Emily’s Comments (group member since Sep 14, 2011)

Emily’s comments from the 815 Discussion group.

It is very difficult to answer the question, “If a man steals bread to feed his starving family, is he wrong?” without more information. Stealing is taking somebody else’s property without their permission. This is wrong. Sometimes, there is a very good reason for doing something wrong, but most times there is not. For example, pushing somebody is wrong, but if you push somebody out of the way of a truck that would hit him or her because that is the only thing you can do in a tiny amount of time, then the pushing is not wrong.

The example with the bread needs more facts. For example, if a man steals bread to feed his starving family in New York, he is wrong. There are a lot of places that people who have nothing can go to get fed. There are soup kitchens and churches and synagogues. There are organizations like “Share Our Strength” that help to feed the poor. Even begging for food is more honest than stealing. A person who doesn’t know where to start could go to a police person or police station to begin to help him or her. But maybe if you are very poor and maybe if you have done something wrong, you would be afraid to ask for the police for help. You might steal to help your family. That wouldn’t be right, but we could understand what happened. What if you were stealing from another poor person who only had enough food for his own family? Stealing can hurt the person or family or business you steal from. But maybe there are some times where stealing is still wrong, but is less wrong than in New York. For example, if you were in a war zone and you could be under attack just for being known, and your family was starving, then I can understand why you would have to steal to help your family to have food. Also, if you are suddenly poor, like if you are in a war area and your house blows up and you have nothing, then you couldn’t really plan ahead for you and your family, so stealing to stay alive would be understandable.

My character, Johnny, from the realistic fiction novel The Outsiders, fights for himself out of loyalty to the gang. Johnny is not a boy who likes to get together with his friends so that he can be bad. He doesn’t take actions to be like whoever is in power. That is what a conformist would do. Johnny is loyal to his gang, the Greasers. The Greasers are like a loving family to Johnny. If you are a Greaser, you look a certain way. Therefore, groups outside the Greasers, like the Socs, pick on him. For example, after Ponyboy and Johnny talked with Soc girls at a movie, the Soc boys attack Ponyboy and Johnny. Johnny kills Bob out of self-defense, not because is trying to be like a gang leader or because all Greasers are killers. This shows that Johnny is loyal to his family/gang because he chooses to hang out with certain people and look a certain way, not that he is a conformist. Another example is that Johnny does not go hold up people or fight just to get out energy like Dally. This shows that Johnny fights when he has to defend himself, not because he his trying to fit in with his group.

I am comparing the realistic fiction novel The Outsiders with the scene from the realistic play Pygmalion. There are several similarities between The Outsiders and the scene Pygmalion. For example, in The Outsiders, the heroes are lower class boys. In Pygmalion, the heroine is a lower class woman. Being lower class means that they are not accepted by classes higher up than they are. We can see this in Pygmalion when Mr. Higgins says to his housekeeper, “Well, when I’ve done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter; and then it will be her own business again; so that’s all right.” Higgins doesn’t even see Liza as a person with feelings. In The Outsiders, the boys don’t usually get to socialize with the pretty upper-class girls. One of the boys, Ponyboy, says (page 47) that, “It wasn’t fair for the Socs to have everything. We were as good as they were; it wasn’t our fault we were greasers. I couldn’t just take it or leave it.” These examples show that the higher classes don’t accept the lower classes as equals to socialize with. Another similarity is that in Pygmalion, upper and lower classes are shown by speech and physical appearance and not what is in their hearts. Higgins wants to do an experiment on Liza to make her seem like an upper class lady. Higgins wants to take her old raggedy clothes and dress her in new ones that look upper class and teach her how to talk like “a lady.” In The Outsiders, the boys are known for their greasy hair; they are “Greasers.” They talk differently from the high-class girls known as the Socs. On page 30, Ponyboy thinks that Two-Bit is speaking well when Two-Bit says to a Soc girl, “You dig okay, baby,” when he means “You understand.” These examples show that people are judged by what is seen and heard by them on the outside. They are not judged and accepted by how good they are as a person with their values.

