Martin Luther King Activity

Answer to both questions.


 First of all, the year in which the speech was given, was part of a really dark time in which Jim Crow Laws were still working, being North  America, specially the South,a very discriminative place were segregation and discrimination could be observed and felt specially if  you were  Afro-American.
If you compare this to the United States of America of today, through MLKJ´s eyes,it would be considered a paradise for black people, not only because it´s very unusual to be discriminated because of your skin colour but  because that doesn´t matter anymore.
A very important thing that broke all this age of discrimination was when Barack Obama was elected as  president of The United States of America, were everyone can notice that he had the same chances as all the other candidates and he wasn´t discriminated because of the colour of his skin, in fact he was elected, demonstrating  the whole world that black people can do whatever they want in life, you can even be the most important person in the world, encouraging black people to stop thinking that they are seen with other eyes.
About the feeling of brotherhhood/Sisterhood, specially in USA you can see that no one is going a make a difference with you because of your skin colour, you can see best friends from different cultures, religions, ethnic groups and of course skin colour because at least in this very diverse country not even one of this things is an obstacle at the moment of making friends, looking for a work or even choosing the person you want to marry with.

Bibliography:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

And ask ye why these sad tears stream?

By Alfred Lord Tennyson

In the tittle you can notice that he is asking "Why these sad tears stream?". I´m not writing the part "And ask ye" because probably the reason why he contracts the word "you" for the word "ye" is because he wants to emphasize on the question and not in that little first part of the sentence that he is obligated to use to make a sentence. He does this to highlight how sad he feels about something that happened. This sadness became even more obvious when he describes his sad tears as a stream. In our daily language would mean that he is crying a river.

The first line of the poem which, which is a quote in Latin  tells us a lot about the poem, it´s like an introductory line which says " Te somnia nostra reducum", this means"your dreams our restore". Something that I understand as that the only way in which the speaker can see his beloved one is when he dreams about her. This poem is  basically about a man who lost someone he loved. He starts asking: why is he crying that much?, Why im that sad?. But right after this he starts telling us about a dream, "a lovely dream of her that in the grave is sleeping" This is the line that tells us  that he is dreaming about someone who is dead, so this is the only place in which the speaker can see her.The whole dream  happens in a very angelical place, where he describes her as the most beautiful thing in life, even comparing her to angels. This scene which has an astonshing setting of  flowers, garlands and ornamentary objects which makes the dream a wonderful place to be, full of brightness and devices that help us to understand that the speaker was or is deeply in love with the deceased girl. As I have always said good things don´t last forever, that´s why in the verse number twentythree that lovely dream vanishes and the speaker goes back to reality where he feels very nostalgic because he is very happy after being able to see her but at the same time very depressed because the dream is over.

In this poem, you cand find a lot of connotative language or implicit messages, that´s why I´m going to explain the ones that I think are more interesting or significative. For example  the verse number eight says"The bloom upon her cheek is still glowing". Here the speaker wants to transmit that the desceased girl, the one he loved, looks alive and beautiful in his dreams. You can infere this because he talks about the bloom en her cheek, and bloom means when something flowers, an act full of vitality and beauty. So when he says that the bllom upon her cheek is still glowing, he is really saying that the girl looks beautifull and alive as a flower which in his bloom.

Another very good example is the whole third stanza where says:

"With angel-hand she swept a lyre,

A garland red with roses bound it;

Its strings were wreath´d with lambent fire

And amaranth was woven round it."

In this stanza the lyric speaker portrays a whole scene where he involves all of your senses, he starts appealing to your audition whe he talks about her angel-hand playing the lyre, to your smell when he writes about a garland with roses. He also talks about lambent fire something that appeal to your touch, the feeling you have when you are near fire, that warm sensation that makes you feel comfortable and protected. Finally I can say that of course it appeals to your vision when you have to imagine this scene packed with different colours and textures. I think that by describing that very detailed scene, he tries to express that even when he dreams about her he feels like in real world in the need to use all of his senses because of her, the delightful experience of being with her.

About the attitude that the lyric speaker has in this poem , you can find a lot of different tones and moods throughout it. At the beggining you can see that he starts in a very sad tone and a very depressive mood in which he can´t understand why is he crying that much and why is he in that huge pain, a pain we will understand later that is caused because he  losed someone he loved. Right after that, he stats writing in a hopeful tone where you can see that he is not so depressed anymore because he had a dream of her, so that huge pain starts disappearing until the dream starts where everything is inmersed in a love. In the dream he starts a vivid description with an angelical tone and everything in a soft, fairy and celestial mood because the purity of the love he feels for her, even comparing her with elysian figures, talking about her as the most beautiful women in the world. At the end of the poem you can see that when the dream is over and all that brightness vanishes, the lyric speaker starts in a nostalgic tone where he is sad because the dream is over but at the same time happy because he was able to see her in a lovely and wonderful way. where he shows us that the dream was the best he has had since his beloved passed away.

In this very rich poem, there are three shifts. In the first onewhich is  from the verse number one to number four, the speaker embodies his pain and sadness because of the death of his true love.
In the second shift, which is from verse five to twenty-two,the speaker narrates a dream, a lovely dream in which he can see the girl he lost, the one and only he really loved but he lost, something we can infere beacuse of how he feels about her.
Finally in the third  shift, which starts in verse number twenty-three and ends in the number twenty-six, this is the final shift, basically the one in which the dream, that soft and lovely vision in which the speaker was able to see the woman he loved, vanishes and he tells us how he feels about the end of the dream.

