6.Ten Favorite Phrases

1. “Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even death by violence.” This is a powerful quote because it suggests that everything that has a beginning must come to an end. Nothing last forever, only our memories and even then they’ll disappear along with us.

2. “I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.” This is all true and painful at times. During nights like those, your dreams become better than reality, so it makes it even harder to wake up because you have to face the facts right then and there. One night’s sleep isn’t going to make it vanish like a dream does when you wake up.

3. “Sarcasm… the protest of those who are weak.” To gain power, the weak, use this sense of communication to mislead and mock the other person to show them that they are capable of holding just as much power as them, if not more since they just fooled them.

4. “This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.” This couldn’t be more true. All throughout my years of middle school and below, I admired everyone taller than me and respected them out of habit. They were everything to me and all I knew. However, now that I’m in high school, I can look back at all of those whom I swooned over and notice that they are merely human like me and what I thought was so great was ordinary. I have seemed to loose that essence of wonder and admiration that I had when I was younger.

5. “What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.” I relate to this quote because when I’m passionate about something I treat it as something more than an inanimate object. Crazily, I too imagine that when you love something so much it simply returns the love by being itself.

6. “But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.” I feel like in moments like these you stop and try to comprehend what is all real. You try to differentiate between what is real right now, in this world to what you’ve been told to believe.This moment doesn’t stay with you for very long, but it’s enough to give you that “inner-outer” feeling where you jump out of your feverish skin and look down upon yourself and all the things that you’ve done.

7. “So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.” A great example for this would be students going to school and following routine everyday being oblivious to what is really going on in the world. There is a constant change lurking among these boys and they don’t even know it.

8. “But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.” This makes me feel sad for Gene seeing that he believes anything he touches will become deadly. I don’t think that this is true and it’s all in his head. His past experiences are what led him to get to this point and I think, although he shouldn’t forget it, he should keep moving on with his an optimistic mind.

9. “You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.” Standing up for yourself and what you believe in is what comes to mind when I read this. And I believe this goes out to everyone who has ever wanted to state their mind on what they believe is right, if you’re going to do that,then make sure it is helpful in the long run.

10. “Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.” I agree with this so much. Wars could never go away because we humans will never extinguish those ignorant feelings we have towards those who don’t believe that same things we do.

4.Main Characters

Gene is a character that, at first, was one that I could relate to in the ways that he always followed the rules and wasn’t the best at sports. This basically defines him as a geek or nerd or basically anyone who cares way too much about school and the rules to get out there and have fun. This is where Finny comes in, and with that, Gene’s jealousy and means to follow under peer pressure appear. All of a sudden, Gene’s competitiveness comes on top of the surface and begins to reveal his true colors. This is where I began to dislike Gene as a character because not only was he letting his insecurities rule over his friendship, but he was helplessly hurting himself along the way. Gene feels a need to show up Finny and get a chance in the spotlight, but jouncing the tree and subconsciously making him fall isn’t the way to go about it. I feel as if Gene needs to take a breather, do some yoga, or go take a hike. He needs to be one with himself and get out of the mindset that Finny is everything holy, because Finny has just as many problems as him.

Speaking of Finny, he had to be one of my favorite characters in the beginning because of his keen and manipulative ways of getting himself out of trouble. He’s the kid everyone wants to be because he carries a sense of control and confidence about him, even when he doesn’t know what he’s doing. However, when things don’t go the way he planned he goes through this mindset where he tells himself that all of this is unreal and it never happened. For example, Finny didn’t want to believe that Gene made him fall off the tree so he threatens Gene when he tries to justify it. Also, his impaired leg doesn’t allow him to be involved in sports or more importantly in the war, so Finny simply disregards the fact that the war is even going on, and continues to focus on how everyone else is living under a lie presented by big fat guys who sit around and eat steak. Finny might be a bit more psychotic than Gene, but either way… these boys worry too much about their own insecurities to focus about the things that they could improve on.

3.Setting and Genre

A Separate Peace is set in the time period of 1958 but flashes back to the years 1942-1943. During that time, the two main characters, Gene and Finny, attend The Devon School, an exclusive New England academy. World War II is going on at this time helping set the coming-of-age attitude expressed throughout the novel, and also the hidden tone of angst. This causes the boys to be more serious about what they’re doing at times, and value the days they have before the war. The war acts as a cloudy overcast that everyone’s either waiting for a storm to come out of or for the whole to pass by and let the sun shine through. Either way, the clouds are heavy and dark and rain war.

However, the boys don’t precisely let the war control what they do at all times, the boys continue to be mischievous, adventurous, and keep growing mentally and physically while the war goes on. They are allowed to do this because everyone there treats them as royalty. Well, not completely to that level, but they are pretty carefree when it comes to them because they pity the fact that they will soon be going off to war and ending their childhood. Being at Devon all the time gives the boys a sense of maturity and keeps them on track. Especially during the transitioning period between summer and fall which shows how suddenly everything can change. Just like a coin, one second your head is looking up and everyone’s on your side, and then the next thing you know, your head is facing down towards the ground alone and in a pit of pessimism. All in all, the setting and atmosphere of this novel continues to portray the solid adult-hood these boys are expected to blend into in their mere adolescent stage.

Obviously, this is a fictional book because the characters are all made up and leave no trace of history behind. Although this could very easily be a nonfictional story considering its time period, the very realistic personalities, and the state of mind Gene enters that has a psychological background. In some cases though, its fictional value does come through when Finny is characterized as being someone who gets away with everything considering the administrators of a school like Devon would presume to be very strict and diligent. Plus, the fact that Finny was only good at sports and later on had his legs broken by his friend causing the scene to be a tragedy is a tad fictional for my taste. If it had been more realistic, Finny could have broken other parts of his body or could have been better at more things than just sports. Altogether though, I can most likely see this novel as a realistic book mainly because of the common found psychological motivations underneath all of their actions.

Glogster

This project demonstrates the different meanings of “por” and “para”. Although they both mean “for”, it is important to know when to use the correct term. This project helped me understand the difference between the two. I enjoyed making the glogster very much because it was fun yet educating.

Los Gustos y Disgustos de Aimee

 

Siempre a Aimee le gusta comer comida muy picante. Pero, a ella le disgusta comer pastel de chocolate. A Aimee le gusta ver las películas cómicas. También a ella le gusta tocar el clarinete. A veces, a ella le gusta levantar pesas. A Aimee le disgusta sacar mal notas. Los fines de semana, a Aimee le gusta pasar tiempo con sus amigos. Los viernes, a ella le disgusta hacer la tarea.

Mis Gustos

In this project, I expressed me and my family’s likes and dislikes in Spanish. I enjoyed doing this assignment because it helped me learn more about how to use gustar correctly. Now i know when a phrase of clarification is needed, and when it is not. Also, I learned how to tell a gustar sentence apart from a regular sentence. I think I am much better at writing and recognizing gustar sentences than I was before the project.