Cherry is in the Socs group, a group of people who aren’t left out, and they do have a lot of money. The Greasers are outsiders that don’t have money, and they are left out. The Socs are rich kids, and the Greasers are poor kids. Cherry thinks that it is rough for the Socs (rich kids), and the Greasers (poor kids). I disagree with Cherry’s opinion because I don’t think that the Socs (rich kids) have a bad life. They have a lot of money, cars, clothes, and other things. They get to make better choices because of their privileges. I think the Greasers have a bad life because there is no money, cars, clothes, or other things. The Socs’ life was better because they got to do whatever they want, so they got to drive cars and go crazy. The Greasers had to do work and do chores to survive and have food, water, and homes. The Socs already had food, water, and homes. I disagree with Cherry when she said, “Things are rough all over” because the Socs have a lot of money and people with a lot of money have problems, but the Greasers have bigger problems and have a rough life.

Article read: "The iPod Turns 10"

1.) Genre: Informative article.
2.) Purpose: To inform readers about the beginning of the iPod and why the iPod is still significant ten years after it was released.

3.) CI: Without the Apple iPod, there would be no iTunes Store, iPhone, or iPad, and maybe no Apple company or paying music industry.

4.) Supporting Idea #1
a.) About a year and a half after the first iPod was released, Apple opened its iTunes Store and sold 200,000 songs at $o.99 per song within a week. In the first fifteen months, the iTunes store sold 100 million songs. The iTunes Store is still in business today.
b.) Because there was a successful iTunes Store, music got paid for instead of being stolen online. So the music industry got better.
c.) People got used to listening to music on a tiny machine that could hold a lot of music, a phone that could hold music got very popular. This is the iPhone.
d.) Because people go used to seeing videos and hearing music on little Apple machines, Apple could make a kind of little computer called the iPad which is very popular.
e.) Because Apple has made these great invention that began with the iPod which changed how people use media, the Apple Company is very strong.
f.) All this progress started with the iPod which came out ten years ago.

A while ago, I read “Notes from a Dragon Mom,” by Emily Rapp from the New York Times on Sunday, October 15, 2011. I printed it out so that I could read it again and again. It is by a mom who has a son with Tay-Sachs Disease. Tay-Sachs Disease is a genetic disease that will probably kill her son by the age of three. I think that Emily Rapp wrote this article to show what moms and families of kids with a deadly disease feel.

I think Emily Rapp was writing to other grown ups, especially parents. She talks about what parents want for regular kids. Emily Rapp says that most parents of regular kids try to make a lot of good choices for their kids’ futures. Then, she writes about what she expects for her son, Ronan. She says that all the decisions that she and her husband make won’t make Ronan live any longer. I think she wants all parents to appreciate their children in the present and not just in the future.

Emily Rapp gives fair information about Tay-Sachs. She writes about what the disease is. It is a rare genetic disorder. Then, she tells what it is like for her and her husband to have Ronan. She plays and cuddles with Ronan. She and her husband take good care of Ronan. They feed him fresh food, brush his teeth, and make sure he is clean and warm and well-rested. Then, she writes about what Ronan will never do. He will never walk or say “Mama.” His brain will shut down. Emily Rapp says that he will become paralyzed, have seizures, and lose all of his senses. She says that there is no treatment or cure. I began to look up Tay-Sachs Disease and almost everything that she said seems accurate about the disease. I don’t know if it is fair when Emily Rapp writes, “my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday,” because I researched this disease and found out that most kids who have it die by the age of five. Maybe the doctors told her that three was what she could expect for Ronan.

I brought two biases to this article before I read it. There is a picture of Emily Rapp with her son, Ronan. She is cuddling him on her shoulder. His eyes are closed. At first, all I thought was how he was a very cute baby. I did not want to believe that he will die in a short time. The article made me feel queezy. I wrote a short story about a boy with Tay-Sachs and I had him live until at least twelve years old. I hope kids will live longer even though they have Tay-Sachs Disease. Tay-Sachs seems so horrible. My other bias is that I thought that all children would grow to live longer than their parents. I think I don’t want to believe that there is no hope for kids with Tay-Sachs Disease, so I have been doing computer research about it. Maybe, someday, I can help to find an answer to this.

