English 06B Assignment Blog

     History comes from a number of sources, such as archaeology, scientific discovery, historical records, personal diaries, letters, and many more. One source, however, not only records history, but how people felt about the events happening in their time, and that is literature. Essays on the topics of societal issues, memoirs of the people living in that time, and poetry give readers a sense of what happened in the past time period and what it meant to people in their everyday lives. Even fiction contains themes important to social, political, and economic events in history. Among all of this, we can see how it is still happening today, in music, stories, academic essays, and other forms of literature that are commonly found everywhere. With the ongoing pandemic and social issues, history is in the making, and it is reflected in the art and entertainment we view each day. Three examples are the songs, "Dream," by Imagine Dragon and "No I in Beer," by Brad Paisl...

      Throughout history, literature and literary works have existed at times when they were most needed. Most often, especially within the last two hundred years, literature has been used to comment on social, economic, and cultural issues, and to display the inequities between the majority and minority groups. For example, with feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many female authors wrote stories, poems, and essays on their point of view in society and how they were unfairly unequal to men in countries that claimed all people were created equal. Many black people also created their own art and literature expressing themselves and their history as well, and sharing it with others to comment on their own unequal positions in a dominantly white society. Being only two examples, there are still many more works of art and literature by many different artists and authors that have some meaning about any issue that may have been present at the t...

     Poem number 20, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his book, A Coney Island of the Mind , is quite a beautiful masterpiece. Ferlinghetti perfectly uses rhyme in the poem to make it flow and connect ideas together in ways that may not have been previously imagined. Besides that, however, he uses the beautiful imagery of a candy store, with its many colors and inviting sights, to depict a childish innocence, and the exact moment it disappeared.      The first few lines of the poem invite the reader into the innocence of a boy who goes to a candy store. The reader is given visions of jellybeans that "glowed in the semi-gloom" as well as licorice sticks, tootsie rolls, and "Oh Boy Gum." It seems like a paradise for a child, when all they ever wanted was something sweet to make them happy.  After that last line about the gum, however, the visions of the candy die away like the dying leaves when the boy sees the girl walk in. The final lines of the poem, "Out...

      There was recently a video I watched of a joke about millennials in a job interview. In it, the girl was on her phone, was al little rude, and seemed clearly out of place for the job as her definition of trained in technology was social media and Siri. She expected everything to go her way, even when she was told she wouldn't be hired. While the video does provide a good laugh, there are a few things that can be recognized following the theme of equity and inclusiveness from both sides of the interview.     Starting with the girl, she wasn't being very inclusive towards the interviewer. She automatically expected him understand her point of view and judge solely based on that. She did not do research about what the job qualifications entailed and attacked him using a perceived defense mechanism when he told her she wasn't going to work out. People today tend to follow a pattern similar to this. While the video showed an extreme in this case, many...