Giver Essay

In Humanities, we read a book called The Giver by Lois Lowry, a book about a dystopian society where people are unknowingly forced to live a life that is exactly the same, and nothing can ever happen. I’m proud of it because it focuses on psychological problems with society, which is very interesting for me. I also started a topic that no one has done before, dehumanization. We spent a while working on it, and I’ve spent a long time editing and making this essay.

What Makes Someone Human?

By Armant L’Heureux

What would your life be like if you never knew what emotions were, and didn’t know about the world outside your home? What if you didn’t realize that you didn’t know? That is everyone’s life in the world of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Jonas, a kid in a homogeneous society, where everyone is forced to be the same without knowledge of it, has a gift that shows difference from his friends. He sees what real emotions are, not the fake ones that his community supplies, such as when someone scrapes a knee or plays a game. In a community that subtly enforces perfection, the authorities strive to make it a utopia by eliminating all feelings. Jonas, the new Receiver of Memory, is the only who can see the world how it’s meant to be seen.

Jonas is the only person who knows what feelings are. One night, after Jonas got home from the Annex, where he learned what actual love was, he asked his parents if they loved him. “Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s almost obsolete,’ his mother explained carefully. Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.” (Lowry p .106). In this quote, Jonas asked his parents if they loved him, and they didn’t know what he meant, then chastised him for improper speech. This shows how people have no idea what feelings are, and Jonas is the only person who knows how what the world naturally is. His parents said that love was meaningless, but it is the most meaningful memory that he has, but because the community eliminates all feelings, they don’t know what it really means. Jonas just wants to help, but can he really change how people see the world?

Once Jonas finds out what emotions are, he refuses to live like he was supposed to. After Jonas is shown how amazing it felt to be happy and to love someone, after his parents said that love was meaningless, he knew he would never be like everyone around him. “But he knew he couldn’t go back to the world of no feelings that he had lived in for so long.” (Lowry p. 108). “This shows how Jonas thinks that having happiness is better than living without it, even if to have happiness, you have to go through sadness and anger. The boundaries that the authorities set were too far, no color, no love, no happiness, but on the other side, no pain. Jonas struggled without end to bring feelings to the community, but after so much pain, he decides to leave the community, the only way to let feelings into the dystopian utopia.

Although people in Jonas’s community were blind to physical pain, they had the pain of being blind, even to that pain. Color, joy, happiness, love, no one knew what those were, nor how to feel them. The community was called a utopia, but it was just a dystopia with everything hidden from them. Death, pain, sorrow, guilt, no one would ever know how to feel them. Jonas knows what war and pain are, but he also knows what love and happiness are, and he wants to show people the feelings that they bring, but everyone refused to accept that their lives were hidden away from them. If you had the choice to live in a world, blind from feelings, would you? No war in exchange for love. No hunger, but no joy. What is a “perfect world?” Jonas believes that it is one full of history and memories, where people can experience both good and bad. That is what a perfect world is to him.

Math portfolio

In math, we were required to write a short description of our math experience. It’s pretty, short, and doesn’t go into much detail, but here it is anyway.

I’ve never really been sure how I feel about math. I like that it makes you think so much, but I get frustrated so easily with it. I’ve always been good at geometry but have trouble with many other subjects in math. I get stuck easily, and I’m never really sure where to go from there, do I start the problem over from a different strategy? Do I look through my work and find the problem? In short, I have trouble with math.

Summer Reading

Book 1- One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Cuckoos nest

In an asylum, there really isn’t much hope for escaping. Which is why patient Randle Patrick McMurphy changes a ward where people are scared of laughing, to a gambling filled paradise. What started as a game turned into a battle between McMurphy and his friends against the authority.

 

Book 2-Ender’s Game

Ender

In a world full of fear of intergalactic war and strict order, Ender is recruited as a soldier at 11 in case of a war they knew was coming. Ender quickly exceeds expectations, but expectations keep getting higher as a soldier. Ender is forced to forget love and friendship and becomes a tool of the military. Will Ender fall into order as a puppet or rebel against the military and fight for his emotions?

 

Book 3-The Curious incident of the Dog in the Night Time

Curious incident

Mark Haddon writes books for autistic children, and this is one of his best. Christopher Boone is an autistic 15 year old whose neighbor’s dog has been murdered. He insists on finding out on who murdered it against both his father’s and neighbor’s will. He stores his notes in a book that he’s writing on it, and using his autistic abilities solves the mystery.

Rumi!

Rumi is a famous poet, and in class, we made poems based on his, which was really hard, because he was really good. He wrote poems about a lot, life, death, love, things like that. I wrote one about life and death.

Dawn

At the first light of dawn

A newborn lamb cries out

While a crow stares down from above

 

On the edge of night

A wolf, bane of the dark

Comes out to feast on it’s prey

 

One soul may go

But Earth still turns

And when the clouds part

The destined path becomes clear

Personification Poems

We walked around the school in humanities and took pictures of what we found, then made personification poems from it. I wrote one about a sidewalk cellar and a statue, this is the one about the cellar.

Gaps

Why do people fear me?

