Since my English 1A class is coming to an end, I just want to say that every book that I have read in there were all great.  I enjoyed everyone in a different way, and I'll start off with Maya Angelou's book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.  It was a terrific book and was very interesting, I loved how powerful she made women.  I enjoyed her pride and her truthfulness along with her strength and dignity throughout the book. Then the book, The Things They Carried.  I absolutely loved the book as soon as I began reading it.  It was very catchy and interesting that kept me going throughout the book.  Last but not least, there are many wonderful articles in the book, Signs of Life in the U.S.A. There are many wonderful articles that have many arguments and stories that can teach us a lot of stuff or stuff that we can relate to.  Overall, I'm glad to say that I was not disappointed in any of the readings that I have done in my English 1A.

The overall readings in my English 1A class, I honestly love all of the readings.  I would have to say that my favorite book is The Things They Carried.  The book is just so intriguing that I would highly recommend everybody to read it.  It is not going to be a disappointment and it surely will not be a waste of time.  I also like the Book Signs of Life in the U.S.A because there are a lot of very interesting articles from many authors that have a strong opinion.  It has many articles that people can relate to or stand against, it all just really depends on the person. Honestly, the books were wonderful.  Never did I think that it was a waste of time reading.

For my extended essay, I have chosen to extend the paper that I feel I can talk about the most.  The paper can have so much good qualities if the time was taken to write and revise it.  The paper that I have chosen to extend more is the one that I personally chose to write which talks about high school, and how social media portrays it as something different. I already included the movie Mean Girls because I found it as a perfect example to use because it had plenty of examples that I needed.  Other examples that I thought about using are certain movies such as Never Been Kissed and Superstar.  These movies also help media portray high school as something evil and show other students what the expectations are like in high school.  A quote that came to my mind, which I though was a perfect example from Never Been Kissed is a quote from the character Rob Geller, “All you need is for one person to think you're cool, and you're in. Everyone else will be scared to question it”.  These kind of quotes give a perfect example of what children and teenagers will be looking forward to when they hit the high school age.  I wanted to talk about how they’ll (social media) uses these things and put images in their (teenagers) head to let being popular become the number one priority.  Overall, my goal is getting my point across and expanding my ideas and opinions onto this paper that I have chosen to extend.

The Thngs They Carried

From the chapters "Enemies" to "The Dentist" it mostly talks about the Curt Lemon and his death. Curt Lemon's death was caused from a booby trap in VC while playing a game that included tossing smoke grenades with one another. After the loss the best friend, Rat Kiley, goes a little insane. He ends up shooting a baby water buffalo, not to kill, but to torture. From what I think of Rat Kiley's actions, he is probably feeling angry, hurt, and sad from the death of his friend. He must've taken his emotions out on the baby water buffalo and which caused him to shoot it multiple times and leaving it heavily injured.

An article from the signs of life.

In the book Signs of Life in the USA there was an article by David Denby called, "High-School Confidential: Notes on Teen Movies".  The article talks about how movies display adolescents and how they exaggerate it.  In some movies media seems to portray the blonde hair and blue eyes girls as the head cheerleader, and the tanned tall handsome football player as the most popular students there is.  The losers of the school would be considered as some ugly geek with braces and thick glasses. In my response, yes, high school can be rough around the edges, but it is not as bad as people make it as in movies.  I think that the reason why adolescents act like some characters in the movies is because what is being shown on social media.

The Things They Carried

In the book, The Things They Carried is a very detailed and good book. I don't know if it was just me, but I found it a little confusing when the author was switching back and forth talking about events when the character was dead and when they weren't. It took me a couple of times to read over a few pages, but as I began to understand it really is a good book. Overall, I'm excited to read more about this book and find out more about the characters. 

Maya Angelou

I find Maya Angelou very interesting because she is intelligent, strong and beautiful. Her poem like, Still I Rise is so powerful that you can just feel all the emotions and mood of what is being read or said. When she makes her performance and speaks to her crowd, her tone and pitch of voice draws in her audience as she had done me. I think that Maya Angelou is just simply amazing, an inspiration to all.