The Battle

Two sides each believing in their own cause marched out onto the battle field.

Both willing to give their all.

One side chose to arrive the night before in the black ink of darkness to hide their movements.

Our orders were to dig trenches.

As it began to snow, I huddled together with some of my friends for warmth.

As the icy night passed, I waited eagerly till morning.

As the sun rose I was cold to the bone.

I heard a loud noise, the sound of hundreds of men yelling at the top of their lungs.

One voice shouted, “It’s the Briti…” his cry cut short as a bullet ripped through his chest.

The enemy poured into the trench in front of us, killing the stunned men in a matter of seconds.

I quickly loaded my musket and attached my bayonet.

I knew I did not have long till the enemy came upon me.

As I put the barrel of my gun on top of the trench I took a shot.

The bullet tore through the my enemy's side dropping him like a feather.

Another soldier quickly charged at me with bayonet in hand; I had nowhere to go.

I was sure this would be my end. I heard a loud bang;

a cannon ball ripping him into pieces.

As I sat there covered in his steaming blood I quickly reloaded my gun and I readied myself as a new foe jumped into the trench ready to kill me.

 I thrusted forward piercing his skin like butter with my sharp bayonet.

As the dying soul fell to the ground I saw my comrade fall by my side.

His hand still clutching the gun with the bayonet in him,

and the gun went off blowing a hole through his heart.

I screamed his name as his lifeless body sank to the ground.

Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my gut.

I glanced down, I observed my enemy remove the now blood-coated skewer out of my side as I fell slowly to the ground.

I looked back up at my enemy from my cold death bed on the ground.

When he put the end of his gun in my face, I knew this was the end and I slowly watched as the hammer hit the primer.

Take Home Quiz

            How to kill a zombie. First, you need to go to your local hardware store. Second buy yourself an axe. Third, chop away at the zombie till he is no longer moving.

            How is a cloud like a marshmallow. A marshmallow may look like a cloud, but a cloud is made up of water droplets. A marshmallow is nothing like a cloud. the marshmallow is made of gelatin, corn starch, and corn syrup. 

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born on the 19th of January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the author of poems and short stories. Poe was the master at bringing mystery and horror stories alive to his readers. Poe was abandoned by his father and orphaned by his mother when he was only three. John Allan and his wife took Poe in. Poe went to the University of Virginia in 1826, but he did not receive enough money from Allan to cover all of his costs. Poe turned to gambling to get the money, but he ended up in debt. After he left the University of Virginia, Poe began to work full time on his writing. He moved in with his aunt Maria Clemm and his cousin Virginia who lived in Baltimore. Later in 1836 he married Virginia when she was only 13 years old. One of Poe's famous poems is "Annabel Lee" it is about the death of his wife Virginia, who died of tuberculosis. One of my favorite lines in Annabel Lee is "For the moon never beams, without bringing dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee." I believe what Poe is stating in this line is that night after night he longs for and dreams about his beloved wife.

Bonus

            Determining who you are, what you believe, and who you will become can be a complex period in one’s life. In Graham's article "Confessions of a Quit Addict" she is running away from the conventional life that she sees as something to "drag" her down.  She wanted to be "free of responsibilities and relationships".  She saw the possibility to "reinvent" herself each time she chose to flee to another place. As she grew older and after the birth of her child, she began looking for something in life she could hold on to. A constant that she could rely on. She found that if she didn't go chasing after change, "it will do a perfectly good job of finding" her. In Brooks article "It's Not About You" he states that today college students were the most "monitored, tutored, coached, and honed" high school graduates.  After being so supervised now they find themselves entering a "world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured." Will they be able to adjust? Brooks believes, "Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role." Students are encouraged to follow their passions and dreams by the parents who grew up during the 60s but they have been so supervised do they really know how to determine what they really want out of life. In Graham's article, she is constantly looking inward to "find" herself while Brooks brings up the point that most successful young people look "outside and find a problem, which summons their life." Fulfillment in life comes from being true to your beliefs and how you can better the world around you.

         Frank Bruni from the New York Times, in his article "The Wilds of Education" states that the meaning "dangerous learning" exposes kids to topics that they may not be familiar with in order to help them understand, accept, and associate with people who have experienced those things. In Bruni article he lists seven books that were banned. Here are three of them, “An Abundance of Katherines,” by John Green. It was deemed too sexually frank. Also “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” by David K. Shipler. It has references to rape and abortion. “The Glass Castle,” Jeannette Walls’s best-selling memoir, was tagged for its portraits of alcoholism and mental illness.

             American Library Association hosts banned book week. ALA want to achieve the freedom to express one's own opinion even though there opinion maybe unusual. ALA stresses the meaning and ensures the accessibility of those viewpoints for those who want to read them. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is a book about a boy who lives with his drunk father and has a hard time fit into society. Mark Twain's book has been frequently challenged because of the uses of a rashly sensitive language.

            Finding your self is saying it is all about yourself and losing yourself is about the greater good. In David Brooks article he says, "As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist." I think losing yourself is more important than finding yourself. For example, finding something you are good at to help other people in need would be self satisfying.

            I admire them because of  the challenges that they had to go through to get to where they are. I agree with Brooks statement, "It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most." I admire my brother Zach because he took 18 hours in college and worked a full time job to help pay his way through college. He is always striving to know more. He graduated in the top of his class at Texas A&M. He enjoys teaching me new things at every opportunity. Zach works hard to be the best he can be and strives to help others. It is my desire to do my best in school and to be successful in life.

Rough Draft

Stanley Kubrick Full Metal Jacket (1987) it is an action packed movie. It follows the life of a solder during his tour of the Vietnam War. I like war movies because my grandfather was in the Pacific Theater of World War 2, and I like to hear about all of his stories as a bombardier in the Pacific.

Matthew Modine(Who played Pvt. J.T. Davis or Joker was his nick name) he also played in The Dark Night, Transporter 2, and Vision Quest.

Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times

In his written reviews he says "Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket is more like a book of short stories than a novel. I like it as a short story, and I would not like to see them walking from place to place because it would get rely long and boring. By make it in to a lot more snippets they were able to include a lot more.

The opening passages of "Full Metal Jacket" promise much more than the film finally is able to deliver. I disagree with that, because I thought it was a great movie with a great. War is horrific. The innocent get drawn into it in order to survive but often they don't.

Kubrick seems to want to tell us the story of individual characters, to show how the war affected them, but it has been so long since he allowed spontaneous human nature into his films that he no longer knows how. I really disagree with him, I think Kubrick did a phenomenal job letting you get to know the character.