3/6/2018 0 Comments Reading Analysis Mp 4Reading books with tougher subjects can sometimes be hard. Previous to this year I did would not read any books with difficult subjects. However, this changed this marking period when I read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood . The Handmaid's Tale was difficult to read due to the topic of the book because it focuses on enforcing gender roles specifically in favor of males . The novel takes place in a Utopian world where the religious government has taken over and have greater a strictly male dominant society. This book hard core objectify woman and their bodies. From the standpoint of a women I found this novel difficult to read because it was saying that women were way less than men and made me feel attacked. It also shows how people can limit want people hear in order to gain power and their favor because the commanders in the book pick and choose what the tell the women. Although it was difficult to read, after I finished the book I found the value in the topic covered. I realized that although gender roles are a sensitive topic they should be discussed because it is a thing that silently takes place daily.
This marking period I also read I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai. I also found this book difficult because it talks about how Malala was shot by the Taliban. I also found great value in this because I am a strong believer that people should tell their stories because other people’s heartbreak and healing can bring hope to others. It also did a good job explaining gender roles because it states the day to day struggles of being a women in Pakistan. This marking period I enjoyed learning more about Gender Roles. Overall this marking period I read a total of 615 pages. Which is about 102 pages a week. This trimester I believe my stamina for reading has grown because now I read for longer periods of time and more frequently resulting in me completing more books or pages.
0 Comments
Struggles with the way"The Handmaids tale" approaches gender RolesFor my Trending Topics blog I chose to dig into gender roles because as a woman I find gender roles to be very degrading to women for they limit what we can do. For my final blog post I chose to do a top ten list looking at the ten ways gender roles exists in The Handmaids Tale compared to ways gender roles existed before the women's rights movement. Features of the projectWhen first choosing this project I was planning on focusing on ways that gender roles were being broken in the book. However when I started reading The Handmaids Tale I found myself super frustrated because gender roles were not being broken but enforced throughout the novel. This conflict helped me develop a new way of approaching my topic. I began to realize that many of the roles stated in the novel were gender roles that greatly existed before the women’s rights movement. This helped me focus on ways that gender roles have changed and see that some no longer exist in the US. This helped me develop a more positive approach to gender roles because it showed me that it is a progressive topic revealing hope for the future. The text features experience really helped shape the structure of my blog. Normally when approaching a blog I just write them in a few decent length paragraphs but this can get boring to look at and stressful for the eyes to read. When I looked at the text features on other blogs I really liked how they had everything split up into short paragraphs. I also liked the way they had there quotes formatted, as a reader it helped me pay more attention to the quotes. These two text features essentially shaped my blog. The short paragraphs helped me come up with the idea of ten ways gender roles exist in the novel and ten ways they existed before the women's rights movement. The use of quotes helped me tie my ideas together with the bastards quotes from “The Handmaid's Tale”. Overall I feel focusing on other peoples text features helped me see new ways to write blog. Before this marking period I had never heard of taking book snaps. Honestly, at first I thought the concept of book snaps were really stupid and extra. As I was doing them I found them to be annoying because you had to stop reading in order to get a picture of the page. I also find it as a huge distraction due to the fact that when I would take a picture I would get distracted by the notifications on my phone. But, when I went to go start writing my blog I appreciated the book the snaps I had taken. The book snaps made it easier to remember where gender roles existed in the novel. It also helped me better organize my thoughts because I could look at the snaps and decide how I wanted to approach instead of writing on a sticky note exactly how I wanted to use it and feeling limited to my original thoughts. I believe not having an original intent with the snaps helped me have creative freedom when writing my blog post. Although I’m still not necessarily a huge fan of the book snaps because I get distracted easily, I do see the value in them and view them a necessary evil. Overall I believe this project helped me apply literature into everyday life. I believe this is a valuable thing to know because it's easy to read a book and think it is not a scenario that would ever exist in real life. This was the case for me with The Handmaids Tale, for it seemed very unlikely that the US would have a religious government take over and essentially lock up women. However, I was able to see real life value in this extreme take on gender roles which essentially shaped my learning experience and knowledge on gender roles. Also allowing me to see my big takeaway point which was that gender roles is a progressive topic. This reminded me that there is a positive side to gender roles because they have changed in a positive direction pretty dramatically over the last one hundred years. Overall this project was a good learning experience for me. 2/27/2018 0 Comments Breaking Down my wallI had always been told things would get better stay strong, But as the rain was falling my heart was flooding but it was flooding in Antartica, Frozen and shocked, The icebergs hitting me as the bad news was thrown at me like a thrawd of ice, As I sank deeper into the cold water everyone continued to tell me that everything would be ok, That I would be ok, that my family would be ok, But it was not ok that my anchor had been taken from me, The only person who I would melt around and show the pain deeply hidden behind the snow banks in my heart, had been crushed by the blizzard, The cancerous snowballs filling up his body, As his body filled with cancer my heart built a wall, Smiling as though everyone in your family fighting snowballs at the same time was normal, Everyone said they understood how hard it was but did they realize how it really felt, Everyone I had ever turned to was now the cause of pain but it wasn’t even their fault, As I stood day after day faking a smile as the storm threw me around, The wall went up higher thinking if I pretended that I’m fine maybe it would be true, But it wasn’t , As all sun light seemed to fade and I appeared to be the strongest one in my family, Someone told me that it was ok not to be , The walls came down, And I could breath above water once again. Notes from the AuthorMy poem "Breaking Down My Wall" Stemmed from the prompt that said to talk about one moment or object. I chose to talk about when my camp counselor told me it was OK not to be OK after my grandpa died from cancer and my grandma and mom both had cancer in that same year. I chose to write about this moment because it was an eye opening experience for me because up to that point in my life I was told to be strong all the time. However, this moment taught me that is OK to break down sometimes and I feel this is an important message for young people to hear because there's so much stigma around being strong all the time. My revisonsThe main revisions I made on this poem was the structure of the poem. Before I made revisions most of the lines were super long and did not vary in length in any way. When revising I chose to split up some of the lines to add emphasis on my main points. For example when I first wrote the poem the last two lines were combined but when I revised my poem I split them up. My favorite revision is where I say "As I sink deeper into the cold water everyone continued to tell me that everything would be OK,That I would be OK, that my family would be OK,". I really like the way I split the three lines of OK into two lines because I feel like this revision helped show my anger I was facing and adds rhythm to the poem. Overall I'm really happy with the way my poem turned out.
2/27/2018 0 Comments Is there hope for Gender Roles?Gender roles have existed in society for as long as anyone can remember. I have yet to see a time where men and women are completely equal. Gender Roles in the Handmaids Tale Realistic Or Unrealistic ?The book the Handmaid's Tale approaches gender roles a lot differently than most books. Many books about gender roles that are released these days focus on the ways gender roles have been broken but that is not the case for this book. The Handmaid's Tale highlights the gender roles that used to exist before the women's right movement. The books does this in a unique way by creating a dystopian world where the religious government has taken over women are assigned to be handmaids. The handmaid's only purpose in society is to have sex with her commander so he can have children. Although the story takes place in a dystopian universe it is important to recognize that the gender roles that exist are still realistic and match with the roles that once existed before the women's right movement. Ten Ways Gender Roles exist in The Handmaid’s Tale |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2018
Categories |