Since my last response to course materials, we have covered a lot of ground. I can finally say that I understand Death of a Salesman again, because I forgot almost everything that we learned about it last year, and we went a lot further in depth than we did last year. As for Hamlet, yeah that's going to be hard for me. Any Shakespearian piece of work is always hard for me, so I'm going to needed a lot of guidance throughout Hamlet. So far though I am keeping up with it pretty well, I just get a little lost until we begin discussing, then usually my classmates and Holmes will help guide me along.
Watching Death of a Salesman twice seemed like a good idea to me, but I just got kind of bored the second time around. Somehow though, I was gone for two of the days we watched the movie, so both times all I saw was the very beginning and the very end. I understand it though from all the articles, and thats all that really matters to me!
Finally, the DIDLS practice everyday is slowly starting to help me. Along with the tone word challenges, even though I can never come up with a good sentence. Everything we have learned so far is coming into good use, and it seems like it will for a long time.
I agree that after all the discussion and watching the movie twice I now understand Death of a Salesman and I can see the themes, and see the character development. I also agree that Shakespeare scares me a little and I think it's harder to understand, especially because of the language. Maybe you should talk about what about Shakespeare is hard for you. Does annotating the play help you understand it? Personally I think the annotations and the blog post analysis of the works we read helps me understand the piece and put all the parts together. Going to the DIDLS part of your post which part of DIDLS is the hardest for you? And I agree that the tone word challenges are helpful when talking about tone, because I was confused as to what tone actually was and these challenges cleared that up for me.
ReplyDeleteI took British Literature last year and so I never read Death of a Salesman before seeing the movie in class so I was a bit confused at first. But after all the discussions, reading, and annotating, I can also say I fully understand that book now. As for Shakespeare I agree 100 percent! The thought of having to annotate Hamlet is daunting because to me Shakespeare is like a foreign language. The elevated diction he uses is so different from what I generally read that it makes it very difficult for me to understand. As for the movie I agree that twice was a bit overkill. I think that it would have been best just to watch the movie after reading because then we could formulate our own interpretations of the play before seeing someone else's. However it was cool to see how many different things I picked up in the movie the second time compared to the first time. I also agree that the tone word challenges will be a big help come exam time. I often struggle with finding a good word to describe the tone in a piece of literature and all these new terms are really helping me.
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