Blog #4 - Muhammad Chaudhry - Period 9 - 2/10/2020

Staten Island Technical HS                                        Ms. Peterson, Instructor
Mr. Erlenwein, Principal                             Blogger Number 4

February 10th

Muhammad Chaudhry Period 9

Aim: How does Kurt Vonnegut Jr.s background and choice of literary devices provide greater insight and clarity to his work, “Harrison Bergeron”?

Do Now:Think/Pair/Share “fitting in” is sometimes viewed as a necessity. How can it become a handicap? What can be done to prevent it from becoming one?

• Fitting in isn't always easy and not possible for others
• We want to be surrounded with people that have the same interests and personality as us so we can have a sense of belonging. Someone who can't change themselves to fit in feels depressed or sad and lonely. People who do “fit in” sometimes lose their sense of who they are as a unique person. To prevent handicapping, people should always have a sense of self and never should be forced to think alike when they have differing opinions.

Literary Terms

Theme-

• A central message or concern or insight into life expressed through a literary work
• Can be expressed by one or two sentence statements about human beings or about life
• May be stated directly or implied
• Interpretation uncovers the theme

Dialect-

• Spoken language used by a large group of people 
• Not a special language but it's the way people say stuff

Our way of saying things in New York is faster and we drop some words so we say knew yolk.

Location has a lot to do with how we say things and why we say these things.

It’s like people having different accents from the same language.

Conflict-

•  Struggle between opposing forces.
• Internal/External Conflict.

Internal Conflict-

• Battle in a characters mind
• Facing their own emotions and mixed feelings and deciding what is right and wrong.
• It's like having a moral dilemma, you have to think deeply about what is the right choice with many factors that play in your decisions.
• Character v. Self Conflict

In Macbeth,when he says to himself, “should I do this?” He was thinking about his actions and if he should be doing this and if it is the right thing. This is internal conflict.

External Conflict-

• Struggle with an outside force
• Maybe in Nature, Another Character or a Community.

For example, one external conflict is Having an argument with someone about something.

Also Hurricane Sandy was a major external conflict that affected everyone back in 2012.

Some more examples are underneath.

Reflection: Today I learned that words like handicap don't always mean something that sets someone back or a word that has a negative connotation. It could mean giving someone a head start. I also learned what dialect meant in a more easy way that I can understand. This is useful knowledge because it helps me learn that many people can speak one language based on geography which is really bizarre. I guess your surroundings affect your speech. I can now skillfully differentiate between the different types of conflict and determine whether its internal or external which will help me when analyzing and annotating any text I am reading.