Title: Swindle Author: Gordon Korman Pages: 252 1. Characters Griffin Bing- The main character in this story, and the guy who finds the Babe Ruth card. S. Wendell Palomino (Swindle)- Card collector who tricks Griffin, and he get’s the nickname swindle because it means dishonest.
In The Divide, author Matt Taibbi conveys to the reader the inner workings of temporary assistance offices. Taibbi argues that in order to receive benefits, one must wait hours in line at the offices and hopefully be accepted to get benefits. Even after waiting, they may be rejected for discrepancies found in their homes, such as clothes not suiting for a single mother or a child at school when you are asking for food stamps for him. An example that Taibbi discussed was a couple working at a fast food restaurant that was expecting a child.
Over the years, there has been an ongoing debate about “street smarts” and “book smarts” throughout the world. Many people side with either or for their own personal reasons. Although “street smarts” has developed a poor reputation which pushes people to neglect the positive aspects of this particular way of learning. In the article, “Hidden Intellectualism”, Gerald Graff evaluates the structure schools use to teach literature. He explains that intellect is not only found in the academic form of thinking.
In Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, had characters that were full of lies. The Duke for example, reminded me of a snake. To put it differently, he was someone who constantly lied, and stole from others and never thought twice of denying it. His character ultimately became someone I couldn’t trust. On the one hand, he seemed to be a modeled citizen that attended an Ivy League school and became this rich snooty person.
We can tell the story in two ways. The first way goes as follows. Thirteen-year-old black boy in Atlanta has been charged for murdering Darrell Woods, a middle-aged black family man. The second way goes as such. Michael Lewis, a thirteen year old boy, grew up in the slums of Atlanta with no father and a drug-addict mother.
In Gary Paulsen novel “Hatchet” it touches on the theme Initiation into Manhood. When a boy named Brian Robeson crashes in a forest with nothing but a hatchet, he learns new things like how to catch food and adapt to the environment. In the article written by Dallas morning news it talks about how teenage boys getting help from people who teach life lessons about accountability, respect, responsibility, and empathy. According to the people in the article they also believe that this program teaches these boys how to be men. In both literatures they both show examples of initiation.
James W. Loewen is a sociologist who taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont.[1] He received a PhD in sociology at Harvard and taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi before Vermont.[2] In 1974, he wrote a history textbook for Mississippi students, but the state rejected it because his depictions of slavery were “too horrific for high school students to stomach. ”[3] He sued the state’s textbook purchasing board and won because their rejection was not justifiable and that they denied Loewen his First Amendment rights of free speech and press.[4]
It is sometimes difficult for individuals to settle the discrepancy between truth and illusion, and consequently they drive others away, by shutting down. Mrs. Ross, in The Wars by Timothy Findley, is seen as brittle while she is attending church, and cannot deal with the cruel reality of the war and therefore segregates herself from the truth by blacking it out. As a result, she loses her eyesight, and never gets to solve the clash between her awareness of reality and the actuality of the world. She hides behind a veil, and her glasses to distance herself from reality. Mrs. Davenport has to wheel her around in Rowena’s chair to keep her awake, so she doesn’t harbour up subconscious feeling within her dreams, which she is unable to deal with.
Edmundson began this essay with a confession of his awareness on teacher interpretations. He explains that he is apprehensive of what they will expect and accepts that he sometimes educates to try and buildup the good analysis from students. Then he explains the fact that he does not want to be characterized as “enjoyable.” Edmundson wants them to be disputed and changed by his course. Lol
The author argues that the Tea Party movement flocks towards conspiracy theories, as a way to hide structural inequalities which help the rich to maintain their wealth. However, in the chapter “Spinning Paranoia” in the book Conspiracy Nation by Skip Willman, the authors argue that conspiracy theorist and their opponents, who claim to be defending common sense, tend to have a lot more in common than is realized. He further states that contingency theory, which attempts to contain conspiracy theory is a sort of conspiracy theory in its own right, in that they both work to support for the symbolic order. Demonstrating that Berlet is not aware of the fact that his arguments about the Tea Party also back hierarchical power structures. For example,
When it comes to knowing and learning the religions of the world one must approach them with a critical mind. One cannot simply just believe every religion and know have their own view points. David Van Biema presents his ideas about Christianity and Jesus in “The Gospel Truth?”. Van Biema’s main point is about how “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John… is notoriously unreliable,” . Van Biema writes about how one cannot be completely sure about whether to believe if Jesus actually said what is written in the bible, he continues to say that Jesus may even be an “imaginative theological construct” .
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South takes a profound look into slavery in America from the beginning. The author, Kenneth Stampp, tells the story after doing a lot of research of how the entire South operated with slavery and in the individual states. The author uses many examples from actual plantations and uses a lot of statistics to tell the story of the south. The author’s examples in his work explains what slavery was like, why it existed and what it done to the American people.
“I fall, I rise, I make mistakes, I live, I learn, I've been hurt but I'm alive. I'm human, I'm not perfect but I'm thankful.” (Unknown). On a day to day bases, we as humans make mistakes, but it is our ability to learn from those mistakes in an effort to minimize making the same mistakes. Every human has belief of something, there are three types of beliefs that are mostly talked about which are true, false, and untested beliefs.
In Tobias Wolff’s short story “The Liar,” the protagonist, James, lies to help him construct a new identity outside of his family. James tells morbid lies about his mother in order to distance himself from her. Since, the loss of his father, James no longer associates with people who are like him. The lies started after his father’s death and his mother starts noticing how much differently he was acting. Since his mother is treating him like she is disappointed in him, James begins to devolve into a state of repressed bitterness.
In the process of entering, there stood an employe who told us we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Understandably, we nodded and took our seats. Surprisingly, we hadn’t realized that the show had started until we saw people with face and body paint swinging around the room. There were so many of them, I kept turning my head around, but couldn’t keep track of them all. Following that, there were people on the stage acting while the stage was flipping.
