Friday, May 1, 2020

Blog #26 - Rachael Zeng - Period 1 - 4/28/2020

Blog #26- 4/28/20 - Rachael Zeng - Period 1 - Freshmen 2020

Our aim for this lesson was “How does Odysseus' strategic leadership further characterize him as an epic hero in "The Sirens" episode of Homer's Odyssey?”, and our do now was to choose between the three morals from Aesop’s Fable and to paraphrase/explain it. 

Working from home is nice and seemed alright at first due to being able to communicate with my teachers and peers without physically being with each other, but it became more stressful after my wifi connection became unstable, and I was unable to submit and view certain assignments, causing me to have a larger workload than other students. However, it isn’t terrible, as I can work on my own time. 

My current thoughts and feelings about the quarantine and the virus overall are very jumbled. I feel that the current situation I am in is fine, as we still have food and other necessities (except for a stable wifi connection, so I can’t work very consistently), but I know that the situation is more dire, and my family is beginning to get restless. And despite getting more rest than I normally do, I’m feeling much more tired than usual. All the days feel the same, and I’m losing track of what day of the week it is. I’m just very grateful that when my mother got tested positive for COVID-19, she did not infect anybody else and was relatively fine while the virus was active. 

What I’m learning from my community based off of their reactions is that for the most part, our community keeps to themselves, an exception being my family and my cousins, as we live next to each other and take turns going out for groceries. However, my online friends appear to be taking the quarantine quite well (from what I see, at least), their only problem being online classes. 

Some of the more important notes from today’s lesson (in my opinion) is the foreshadowing that could be seen in lines 701 - 703 of the reading. It states that “Then all at once the wind fell, and a calm / came over all the sea, as though some power / lulled the swell.” As Mrs. Peterson had said, it was like the metaphor “calm before the storm”, as a few lines after this, Odysseus begins to struggle to escape and become lured in by the sirens’ songs. Something I just happened to find interesting was the different ways that the sirens were represented in literature and media. In one video, the sirens were said to be half bird half person, while in books and movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean, sirens are more mermaid-like. Are their songs really that enchanting? Do they actually sing well? I have a few unanswered questions, but I’m not expecting actual answers to them.


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