Update!

One week until the beginning of summer vacation! I have a pile of papers to grade and a few more boxes to pack, and then I am officially on vacation. I am currently working on cleaning up, and I have a project going to digitize some of my teaching materials so they will take up less space.

I spent yesterday handing out yearbooks, and it was very nice to get rid of them all. It was one more right of passage...a little bittersweet, but good to be done.

This afternoon, we took a break to plant our garden...I have several pumpkin, a zuchinni, 2 Roma tomatoes, 3 heirloom tomatoes, a couple jalapeno plants, some lettuce, radishes, carrots, and herbs. Oh, and a watermelon plant, which I don't have high hopes for, but thought I'd try. We are getting very inventive with space to fit everything in.

Huck Finn

I do not think that tom should have made Jim do all the things he did to escape. He was having fun, but Huck and Jim don’t have imaginations, so they don’t understand why. Also, he almost got them in major trouble several different ways. It was also hard on Jim to put him through all of these things when they could have just let him out.
Huck likes to be with Tom, so he didn’t mind doing all of these things to let Jim free. Jim has no idea why he is doing these things and doesn’t know Tom well enough to “have fun” with him. It is just a burden on him, like when he says “I jis’ ‘s soon have rattlesnakes aroun’”, but he thinks white people know best, so he doesn’t argue (Twain 275). It added lots of unnecessary work to all three of them and almost didn’t work.
Huck and Tom were almost caught taking the spoons and sheets and clothes. They barely got all of the letters to the family warning them, and then tens of farmers came to stop them. They couldn’t do the full plan without getting caught, so they shortened it. Then Tom got shot in the leg. They could have just slipped away with him and avoided all of this trouble, but instead it backfired on them jus for Tom to have “fun”. I think Tom takes it way too far.

Endding to Huckleberry Finn

In the story “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, I think the ending could have been a more exciting. There could have been many, many different ways the good book could have ended. The ending was to plain. There wasn’t any “cool” or something that we didn’t expected to see happen at the end. Through out the whole book I was on the edge of my seat reading every word because there were a lot of things I didn’t see coming in the book. When I was reading the book I was thinking about all the possibilities of how the book was going to end.
I was disappointed that the story ended the way it did. I was thinking that Jim was going to die or he would be sold as a slave for the rest of his life. I didn’t want him to die because he is a African American, I thought that is how Twain was going to end it. I didn’t think that there was going to be a line in the story saying the “Now, old Jim, you’re a free man again, and I bet you won’t ever be a slave no more”. (Twain 289) I think Mark Twain could have credited a cleverer ending. There’s nothing I can do to change the ended because the man is dead and he wrote a pretty good book.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .New York: Penguin Book, 1986, 1884. Print

The Catcher in the Rye- Sarah Waltman

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden ends the story with saying that he was “sorry that [he] told so many people about it,” it meaning his problems, and also just his life story (214). He also states that he “sort of miss[es] everybody [he] told about” in the story, which was ironic because most of the people he described throughout the story he was always annoyed with, but these people also seemed to be his closest friends, such as Ackley (214). Holden, in my opinion, always seemed to be sort of lost with who he was as a person, and also with what he wanted to do with his life.

Holden had many people supporting him, and giving him advice to “have a fair idea where [he] wants to go,” and then his “first move will be to apply [himself] in school” (189). Holden gets advice about school from not only Mr. Antolini towards the end of the story, but also from Mr. Spencer in the very beginning of the story.

One thing that I have noticed throughout this story is that whenever Holden is around younger kids, like his sister Phoebe, or whenever he remembers times when he was little and playing with Allie, he is always “so damn happy” to see how happy the kids are, or remembering them happy anyways (213). For example, when Holden watched how happy Phoebe was when she was riding on the carrousel, “[he] was damn near bawling, [he] felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth” (213). Holden was also somewhat happy whenever he would look at Allie’s baseball mitt with poetry written all over it, and he would remember how “he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket… so that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and no one was at bat” (38).

Throughout the story, Holden’s self discovery was what really interested me, and in some ways I can relate with him about the troubles of trying to be free in your own world, but I don’t think I would run away like he did! Overall I really enjoyed this Novel.

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown, 1951. Print.

The Things They Carried

The book I’m reading, The Things They Carried, is a good book as I’m nearing the end. The author continues to talk about the friends that he lost while he was a soldier and what it was like for him to get wounded. He gets injured and is sent back to a safe environment. While he is there, his old platoon comes back to where Tim is to enjoy some time away from the brush. This point in the book is significant in many ways. While his old platoon is in the rear, Tim wants to get back at the rookie medic for making Tim suffer while he got shot in the hind quarters. The rookie medic, Jorgenson, tries to apologize to Tim but he refuses and still wants to get him back. When Tim goes to ask his old platoon for help in getting Jorgenson back they refuse. They say that Jorgenson was a new guy back then but now he is one of them. This angers Tim so he gets the help of Azar who is a “fun loving” kid who is always up for a trick. This made me feel sorry for Tim because his old platoon had moved on and he was no longer part of it. He felt abandoned and the author really makes you feel it.
Stephen Bradley

Catcher in the Rye-Aleia Amaya

Holden ends the story of The Catcher in the Rye by saying "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."(214) This shows many of Holden’s emotional and physical mind sets. He has attachment issues to anybody and everybody who enters his life, even for minutes at a time.
Throughout the story symbols similar to this are shown. The ducks constantly leaving widely catch the interest of Holden because of their flight pattern. He is constantly asking strangers if they know where “the ducks go in the wintertime?” (80). Then we see his attachment again while talking about the museum because “nobody’d move…nobody’d be different”(121)
His attachment to his little sister, Phoebe, is what brings him home in the end. This goes back to both the duck and museum symbolism. Holden is constantly lonely and having Phoebe back in his life made him “so damn happy all of a sudden”(213). Finally, Holden found his happiness and his comfort back in the people he had been avoiding. His family.
The Catcher in the Rye story Holden talks about catching all of the kids coming out of the rye as his job. He wants to keep all of the bad things from getting in the way of kids lives. Just like how he sees the F-word throughout all of the walls and gets angered because of the corruption it could cause for his sister and her friends. Holden is growing up, and realizing that obstacles come in life no matter what. All he wants is to protect who he can, because he’s tired of losing people in his life.


work cited:
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown, 1951. Print.

This is ALI KIRKPATRICKS TTTC

Good afternoon. I am currently reading the novel The Things They Carried. Today I plan on blogging about the horrible ending of this story. If the last chapter can even be considered an ending. “Timmy’s life with a story.” (246) is not considered an ending. I think that Tim should have created a much better ending. It seems like it just cuts off in the middle of a story or thought. When someone is writing a novel on the supposed events of a war it is completely necessary to have an ending that sums up the topic of the story. I think this should have ended by him describing life back at home after the war or a really interesting story that he heard while over seas but not just leave people hanging. I see this as the author not being creative enough to create an ending. Almost like when a song artist just lets the song fade out instead of having a fitting end. The only possible reason for this is that the author wants the reader to use their imagination to create an ending of their own but I still believe that if this was the case then Tim would have left us with something similar to a cliff hanger. However this is not here.

O’Brien Tim, The Things They Carried, Boston, MA. Broadway Books, 1990. Print