloom and have already shed there petals, which is very unfortunate not only to the trees but to everyone who enjoyed their beauty. My purpose for bring up this observation, is to bring to light the effects of climate change by bringing up a small, yet very noticeable change. If we do not look around now and start to act, we as a whole could not only lose the famous blossom season but also many important natural effect which keeps this planet stable.

   

REHUGO

Reading: I don't remember much of the fourth grade but what I do remember was the ELA test. It was one of first major tests I had to take, but unlike most major tests I have taken in my life I actually remember a lot of it. I remember it being a large collection of short stories. I remember one of them being about the moon being stuck in a well, another about machines run by wined up gears, and another about a man who was riding a horse at night. I was not a very good reader for most of my life but I remember reading these stories and I remember them more than anything I read in AP Literature  last year.

Entertainment and Arts: Like most people, I love to watch movies. I would not say I have a favorite genre or period of films, I might just have a favorite film in every category, but I have notice recently a trend in modern films. It seems that the modern film industry has stopped trying to make original films or at least stopped trying to make unoriginal films seem original. 2011 was dubbed the year of the sequels, because of how many movies released were just continuations of other movies. I don't have anything against sequels but I was repelled from going to the movies this year, because I wanted to avoid a feeling of deja'vu.

History: In 1258, the mongol empire invaded the city of Baghdad. It was a total massacre and is believed to be the beginning of the end to the Islamic golden age. There is one story from this siege which has lasted throughout the ages. In Baghdad stood the house of wisdom, which was believed to be the largest library at the time. During the siege, the mongol invaders destroyed the library, took all of the thousand years collection of books, and through them into the Tigris river. The river ran black for weeks and to this day there are traces of ink at the bottom of the Tigris.

Universal Truth: "Life means suffering" This is one of the four noble truths of Buddhism. No matter what happens in life, at some point everyone will experience suffering. There is no way to avoid suffering. That being said, at some point everyone will experience happiness as well. There is no way to get rid of either feeling, happiness and suffering will always be there, its just how much of which is experienced.

Government: I don't like to think about government that much, it just ends up making me very upset. I do not like how big of a part politics play in social lives. Democrats won't talk to Republicans and vice versa. I feel like Government has just come down to a coke and pepsi argument instead of actually trying to work things out and get things done, people involved in government seem to be obsessed with making the other side look bad. When people are put into categories, we no longer see them as people anymore, and when this mentality goes all the way up to the U.S government, makes me feel like the government has resorted to a childish, back seat brawl.

Observation: During the summer, I saw a firefly on my stairwell early in the morning. It had stopped flying and was only letting out small blinks. I stood and watched it for a while and I felt bad for it. I never likes bugs, but the poor thing was slowly dying on my stairwell, and I wanted to help it, but I did not know how. After a while I left it there and when I went back a few hours later, I could not find it anymore. I still think about that firefly, and it makes me feel good that I will not let it be forgotten.

Five Favorite links

The links are not in any real order, I like them all but in different ways.

http://www.thisisnotporn.net/
   Don't judge the link by its name. This Is Not Porn is a site that finds photos of famous actors, musicians, and other famous people that are just them doing things you would expect to find in your own family album. Most of the photos are silly, but some are really beautiful. This is a site that I go onto when I am bored and it makes me feel happier. I like the idea of celebrities being what they are, people, not unreachable idols.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
   I love films and everything to do with films. This is a trait me and my oldest sister share. When I get stumped by a question about a movie or actor I go to this site to find it out. I used to go to rottentomatoes just to look up who was in what, but then I started to pay attention to the rating system they have. good movies are fresh and bad movies are rotten and I got hooked on seeing which movies are considered good or bad by critics and movie fans alike. I started looking up different actors to see what movies they were in that were rotten and which ones were fresh and I have yet to find one actor that has not been in at least one rotten movie. Sometimes I do not agree with the site about movies it deemed rotten but I do find it one of the best sites to go to when I want to find a fresh movie to watch


http://www.cracked.com/
   One of the things I love most in this world are really strange facts and stories, but it is always hard to find out if they are true or not, and that is where my love for cracked.com came from. Cracked is a site filled with hundreds of articles about unusual facts in science, history, media, and literature. All of the articles have a link to where the information came from and it is almost always from a trustworthy site. But unlike most weird fact sites, cracked has a staff of fantastic writers. Most of the articles are written with a dry humor which I find witty and hilarious.


http://betterbooktitles.com/
   I don't go on this site often but when I do I always laugh. This is a site that re-names famous books with titles that are more fitting to the content in them. For a lot of the "better" titles you would have had to read the book to understand it, so some of the jokes I do not get, but the ones that I do I find clever or just funny.

http://xkcd.com/
   Their are many comics on the internet, but xkcd is one of my favorites. The comics are very simple stick figures, but the dialogue is fantastic. Unlike most comics which stay focused on one subject and mainly tell a different variation of the same joke, xkcd makes comics about a variety of things, and jokes that are well thought out and witty.

