Sunday, July 28, 2019
I think the most important part of this journey was the end. It was that final step of the culmination of readings and thinkings that pulled out the essential messages. These final assignments were the results of being thrown all this information by thinkers, and finding the commonality and the linking factor between them all. And I think I found it: thinking. It may seem general, vague, or silly to say that thought is what connects them all, but in reality that's what makes it special. Thought is a complex and interesting trait to have. It allows us to step inside of something and wonder about it, something that had been dived into in a Brain Pickings piece I read. I can't imagine life without thought. Almost everything would be bland, label-less, and some things might even been undiscovered or non-existent. Things would just be. We wouldn't have the power to consider what could be, why things are, and how things are. It makes you grateful for something that's consistency used all the time, but we don't think about how much we appreciate it too much.
In my concept map, I wanted to convey this connectedness of nature. Thinking is the center of the piece, with everything revolving around that word, and coming back to it.
When doing my rhetorical analysis on Popova, the first thing that stood out to me was the consistent use of quotes. Immediately, I knew I wanted that to be the biggest part about my concept map. In replicating her style, the I wanted to capture the essence of the original words to communicate the main themes and most important messages I retained from the readings, because in some cases paraphrasing can remove some of the "thunder" or "pizazz" that it initially had.
From the beginning of my AP Lit Summer Work, I was more excited to deal with some of the more philosophical thoughts that the readings would hold, and how I'd mentally tackle it. However, as I said in my other posts, I was worried that I wouldn't understand the readings due to the difficulty I had interpreting the words of A.O. Scott. Luckily, I was able to grasp onto the meaning of the latter passages, and Popova's Pieces also came easily to me. While it was a lot of work for the summer and took a ton of effort to piece together the main themes and comprehend what was going on in these passages, I think it was an experience that will build upon my knowledge and what I can do in the future.
I'm interested to see what we do in AP Lit with this. I'd imagine that we'll take classic texts or even modern texts and think about the more philosophical or complex ideas thrown at us, and do what we can to question their ideas, criticize, and see what they did and could have done.
I hope this helps me in the future by introducing skills or enriching preexisting ones that I have. I'm gonna be thinking all my life, why not improve on it as much as I can? Signing off for now.