Stuck to a sidewalk

Doors wide open

Waiting for visitors to come into my embrace

 

I am a bird

So much potential

But trapped in an open cage.

 

I want to be like the people

I want to loved

Just one person comes

To empty me out every week

The Sidewalk

In class we had made poems based on Rumi poems (I wrote a post on mine), that kind of gave everyone a reputation on how they write. We then chose someone to write in the style of. Mine is a cinquain in the style of Will.

The Sidewalk

Sidewalk

sometimes wet, but

mostly dry, like a bowl of

chicken soup, just used by

someone

 

Yep, it’s stupid.

Kira

Kira was the name of my dog who died last year on Thanksgiving, I had her all my life so it was really important to me. I wrote my first poem this year about her:

 

Rest in peace Kira

Lost on a Thanksgiving night

Time for a new dog

 

Something worth mentioning, I got a new dog, Norman!

Shabanu essay

In Humanities, we wrote an essay about the book we just read, Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind. We chose a topic based on the book, such as women’s rights. I chose how Shabanu had a bad father.

Think of how you would feel if your father never cared about how you felt, and everything he did was based on what was best for him. Bad parenting is guaranteed to leave a mark on the child. In the book Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind by Suzanne Fisher Staples, a twelve year old girl, Shabanu, had a difficult life growing up, especially because of her father. Dadi was a terrible father because he did things behind people’s backs, he broke promises and worst of all, he beat his daughter, Shabanu.

 

Dadi did things behind people’s backs. He wrestles and bets with others, without telling his family, and that’s just one example. On page 101, Dadi’s cover got blown, “They remind me of Kalu and Tipu… All at once I realize it’s Dadi!” Dadi was wrestling to get money, but he didn’t tell anyone that he was doing it, not even his wife. Therefore he must have thought that it was bad. If that’s not enough to convince someone, he also broke some pretty big promises.

 

Dadi broke promises. He promised not to sell Guluband, but he made a deal with Wardak to sell him, along with many other camels. Dadi then bought back a bit of Shabanu’s love by getting her the dog, Sher Dil. On page 62, Shabanu screamed, “‘You promised!’ I shrieked. ‘Liar. You lied!’ Wardak has untethered the male camels, and Guluband is just getting to his feet.” Shabanu was devastated by Dadi because he just sold all his male camels to a possible terrorist group. But none of that even is comparable to the worst thing that he did. He beat Shabanu.

 

Most of all, Dadi was a horrid father because he beat Shabanu. Dadi beat Shabanu multiple times, including when she didn’t tell him that she was of age, even though he found out three days later. On page 240, Shabanu thought, “I refuse to cry out, and Dadi in his fury is like Tipu, bloodlust in his eyes. He can beat me to death if he likes.” Dadi started beating Shabanu just because she didn’t tell him that she was of age. Shabanu had earlier heard Dadi yell, “I’ll throttle her!” and she ran away in fear. This only scratches the surface on what horrible things Dadi has done to Shabanu and his family.
Dadi is a father that no one would want to have to care for them for their entire lives. Who would want a father that did things behind people’s back, broke important promises and beat their children? Dadi didn’t even let Shabanu get any choice of who she married, and whom she was assigned to was a 55 year old man. How would you feel if you had to grow up in fear of your father? Would you run away? Or would you be trapped like Shabanu?

Shabanews!

In humanities, we made news reports about things like daily life and food. I did real estate with Will and Freddie, it’s pretty short, and it doesn’t have much in common with Shabanu, but we had fun with it.

Script:

Freddie: Welcome back to Shabanuws: Real Estate Edition! I am Amu Kamat reporting from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Today my fellow colleague, Ahmed Ali, will be showing the very wealthy American Adam Soldairs, around a very fine mud house. Over to you, Tamak.

 

Will: Thank you, Amu. Now we will start the tour with Adam.  

 

Armant: Thank you Tamak, I’ve traveled far and wide to find the perfect house, and this might just be it.

 

Will: Now we have the entrance, a very grand and well built house. Did I mention, it has a very good door?

 

Armant: So if you want a place without any visitors, and no civilization for miles, then would this be the place?

 

Will: Yes, but watch out for Nazir Mohammed, he uh, he doesn’t exactly like people very much… Anyway, let’s go inside, I’m burning out here!

 

Will: Here is the main bathroom. It’s very nice, for it has a toilet and sink!

 

Armant: Very nice indeed. Can we pause for a second, I want to, uhh try out the bathroom.

 

Will: sorry for the interruption. Now, we are in the bedroom.

 

Armant: Quite a nice bedroom here, good bed, almost soundproof walls, and very relaxing. How solid are the walls though?

 

Will: As solid as mud can be.


Armant: I may have misheard you… did you say mud?

 

Will: The walls are almost entirely mud.

 

Armant: So then very fragile

Either we go to a different room or we go back to Freddie
Freddie: We seem to have a technical difficulty, if you would like a house in the middle of nowhere and a toba near it, than this is this house for you! Shabanuw’s reporting daily, come back tomorrow for more news!

 

Video

Expanding NYC

In Art we are working on map art, which are maps turned into art. I am making buildings under construction to symbolize that New York is always expanding.

Armant Map Project 2