1.) Arnold tells Rowdy that he [Arnold] will “die” if he stays because Arnold tells his best friend about things that are deep inside his heart. Deep inside Arnold’s heart is that he knows what Mr. P said is true. Mr. P said that Indians on the reservation lose all their hope and end up not following their dreams or doing much of anything. Mr. P said that Arnold would have more and more hope when he got farther and farther away from the reservation. Arnold wants to have hope. Not having hope is “dying.” Arnold tells Rowdy the most important thing in Arnold’s heart. It is about having hope, but all he says is about going to Reardan.

2.) The book doesn’t say why Rowdy doesn’t go with Arnold to Reardan. But, in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Arnold tells us that Rowdy is a great athlete. He tells us that when they were competing against Reardan. Rowdy scored 24 out of 45 points in one basketball game and 40 out of 50 in another game. In baseball, Rowdy hit three home runs in one game and two home runs in the second. But the Indians never won a game against Reardan. The Indians and Reardan were rivals. Rowdy was an angry guy to begin with. He couldn’t dream of joining up with the kids (at Reardan) that he was mad at. Rowdy didn’t have much hope about things anyway, so why should he go to his rivals that hated for hope.

1.) Why would Mr. P want to “kill the Indian to save the child”?

When Mr. P says that, he means that the teachers were trying to end Indian culture, not really kill people. The white teachers thought that the Indian culture was not important and productive. He used to think that Indians would be more productive if they got rid of their songs, stories, language, and dances. Stopping the Indian culture is what “killing the Indian” means. “Saving the child” means not giving up making their dreams come true. But Mr. P changed a little. Now, he thinks that the only way to have hope is to get away from sadness. Getting away from sadness means leaving the reservation.

2.) Think of the following quote: What does Arnold mean? Why might she prefer being “trapped”?
“My sister had become a humanoid underground dweller. There wasn’t much romance in that. Or maybe there was. Maybe my sister read romances all day. Maybe she was trapped in those romances.”

So far, in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alex has talked about Indians who used to have great dreams about their future but gave them up. His mom wanted to go to college but didn’t. His dad could have been a professional saxophone player or singer but wasn’t. When Alex has to go to talk to his teacher, Mr. P, Alex learns from Mr. P that his sister wanted to be a romance writer. He also learns that his sister wrote short romance stories and had romance books that she hid. But his sister Mary doesn’t write stories anymore. She gave up. She wanted to go to college but didn’t. His sister has given up her dreams. Instead of doing something creative or making her dreams come true, she is just escaping into her reading world which could make her feel better while she is reading. So she reads all day in the basement. But a trap is something that keeps you from escaping. So, she does nothing but read her romance stories all day, but it keeps her from having her real life and escaping her poverty and sadness.

Interview of My Mom About Her Art Journal

My mom does artwork in a large spiral-bound book that she bought at the end of last year. The book has large pages of rough, watercolor paper. She loves to write and make art in it to remember her day. Before she writes in it, she designs different backgrounds. Mostly, she paints the backgrounds, but sometimes she collages lightweight papers like colorful tissue paper, or an interesting napkin. She writes on top of these with either a black marker or a silver marker. My mom chooses which marker to use based on what will show up on the background.

For New Year’s Day, my mom painted the background pink. She colored a stamp of a circus tent in orange, purple, and red, and stamped it on the page. We went to the circus that day, so that’s why she used an image of the circus. She collaged pictures of my brother and me onto the page from under the real tent of the circus, and a ticket to the show, plus an image of the Grandma clown. My mom used other pictures as reminders of pieces of the day, and she painted an orange border around the whole thing. She drew small snowflakes and painted some white dots on the border. You can’t smell the paint anymore from that day, but she painted a little today on later pages in her journal and you can still smell the paint and glue from that. She has painted many pages in between January 1 and today. On one, she put down a bunch of string and spray painted over it in different colors. She has four little bottles of spray paint. One is a beautiful blue like the part of the sunset over the orange. Another is orange. The third and forth paints are a blood red and a lettuce green. The spray paint comes out speckled and the place underneath the string looks like a chrysanthemum. Sometimes she starts pages, but has to wait to finish them later. When she is drying pages, she puts waxed paper under the painted pages. When the wind blows, you can hear the wax pages crinkling. That is a very gentle noise.

My mom says she wishes she could write and paint everyday, but some days there is no time to do it. She says that when she is painting or doing other art on her pages, she can think without words. My mom says that when she is working in her art journal, she feels like her lungs are filled with the purest air and she can float.