Geneva Week 6 Category 4: Feedback

Geneva Week 6 Category 3: Literary Feature Hunt

Geneva Week 6 Category 1: Class Act

On April 8th we had a very good in class discussion about new snippets. On page 250-251, I believe that this was brought up by Fion, the hollowed out building looks fairly similar to the skulls underneath the city. Perhaps, the martyrs of the city were meant to representthe hollowed out building which look like a towering stack of skull. This leads to the idea of the death of the city. The people end up 'sacrificing' their lives for their country and for their freedom. Although they say that the war was a good thng and a positive effect, the citizens are dying and the city is slowly dying, or decaying with that.
In the panel, Marjane Satrapi is looking at the poster which is juxtaposed by the hollow building. The building may represent the hollow obedience of the religion. The protagonist is looking at the city in a cycle: Marjane is looking at the nurse, who is looking at the martyr, who is looking at the decayed wall who is looking at Marjane. (are they looking forward, or hesitant to look back?)

As the citizaens decay, the city begins to decay. This can also result from the fact that if there are less citizens to work, then the employment rate depleats and the employers end up filing for bankruptcy. This is economic situation is fairly related to the current USA situation, where the economy is collapsing from the top down, and with banks filing for bankruptcy, there are less employers and less income.

I definately thought that this was a very interesting topic, and the idea of cycles...

Geneva

Kevin Week 6 cat.4 sippets

on page 235
Marjane sits on a brench alone to show solitary. She watches people passing through and some of those people are also watching her, with pittiness in their eyes. This panel shows Marjane created an atmosphere of loneliness. You can see the street line between marjane and the people who pass by. the line represents a fence that Marjane creates to not be intrude by anyone.

Geneva Week 5 Category 2: Feedback

On April 9th I received back my perspective of Humanism Essay back. I got a lot of feedback again as usual from Mr. McGuigan, but I FINALLY understand now what I need to do to write better. Improving is not about having a fully developed and out of this world idea (although that will help you get a 7), it is about making sure that your idea (even if its standard but answers the question) is transmitable from one brain to another person's brain.
Going through the essay, having the really short and explanitory sentences made the essay so much easier to understand. Because everyone's brain is different, there is always a different perception of the way the words sound. That is probablly why we speak with different intonations and why we write the way we sound as people. Not everyone writes in the exact same manner, and that is why half the class and practically all my teachers couldn't understand my writing. So here is a short list of what I need to do (and should continue to do) to make my writing better (i.e. more understandable):

• Explain ideas that make sense in my head, but may not make sense in other people's minds
• In englsh always use bracket sourcing (NO FOOTNOTES! and it should be MLA)
• Keep the period inside the quotation marks
• Have a short explanitory sentence here and there
• Mix up the sentence structure
• Long sentences are aburrido, so use a comma or semicolon or colon to change it up
• Gargantuan vocabulary words should only be used here and there ("too much spice in your food just tastes disgusting") maybe twice to three times a paragraph
• When writing essays, stick to maybe two big ideas and really devour the meanings of those ideas in the paragraphs
• It is better to completely close two relevant ideas than to have three open sort of relevant ideas
• Always stay relevant to your topic sentence in your paragraph (if it doesnt explain your topic sentence in any way, cut it or make a new one)
• You should pretty much already know what you want to say in your conclusion before you write the essay
• Start with the most important idea then work your way outwards to secondary or interesting ideas

There are probablly more tips, but these are a few of the most important ones, they are helpful so im writing this so that i wont forget them and so that i can access them from anywhere with internet.

Geneva

Geneva Week 5 Category 4: Snippets

The situation from page 285 to 287 sort of reminded me of her total personality change from pages 190-197. She begins to wear the makeup again to remind Reza of her old self, only to be asked "what [she] is doing out wearing that flashy lipstick" (Satrapi, 287) and also told that it "doesnt even suit [her]" (Satrapi, 287). The situations are similar because she feels the need to change who she is to fit in with her surrounding people. The woman Reza fell in love with was a woman who wore lots of makeup and was very aloof, confident and didnt have many war opinions. The girl Julie and Momo were friends with was a girl who was very shy, worldly and didnt fit in just like themselves. They were a group of outcasts who casted Marjane out because she was too different. Reza stopped loving her when her image and self grooming came to an end.

The efforts she put in to 'save' the friendships and relationships were almost like stepping back to the old mistakes and trying to rewrite her history. Another reoccuring motif in this story is the return to her family and her grandmother. She always seems to keep her grounded and, like the bed on page 70, her support was not there when she needed it.

Geneva

Geneva Week 5 Category 1: Class Act

On April 6th we discussed some interesting questions, they were sparked from the MYP rubrics and were led into a series of question storming. They included:

• How does Marjane connect to the everyday human being? How is she different?
• How does this style promote what is being said in the text?
• By the end of the comic, is religion a positive or negative force for Marjane?
• How can we judge what is beautiful?
• Does anyone actually have a personality? Do you own it or is it part of someone/something else?
• Is family crucial for self-realization?
• If this comic was set in our era, what changes would be made? How would it be the same/different?
• What changes happened as a result of her journey?
• How does Marjane grow mentally and physically? Does one play off the other?

After the question storming, we broke off into discussion groups with a main idea question. My group consisted of David, Lucy, Denitza and myself. Our question was "How can we judge what is beautiful?" and this question originated from Bhanesha.

There are always different images of what is beautiful, you taste is different than mine. It is difficult to judge what is more or less beautiful with such a general perspective. Also, we are only given the knowledge of our perception of beauty, we do not really know what another person's version of beautiful is, until they tell you what it is they call beauty. Examples of these images are certainly comics, novels, movies, photos, songs...etc. All mediums of art are different or the same image of beauty just taken by different people who blend in their own ideas with the original one.

"There are two forms of beauty, inner and outer beauty, "said lucy.

"Yes but the dictionary says that Beauty is defined as a fine specimen," retorted Denitza.

"Just because the dicionary says it, doesn't mean its true." David added in quietly. His comment was so quiet that Denitza probablly didn't hear. Geneva smiled to herself on the side. If Denitza had known what David said she would have immediately gone into 'rebuttal mode' and would try to dictionarify David's head off with all her facts (which probablly would come from the secret vault of facts about why beauty is skin deep, which came from her training days in JRP).

"I think that the people who are pretty have an easier and more happy personality. So then they have inner and outer beauty because they are not shy and they aren't ugly too." Lucy said, trying to change the subject.

"Exactly, because the people with outer beauty have the confidence to develop an open personality," said Denitza.

"But does your personality define your beauty? Can a personality be beautiful?" David questioned.

"Well Marjane seems to think so, because on page 190 she percieves her growth as a deformity and gathers the ugly image of herself from other people's images of beautiful. This is a result of culture. The region she grew up in and the region she was living in at the time (Austria) had completely different visions of beauty, so she was stuck between her old Iranian image of beauty and the new image of Austrian beauty. Almost as if the other people around her are her mirror and she only sees the ugly image that they reflect of her" said Geneva finally.

"But she can't compare to the white people in Europe. Like me, I can't compare to the people here because I am Chinese." said David (lol just kidding, Lucy said this :P)

This concludes a short snippet of our conversation at the park.

Geneva <3