Monet Water Lilies

   This is one of my favorite pieces of artwork, but I have never been positive of why exactly. It is one of my mothers favorite paintings and has been around me since I was a child but I never really looked at it, just accepted it as a part of the furniture.
   I looked at it for the first time when I was fourteen. Me and my sister went to the MoMA with our father, she had been there before but it was my first time. It was one of the rare days when it is not crowded. We went around the museum, saw some interesting things like a wall that moved whenever the person next to it did, and not so interesting things like a whole gallery filled with different types of stains, but my sister was on a mission to find a painting by her favorite artist Salvador Dali.
   We asked around and it turned out they only had one painting on display by Dali at the moment on the eighth floor. She went off to look for it and my father followed her because she has a habit of wandering. I was following slightly but a bright corner of blue caught my eye. I went down to one of the back galleries that had barely anyone in it and thats were I saw Monet's Water Lilies for the first time.

   What I never knew about the painting is that it is huge, taking up a whole wall. The copies I had grown up with were never as beautiful, as captivating as it is in person. The size of it makes it seem like an actual lake. I felt like I was in the painting, in its almost dream like appearances, its serene colors, its slightly distorted brush work which makes it feel all too much as if it is a memory I had forgotten.
   I dont know how long I stood in front of it, but my father called me out of my rapture. They had found the Dali painting and were heading back downstairs. I went with them back downstairs, leaving the water lilies behind, but anytime I think of a piece of artwork, my mind first goes to that blissful realm, beside the lilies.

Table of Contents

Self Reflection

  Wisdom Paper

    Synthesis Essay

      Five Favorite Links

        Water lilies     

                                   Here is a picture of a Sith Penguin to spice things up :)

Self Reflection

   I am a little nervous about posting my work online. I don't think any of my work this year is awful, but I know it is not my best. I do think my writing has gotten better, but I know I have not been working as much as I should be. I have not done that many re-writes and I have not really tried new things, I have been sticking with what I know will get me a passing grade.
   I do like the idea of an electronic portfolio, but I am nervous about creating one. We did something similar at the end of the year in AP Literature, but it was a little less professional than this. I do hope that I did a good enough job on this, and hope that anyone who reads it will enjoy my writings.

Synthesis Essay

The Loss of Worldliness in Literature

            Variation is key to understanding. A student must not just look at one type of literary work, modern, post-modern, historical, fantasy, fiction, or non-fiction, but all of these genres thruout their studies. If a writer does not just look for the same ideas and motifs for their work, then why should a student just learn one section of literature?

            Schools in other countries, as well as in private schools in the U.S., judge what to teach based on a canon standard. The canon is a group of literary works chosen by “influential critics, museum directors and their boards of trustees, and for more lowly scholars and teachers” (Landow). It looks like a sound group of judges with literary backgrounds, but they all are “hangers on of high culture that of the Victorian period.” the selected works are all of the same type, western literature, allowing no variation in study. Students under the canon may learn everything of the great Elizabethan poets but nothing of the Japanese epics of the 12^th century.

            The Canon will exclude a majority of cultural masterpieces because of the judge’s fondness for Western dramas. This is a loss to the knowledge of these foreign tomes, which was proven by researches Florez-Tighe to have a positive effect on language development and racial acceptance among children (Pirofski). Not only are these anthologies aiding in children's lack of cultural understanding but the understanding of literature all together. Iimportant pieces that identify the writer can be simply left out of the canon, giving a whole different meaning to the authors work, like Whitman's “Song to Myself” as stated by Greer of Eshlemans strategy. When Eshleman handed this poem to his students the subject that was discussed in the anthology was replaced by a greater subject of what is socially acceptable.

            The canon anthologies tend to simplify the students studies in school. All that is required to read is placed in one volume of work with an image which may have nothing to do with what is inside the text itself (Mack). But student’s adventures in scholarly achievement should not be left to what a group of scholars from a different generation who yearns for a past literary golden age to decide. A student must have variation and the canon will not provide this. It is a conformity which many have wrote of the dangers of, but a student in an anthology based class will never know this, because dystopian writings are not on the canon.

Wisdom Paper

Wisdom and Knowledge, Not a Black and White Situation

           To understand wisdom is to understand the catch phrase of the board game Othello “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” Like the catch phrase, it takes a few minutes to learn something but to obtain wisdom from this knowledge takes years to develop. Othello is in a group of games which anyone can learn to how the game works the first time playing, but cannot win on knowledge alone. If a Harvard graduate and a high school dropout were to play Othello against each other and both had played before and were of equal ability to play, they may be tied in their skill. In the world of Othello, or any mastery game, we are all equal in knowledge, what sets us apart in these games is wisdom.

