Spaces, for Class and Work

For today's 20/20, Anya and I read What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace? I think that it's at least an interesting read, although it may not be my favorite. As someone who is starting to think about what I want to do with my life over the next 10 years, this article provided an explanation …

The Great Gatsby: Chapters 7-9

(This contains spoilers for The Great Gatsby) I'm not very surprised by Gatsby's death. It seems to me there are very few ways Fitzgerald could have wrapped up a story such as this, and certainly fewer still in so few pages. There's something oddly soothing, too, in his death. The reminder that for all of …

The Great Gatsby: Chapters 4-6

(There are The Great Gatsby spoilers in this) I don't know how a book earns the title of "a classic." I don't know if someone just writes it into a review, or it's earned over time, or if there is some special initiation ceremony. But somehow, somewhere along the way, The Great Gatsby received the …

The Great Gatsby: Chapter 1-3

(There are The Great Gatsby spoilers in this) For AP Lang, Anya and I decided to read The Great Gatsby, an American classic. Because it has nine chapters, every three chapters I will write about my thoughts so far. I am a feminist, and for me that means what happens to women in books stands …

Trees and Ecosystems

(This was written in 20 minutes, please forgive mistakes). Nature is an interesting thing. As humans, we've been studying and using and talking about nature since practically our beginning, but we are not separate of nature. We don't create nature, yet we sometimes act as if we do. In Norse Mythology, the Tree of Life …

The Republic: Book One

(This was written in 20 minutes, so please excuse any mistakes). One of the big themes in Book One of Plato's The Republic is justice. Socrates gets this groups started on this long one-sided argument about what is just, what is unjust, who is a just man, and who is an unjust man and so …

Allegory of the Cave, Part II

Culture is an interesting thing. Basically, a group of people gets together and decides, "This is how we want to live," and bam, it's a culture. But the key part there is that it's a group of people, a community. This idea came up in the discussion I had with Anya today after our reread …

Essential Qualities of a High School Graduate

(This was written in 20 minutes, so please excuse any mistakes) In Part 2 of #EdJourney, Grant Lichtman has his master list of the “Essential Qualities of a High School Graduate” which is comprised of words that high schoolers came up with. Some of these words seemed pretty similar to me at first glance, so …

Does Imagination Depend on Exposure?

(Just so you know, this was written in 20 minutes, so please excuse any mistakes). On Monday, Anya and I read "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato out loud and then found various responses to it so we could see how other besides ourselves viewed it. Sometime people talked about education, or religion, or even …

A Study in Style

Blog Post Prompt: Do we need to like everything we read? Why? The definition of the verb form of need is “[to] require (something) because it is essential or very important.” So while we don’t need to like everything we read, we do need to read things we don’t like. Everything written was written for a …