Unit 2

Georgia Performance Standard

ELAALRL2 The student identifies, analyzes, and applies knowledge of theme in a work of American literature and provides evidence from the work to support understanding.

A theme is the hidden lesson or moral that the story tries to teach you. It will not say the theme straight forward, it will hint at it. The standard is saying that using examples from the text you can prove what the theme is.

Rip Van Winkle

The romantic part to Rip Van Winkle is when he makes it to the mountain where he gets tired and decides to take a rest. he helps this old Dutchman to carry his keg of liquor he hears what he believes is the rolling thunders that can be heard from the village when actually it is people playing a game of nine pins. He ends up drinking a flagon of this drink and ends up sleeping for about 20 years. no one can actually sleep this long with out something happening to him he would starve or die of dehydration eventually and before that he should wake up. But on terms of romantic these days there was a little anti-romantic story here, when Rip finally gets back to the village he eventually finds out what happened to his wife and "found relief in this new information."

Thanatopsis Movie

This poem has the three ideas of Romanticism throughout the whole thing. Imagination has to be used during most of the poem. It explains, in one whole section, what mother nature is saying to you. You would definantly need alot of imagination to even grasp a non-living thing talking to you. That particular part also could represent the nature part of Romanticism but he also mentions it later when he describes that you grew up from the earth and when your life is over you will return to it. As for the promotion of the common people, he mentions that it doesn't matter who you are, you will lie with the kings, wise men, and good people that have lived on this earth.

Transcendentalism

Nature

This piece of writing mainly focuses on how beautiful nature is and how it looks different from person to person due to their mood. "Yet it is certain that the power of to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population." This big part of the story really stuck out to me. You couldn't just put part of it in as it wouldn't make much sense otherwise. But this piece is saying that nature could look different from day to day as it has the same mood swings a person does but also that each individual would percieve the look of nature differently from one another anyway due to their own feelings on that particular day.

Self-Reliance

This piece of writing mainly focuses on the person themselves as a higher being if you were to put forth effort to be exactly what you are. "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;" When a man is still growing up and learning responsibilities he would learn that someone needs to be himself. If you are copying someone then you are committing suicide because you kill your true self to be like someone else. Same goes with wanting to be someone else. It doesn't matter whether or not you make stupid decisions you, yourself, need to deal with the consequences same if you do something good.


Wilderness

The man in this video enjoyed the wilderness. Transcendentalists enjoyed nature too, and believed that god could communicate through nature, among other things. If a man was close to nature he would be close to god. This man lived in the nature and off the nature for about 30 years. The man took only a little bit of tools so that he could build his own cabin. He built everything that he needed except a few items like his gun, canoe, and bullets. This man loved nature a lot so he decided to find out if he was able to endure what it could throw at him for one year and deal with his own company for that long. He made it to his goal 30 times over.

Unit one

ELAALRL3 The student deepens understanding of literary works by relating them to their contemporary context or historical background, as well as to works from other time periods.


We should be able to read a piece of literature and relate it to ourselves in the present time, to other facts or ideas we know about the time period which the piece was written, and to relate it to other pieces of literature that reside in different time periods.

I believe we should master this standard because if we are not able to relate pieces of literature to ourselves we will feel no connection to it. It would also be very boring to us to read it. If we cannot relate it to other pieces of literature then the last standard is pointless because how u relate to other pieces is to use the evidence found throughout and what is similar.


RESEARCH

http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/ok3.html


I really like this example because it shows that people have always played pranks on other people but it also teaches a lesson that if you were to play a prank on the wrong person they might stop u from doing something you love to do. This story was about a rabbit playing a joke on two snakes in a river that have never met each other and losing his privledge to drink from that particular riverbed that he liked so much.


Differences

The Native Americans used animals to show an unnatural being. They could all talk and change forms, in my opinion they believed that these particualar animals were brought down to teach people lessons on how to behave properly and teach them other valuable lessons. Thats how they came up with all these stories that have the morals in them. Where as in the sermon, the person said that "god is only holding you over the pit of hell for his own amusement." He was saying that you either know how to act already or its going to end badly. Hence why he will only save those he wishes.


The Rationalists

The Puritans believed that everything that needs to be explained has been explained in the scriptures and other than that we shouldn't know what else is going on or how something worked. The rationalists believed that everything worked in a certain way and that it was up to the people to find out how and why everything works. A little bit from both of these cultures are still around some people believe that what the scriptures say are what goes and will not believe what science says on certain ideas like evolution. But of course we still have scientists trying to figure out alot of stuff concerning the entire universe but we have already at this point found out all the stuff the earliest scientists were trying to explain or we at least have and idea.


Franklin's Autobiography

Benjamin Franklin believed that people should find their own way to moral perfection and not to follow what the bible says about reaching moral perfection. Benjamin Franklin created his own virtues to reach this based on what he believed are his faults. He believed that you could only know what virtues you should follow on a self evaluation, not someone else telling you what you need to do to improve your own life. Such as, the bible saying that you need to follow the commandments.


My own Virtues

1. if something does not have to be said the do not say it.
2. respect your elders
3. Respect every person as an equal
4. you should not harm your own body.
5. Don"t let your mind go to waste.
6. One shouldn't waste just for the sake of wasting.
7. Respect others beliefs, even if you feel they are incorrect

as an overview some of these I need to work on myself but also i believe that these are some of the most important to treating others right and other people may have alot more that they have to work on.

Georgia Performance Standards

ELAALRL1 The student demonstrates comprehension by identifying evidence (i.e., examples of diction, imagery, point of view, figurative language, symbolism, plot events and main ideas) in a variety of texts representative of different genres (i.e., poetry, prose [short story, novel, essay, editorial, biography], and drama) and using this evidence as the basis for interpretation.

The Standard means that we should be able to read a passage/story or other piece of literature and interpret or understand what it says by using the "identifying evidence".

The reason that mastering a Standard like this is that if you are to read anthing you should be able to point out the meaning and what the author is trying to say by writing this. In my opinion this is the basis of literature, to be able to pick out certain parts of the story to know what the author is trying to tell you.