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