My Life in a Blog

This is gonna be my last post for 2016, so i'm gonna keep it nice and simple. Last week in class was kinda hectic. We had a snow day Monday so our plans had to be rearranged a little bit. Through the week we finished reading The Crucible. At first I didn't quite understand the satirical aspects associated with the book, and I couldn't understand what it was trying to illuminate. But after our socratic seminar on Friday, i understood the meaning of the book. It had a great amount of exaggeration, social irony, and it basically highlighted the mistreatment of women and the accusations associated with them. My classmates explained how throughout the book Elizabeth was always the weaker submissive character, but at the end of the book, she switched roles with John Proctor and took the dominant role. That was an example of irony because it showed the drastic change between roles in their relationship. After having the socratic seminar the book is much clearer to me.

This week in class we continued our venture into satire. I think i'm finally starting to understand what  satire is really meant to be. It is meant to highlight an area of concern in our society by finding all the wrongs and  explicitly mentioning them in a humorous tone. To be completely honest, i'm having a little trouble finding the satire in The Crucible. Either I don't fully understand the language that the book is reading, or i'm not paying close enough attention to the piece at hand. We read some more satire pieces in class and annotated and wrote a synthesis piece about how articles relating to mass hysteria connect to The Crucible. My article was about this group of girls in New York who was convinced that they were under a spell of some sort. On the contrary though, it was a mind game that they were playing with themselves. The whole witchcraft concept of this piece really interests me, and I can connect it back to APUSH, and the Salem Witch Trails.

So this week in class we started a new topic. We started to drift away from the constant pursuit of the American Dream and started to focus on Satire. Satirical writing is like writing with a comedic, ironic, and sarcastic lens to highlight social or political issues in our world. Honestly, I am a little bit worried about this piece of writing. I am already an extremely sarcastic person and use a lot of comedy when I talk, so I am afraid I will use too much sarcasm and effectively make my piece ineffective. I don't want my writing to become a joke, so I will have to have a lot of practice with this theme. So far, I like the pieces of writing we've looked at, and enjoy the lens itself.