ahhh paper!

a good friend-Logan. he's absolutely hilarious and always makes me happy. we spend forever on the phone because we think each other are the funniest people in the world. whenever i'm sad he is the first person i call.

what i want this paper to do for me: i want it to help me understand myself more. it is hard to define people; especially yourself. i want it to make me think things about myself and my life that i have never even considered. i want it to be interesting and creative. i want to learn who and what has truly shaped my life

Assignment: i am really kinda nervous about this, i think it is a really cool thing but im nervous about starting it. i like the idea of different voices, i think i will use some of my friends and definitely my mom. working in the metaphors and rhymes and all that stuff is going to be difficult for me because i am not used to writing those in my papers. that is probably why i am scared about this assignment, because it is like nothing i have ever done before and i tend to get scared of new things.

Brainstorming:
sorrows and griefs: my grandfather dying when i was 9. my older brother getting divorced when i was 15. my best friend moving away in 6th grade. me breaking my foot in the beginning of the softball season my senior year.

municipal: i lived in the smallest town ever, Downs, only about 600 people. i guess it wasn't even a town, it was a village. spent more on fireworks for the 4th of july then basically anything else. full of hicks and creepy people. downtown Downs consisted of a florist, a tanning salon, a video store and a post office.

ecology: lots and lots of cornfields. not really a suburb, although only a few miles away from a larger city. lots of farmland, but i didn't live on a farm. i don't feel like i am a hick at all so i loved my school but i never was connected or involved with my town.

municipal context: the water i grew up with was disgusting, we never drank it out of the faucet because there was so much iron in it, it was seriously yellow and it would turn blonde hair into orange hair. there were lots and lots of trees around which made for a beautiful autumn and i loved it in the winter when all the trees were covered with snow. there was one major highway that ran fairly close to my house so i think that is part of the reason why i am such a sound sleeper. the kickapoo creek (im not making up the name!) ran through my backyard, well it was more of a ravine of a backyard but thats not relevant.

family disagreements: i hated when anybody in my family fought because it would just make for an uncomfortable situation. my older brother used to argue a lot with my parents about what he was doing or who he was with but when he moved out for college that got better. my grandma is really sick with emphysema and that definitely causes sorrow because every time we go see her we see her deteriorating before our eyes. its hard to watch. i used to be cause for some family rifts, not because i was doing bad stuff, i was just ready to move out so i would fight everything and anything with my mom.

Eagleton: There was another sense in which the "experiential" nature of literature was ideologically convenient. For "experience" is not only the homeland of ideology, the place where it takes root most effectively; it is also in its literary form a kind of vicarious self-fulfillment. If you do not have the money and leisure to visit the Far East, except perhaps as a soldier in the pay of British imperialism, then you can always "experience" it at second hand by reading Conrad or Kipling. Indeed according to some literary theories this is even more real than strolling around Bangkok. The actually impoverished experience of the mass of people, an impoverishment bred by their social conditions, can be supplemented by literature: instead of working to change such conditions (which Arnold, to his credit, did more thoroughly than almost any of those who sought to inherit his mantle), you can vicariously fulfill someone's desire for a fuller life by handing them Pride and Prejudice.

Freire: Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

Viswanathan: The curriculum is conceived here not in the perennialist sense of an objective, essentialized entity but rather as discourse, activity, process, as one of the mechanisms through which knowledge is socially distributed and culturally validated.