Blog #3- Anthony Butsikares- Period 3- 02/06

Today in class we began reading the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It is centered around the ongoing theme we have been discussing in class, which is about equality. It’s centered around a society where everything is equal, and everyone must be lowered to others standards in order to achieve “equality.” People that were too perfect had to all be given impediments so that they were no longer better than others. We are continuing the story tomorrow in class, and will continue to focus on the lesson that true equality is not possible, or even plausible.
We also learned a bit about the author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He was born in 1922, in Indiana, and died in 2007. He was an author who flourished on the theme of satire writing. Satire is a new vocabulary word we learned today as well. It is a piece of literature/ performing arts that openly mocks other people or themes. Satire is often meant to be humorous, but also is focused on improvement of whatever is being looked at.
The short story we looked at today was a good example of a dystopian setting. Dystopia is a word to describe a setting with extreme suffrage and injustice. This is typically in a post-apocalyptic environment.
Lastly we looked at the STEAL strategy for characterization, which is split in 2 parts, direct and indirect. Direct means that the author explicitly describes a character, while indirect forces the reader to make inferences. STEAL is for identifying indirect forms of this. The S stands for Speech (what does the character say). T is for thoughts (what is revealed about what the character is thinking). E is for their effect on others; A is for their actions. Lastly, L is for looks, and their appearance.
Overall, I thought this lesson was a very good introduction to characterizing characters, and helped me get into the short story a bit as well. Now I’m looking forward to our vocabulary game tomorrow!
-Anthony