Tim's blog

 August 24th was a block day without Mr. Rease's class and I was absent on Friday, August 25th. 

Today, we took an assessment on illuminate online about the four poems we've been going over recently. I'd like to appreciate the Illuminate Online testing software, because seeing the statistics of our scores was interesting and helpful for me to get a bigger picture of the class's knowledge of the poems. I scored a 76, one point above the average of 75. I won't let myself be too disappointed because I still barely have a 90 in the class and I know I could've done worse. Also, I'd like to share a moment of pride in my cousin Mercy, who got an 88 on this assessment. I need to level up in here to beat her on the next one. I hope Mr. Rease doesn't see a problem in competition for good grades going on between the students in his class. That's a joke. I think any teacher would want that. 

 On the 22nd, we had a substitute teacher and we were given questions on a sheet of paper about the poem "Mother to Son" from the day before. This activity was a lot less engaging than most other days with Mr. Rease here, because he keeps us in conversation about what we're doing until we have to individually prove our comprehension with questions. I liked this day. it was very quiet and I actually remembered to bring my airpods for the first time this whole year. I had to look up what a "complex account" was in literature, and it actually took a while to find out what I was looking for in the poem to answer that question. It was a nice work day.

On this day, we analyzed a poem called "Mother to Son." To me, this was one of the most interesting poems we've looked at so far. I liked the overall analogy that was also the theme of the poem. Stairs are described that are treacherous, dangerous, and hard to climb, conveying the struggle of African American people growing up and staying steadfast in their rough journey in growing up. This seems like a lot of meaning, but the poem actually goes further with a constant reminding that things are better now for the son than they were at the time of the mother, when these "stairs" were much more treacherous. This poem stood out to me from the others. It was longer and had many layers to it, shown clearly and also hidden, that I found very interesting. The poem included "life ain't been no crystal stairs", which also stood out to me because I had never even heard of crystal stairs. The pictures shown of the different types of stairs really brought the ...

 I was absent on this day.

 I was absent on this day.

I was absent a lot on this second week of school. Thankfully, this Thursday on the 16th was a work day where I could make things up. I read "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and did an analysis and questions about it that I had missed the day before. Mr. Rease kindly gave me another night to finish this because the class period wasn't enough time for me. Thanks Mr. Rease for being lenient! (especially for letting me do these posts late lol) This poem was very meaningful and got deeper and deeper as I related it to my own roots. I think having us do question 10 first about our own roots was smart because I would have preferred to apply it to myself primarily, which then enabled me to analyze it a lot deeper with questions 1-9 after. 

I was absent on the 15th. I made up what I missed the next day, so go see my blog for the 16th.

 I forgot to do my blog post for this day, but I remember we went over our "first thoughts" paper that we took home to finish. This assignment was one of the most unique ones I'd done in school to date. By unique, I mean in a way that I can tell is just because we're in a class with a subject that is new to my past school experience. I like how this class is always about things that have true meaning in the real world. Obviously the other classes we take have meaning, but not in this social-awareness kind of way that this one does.

 Today we started Unit 1: Redefining America and Re-Evaluating American Culture. Just now starting our first unit this week kind of reflected how most of my other classes started out. It's interesting that it seems we only truly started our school year this week, on the second actual week of school. Don't get me wrong, I liked that calm first week of introduction and a lot of substitutes, but it felt like such a waste of time at some points. Back on the subject of our class, what we started taking notes on for this unit was African-American Culture. It was interesting to see a timeline of important cultural events, all the way from the first African-American slaves being brought to the States to Obama's election and the George Floyd protests. I learned that Georgia's population of African-Americans was lower than I thought (31%), which the more I think about it, doesn't really surprise me as much. This is because when I later considered Georgia's overall diversi...