Follow and Respond 3

Hannah-

Dylan Bird said...
I have the same problems Hannah. First of all I have the same procrastination problems. Right now I'm at home doing homework during school! Now that's procrastination! Also, I have the same problem with blog block. Its hard to write blogs with your own free range. I honestly just think its easier to do blogs where we are told exactly what we have to do. All this freedom is good, but all of the sudden my creativity is gone.

March 1, 2012 7:20 AM

Walker-

Dylan Bird said...
Cool connection. I've never been a mechanic or anything but that sounds kinda fun. I bet its really rewarding whenever you get them up and running again. I would feel accomplished if I did something like that. I think its impressive that you connected that with your story. It shows that you can relate to the smallest things in a story, making it more enjoyable to read.

March 1, 2012 7:29 AM




Dylan Bird said...
Blog block sucks. Why can't we just blog as easily as have a conversation? Blogging would be fast and simple. Its hard to blog about random topic related to your book and come up with something impressive. I'm not the greatest with words anyway, so blog block just makes it twice as worse. Plus my mind is always wondering whenever i do this too.

March 1, 2012 7:36 AM

Sparknotes: Good or Bad?

Sparknotes is a questionable site. Some people use it as a study tool, which is a good idea. You can better understand the true meaning of things. You can use it to help you identify things you don't understand. You could even use it to identify themes and morals that you couldn't draw from the story. However, you should only use Sparknotes as a study tool, not just to use it without reading the book. Using only Sparknotes, you may understand the general story line and understand what happened throughout, but you'll never fully understand the characters or get connected to the story. Sparknotes will rob you of fully understanding the book if you use it incorrectly. So in summary, you should only use Sparknotes if you are reading, or have already read the book. It can be good, but can also be used badly.

Animoto 3

Vlog 3

Follow and Respond

To Hannah:
I completely agree. When I tried to use sparknotes.com as a substitute for Scarlet Letter, I didn't understand the story very well. Not only did it ruin the book for me, but my grades showed my lack of understanding. When i looked up my book's summary online and got a similar site to sparknotes, it didn't even tell half the stroy. If someone read that as a substitute, they would have no understanding of the true meaning of the story. Overall, I completely agree with you, GOOD JOB! :-D

To Walker:
Walker, this really got me interested in the book. Also I was impressed by your depth of thought and use of a wide vocabulary in this. I know the feeling as well, the feeling to be impressed by your authors talent. It's amazing what someone can do with their imagination and a pecil! It blows my mind how they come up with such vivid images of a story they created, and can describe it in a perfect way to make you see it too!

To Micheal:
Michael, its interesting that you mentioned that blogging is harder. I don't agree. I think its harder if you don't try to use your time correctly. However, I completely agree that its easy to get lost behind. I was way behind on my blogs for a while. I also agree that I would rather write papers, because the formatting makes it easy to just not think about things and just write.

#21stCentury

The 21st Century English classroom is convenient and technological. Imagine being in a 1970's English classroom. Your assignment is to research Shakespeare and write down some of your favorite quotes on redemption. This is a pretty tough assignment for the 70's! You would have to go find a Shakespeare book and read until you found something on redemption, and then keep reading to find more. In modern day classrooms, I could go on the computer, go to google, and type in "Shakespeare redemption quotes", copy and paste the first few onto Microsoft word, and print. Now that's conveniently easy! Sometimes we don't realize how lucky we are.

Though blogging isn't something I particularly enjoy, I really can't complain about it. It is a good way to learn to use Internet resources, a book, and my mind to collaborate and come up with interesting things to infer in my blogs. Along with this, being in the 21st Century enables many types of communication. We can even work with a school across the state on blogging. Now that's pretty cool.

Blogging also enables us with the freedom to work at our own pace, and read at our own pace. If we read aloud in class, people would be drifting off, struggling to keep up, or just pretending to pay attention. With blogging, you have to read your own book on your own time and then talk about it. This helps shape personal responsibility in all of us and helps us learn to interpret the text individually, without the help of a teacher. Blogging makes students more independent.

Dear Mr. Silverwing...

Dear Oppel,

I have read many of your books, but most recently I read the book “Half Brother”. I admire this book not only because of my love of chimps, but that it shows the relationship that humans can share with animals. Your book takes the relationship a step further and adds communication to it. I enjoyed how you paralleled between Ben’s adolescent growth of character and maturity and Zan’s mental and physical growth. This mutual struggle to grow as an individual is part of what I think helped Zan and Ben become brothers who love each other. You did a great job showing that. Also you evaluate the average adolescent boy’s mind. I love how you make Ben’s quest to obtain the return of affection from Jennifer just another scientific project. You show how strangely he encounters his first crush, by keeping a log book. I also think his thoughts about her are hilarious. When the thought, “I had Jennifer in front of me, so close I could see the little mole under her left ear. I wanted to taste it,” I literally laughed out loud. I don’t know if you intended all of these weird thoughts coming from Ben to be comical, but they definitely made the novel more enjoyable for me. Ben’s struggle to live up to his father’s expectations was interesting as well. He never was quite sure about what to think of his dad, and they never were really on the same page. Your examination of human and animal relationship continues to impress me.

I am very impressed by your skills as an author. I have also read your “Silverwing” series and I am impressed that you can write amazing novels from such different perspectives. In “Silverwing” and the rest of the series, you took the role of Shade, the adolescent bat, took his character, and made his personality and character grow throughout the series. This made me think of you as a writer who strictly wrote from an animal’s point of view. Before reading Half Brother, I expected it to be another book from the animal’s perspective, but you surprised me and took it from the teenage boy’s point of view.  Your vast amount of imagination is incomprehensible to me in how you can come up with all of these stories, and still manage to show the connection of humans to animals. Your writing has made me think time and time again, “Do animals really feel this way?” As a result of this, I am kinder to all sorts of animals. When I found an opossum in my garage instead if thinking, “I’m going to kill this damn thing,” I thought, “He must be really cold out there.” Your examination of animal’s minds, making them more human, has led me to think entirely differently about anything that breathes. Never again will I look at an animal and think of it as just something, I’ll think of it more as one of us. Thank you for the insight.

Sincerely,

            Dylan Bird