            Wisdom is action based on understanding and logic attained and stored from past events in a person's life. This knowledge and action is used for the public good and without the purpose of use, as Schaefer points out in his writings on Aristotle's theories, wisdom becomes merely prudence.

Prudence and wisdom are separable from one another, since men like An Axagaoras and Thales, being apparently "ignorant of what is to their own advantage," are said to have the latter but not the former, and are thought to "know things that are remarkable, admirable, difficult, and divine, but useless; viz. because it is not human goods that they seek" (VI.7). But if it is the mark of the prudent man to possess knowledge, i.e., a reasoned understanding of the goals of action, and if the political philosopher is the architect of the end with reference to which what is good simply is determined, we must wonder how far it is possible to be prudent in the strict sense without possessing philosophic wisdom.

Yet, action alone is not what makes a person wise. Action must be based on events, knowledge and theories which are understood beforehand in order to be considered wisdom.

            Due to a great misunderstanding, many who have a grasp of knowledge are mistaken as wise, as people who can comprehend and act with sufficiency, yet do not know they posses knowledge are mistaken as being absent of wisdom. In Aristotle's words "some who do not know, and especially those who have experience, are more practical than others who know." This is the reason why a graduate from Harvard and a high school dropout can be equal opponents in Othello.  This is practical wisdom which every human is capable of. “Practical wisdom is not the prerogative of the few, but is accessible to all. Even so, it is not an automatic acquisition. To begin with, individuals have a certain responsibility, along with parents and teachers, for what they become” (Almond). We all have brains; we just use them in different ways.

            Just because knowledge alone does not make a person wise, it does help. Knowledge is a great way to obtain understanding and comprehension. If everyone were to learn by action alone, half the population of the planet would be dead. “Knowledge can and indeed must accompany wisdom. People need knowledge to draw upon in rendering judgments-knowledge of human nature, of life circumstances, or of strategies that succeed and those that fail” (Sternberg). Knowledge is the addition to wisdom which makes the actions associated with a wise person much easier to comprehend.  Someone without knowledge, but with wisdom, would have to explain their actions within their own understanding which can be confusing and easily mis-judged, while a person with knowledge and wisdom could explain their thoughts and actions in a way which is already known and comprehensible.

            The connotation of wisdom is usually of an older person who has lived through many experiences and has acted upon them in ways which they have seen to be successful or unsuccessful. In some ways it is true that the older a person is, the more wisdom they have.  In studies taken assessing wisdom, the older participants were proven more successful then the younger ones.

Such a finding suggests that, as we continue our search for top performances, the "world record" in wisdom-related knowledge may very well be held by someone in the last season of life, someone rather old who has not been struck by a brain disease and has participated in a favorable, wisdom-prone set of life circumstances. (Bales)

 The collection of wisdom mainly relies on life experience so it only makes sense that someone who has had more life experience would have compiled more wisdom than someone who has yet to have as many experiences. But this does not mean that younger people lack wisdom. The saying “wise beyond his age” did not come out of nowhere. There are many young people who have seen events, taken action before their time, and amassed massive amounts of knowledge before many of their older counterparts. Yet, at some point, they too will grow old and in their old age will have even more knowledge than when they were young.

            In order to have a stable society, the people of that society must have wisdom (Almond). In a civilization that lacks or has forgotten the importance of wisdom, the lives of its people are usually inadequate and miserable and its government broken. But after seeing this downfall and corruption, the people of this society grow knowledgeable and wise from their harsh surroundings. Nearly every golden age rises from the ashes of a dark age. The Renaissance arose from the Dark Ages, The Pax Mongolica from the Huns devastating conquests, The Elizabethan Age from the Reign of the Tudors. All of these golden ages came from the knowledge and wisdom developed during such dark times. Unfortunately, this wisdom can only be passed down for so many years, and the dark times are forgotten, along with them, the wisdom they birthed.

            Every human, from their first moments of breath to their last, has strived for wisdom. Many claim to be wise, but they are merely prudent, lacking great action and use of their knowledge. The true character of a person is not the knowledge they have but the wisdom they have developed.

Works Cited

Almond, Brenda. “Seeking Wisdom”, Philosophy, Vol 72.281 (Jul, 1997), 417-                

   433, JSTOR

Baltes, Paul and Staudinger, Ursula “The Search for a Psychology of Wisdom  

     Current Directions in Psychological Science”, Vol 2.3 (Jun, 1993), 75-80, 

     JSTOR

Schaefer, David L. “Wisdom & Morality: Aristotle's Account of Akrasia”, Polity

     Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1988), pp. 221-251, JSTOR

Sternberg, Robert J. “What Is Wisdom and How Can We Develop It?” Annals

     of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 591, Positive

     Development: Realizing the Potential of Youth (Jan, 2004), 164-174, JSTOR