With all of this said, its obvious that the tittle of this poem is very well used because it give us a hint about the themes we are probably going to find. For example, sadness, love, and death. In this very expressive poem, you can see sadness   in every part of it because the protagonist lost the girl he loved. The loved girl dies, and that is what brings sadness to the poem. So we can appreciate that all of the central themes are bind together very close and gives the poem a lot of coherence and cohesion.

About the metre and Rhyme pattern, I found out in verse number four, that this poem is structured in iambic pentameters. And as I could appreciate in the first two stanzas, this poem has an ABAB pattern, which can also be called alternate rhyme or Shakesperian rhyme, because a lot of William Shakespeare poems are written with this rhyme pattern.

Finally, I can say that this poem is very rich in poetic devices, that´s why I´m going to take the two most representative examples and explain them. First, a device that is very used in this poem is the metaphor, a very good example is shown in verse number eight were says "The bloom upon her cheek is still glowing". In this metaphor the speaker appeals to the bloom of the flowers to show that she, the girl he loved, is dead but in his dreams she looks very alive for him. For the other side, imagery is used al over the text, making you imagine a very detailed image of every stanza or verse you read. For example, the fourth stanza says:

" I saw her mid the realms of light,
In everlasting radiance gleaming;
co-equal with the seraphs bright,
Mid thousand thousand angels bleaming"

In this stanza the speaker makes you imagine what he is dreaming about and makes you get into it, something that gives you a better understanding of how he feels and what he is seeing.

Rationale

This written task which is about Harper Lee`s novel "To Kill a Mockingbird". It is a letter from Miss Caroline Fischer to the principal of Scout`s school. Where Miss  Caroline has her in the first grade class,  in this letter she express her feelings about a problem she had with Burris Ewell and her general thoughts about the class.

I decided to write this because I wanted to show how a teacher in those years felt about the society. That`s why I decided to write a letter from her to the principal of the school because in that text type I can fully express her feelings.  This is very important because my purpose here was not complaining only about the class but implicitly to criticise the society which can be reflected on her first grade class. In this letter you may find a huge variety of problems that were very important issues for United States of America in the '30s, such as illiteracy, lack of manners, poverty and social inequality.

I wrote this in a formal language because it was a letter from a teacher to her boss, so she has to address him in a formal record, but also sometimes I had to use a little bit of informal language to fully express her anger and discontent.

Closing, I would like to add that my target audience is every teenager or adult who may be interested in this very metaphoric novel. Which is a very accurate representation of the problems that United States was suffering in the 1930's such as social inequality, poverty, racism, illiteracy and a lot of other more issues which made american society to be full of troubles.

283 words.

TKaM Answers

Chapter 1:
1) From the Finch family I understood the reality of Maycomb and the type of people you could find there. Also the different social clases which you can find on those years in USA (Afro-American people, white trash, etc).

2)Radley place enchant the three of them, because of all the "urban leyends" about that place, like there lives a ghost, that he goes out on the night and kill people, etc.

Chapter 2:

1) Because she was very curious about how school is. Also, she was always unnoccupied and always spied Jem by a telescope to see what was happening in the school or what he was doing. It was basically because Scout was always at her house with nothing to do.

2) Yes, he feels ashamed because his little sister, Scout, would make him see as a loser if she starts following him and talking to him the whole day, thas why he asks Scout not to talk him during School.

Chapter 3:

1) I think that after this visit, Scout started respecting more the people she called "white trash" and also stoped discriminating people just because of their economical situation.

3) The differences between this two kids. Or this two families are basically the education, because if you look at he Cunningham Family they are poor but with some values and education but the Ewell´s are totally "white trash" with no values or education.

Chapter 4:
1) The children of Maycomb thought that Boo Radley was a type of beast, ghost who killed people and animals in the night. They were very afraid of him.

2) The Radley game consisted in making Boo Radley to leave the house, or at least to slap the house and see what happens. Also they used to represent some scenes about what they thought about Boo Radley's story


Chapter 5:

1) Miss Maudie is alaways highlighting the strenghts that Atticus has, she thinks Atticus has a very pragmatic attitude and she is always teaching things to the kids, maybe trying a little bit to supply the lack of a mother on Jem and Scout's life.

2) Atticus says this because he knew the real story and knew that he wasn't a gost, he was just a man with a lot of problems in his past, but he wasnt bad.

Chapter 6:

1) They wanted to look inside of one of the Radley windows to see if he was real or not,or if it was normal. Because they still tought that he was kind of a serial killer or something like that. Scout was against this because she was afraid that something could happen to Jem, because she was very afraid of Boo Radley.

Chapter 8:

1) you can see that miss Maudie shows a very positive attitude when her house burns, she says that that was very good beause she wanted a smaller house, she looks very resilient and strong.

2) In this chapter, the important thing that happens with Boo Radley is that when Scout is in the middle of the night in the street very cold, watching Miss Maudie's house burn, Boo Radley apears withoiut being noticed and puts a blanket on Scout´s shoulders and leaves. This shows us that he really was a caring and good person. Scout starts thinking that maybe he isn't that bad.

http://maxgx.blogspot.cl/2015/08/great-depression-questions.html In this pictures, you can see the sad situation that the world in general, but even worst in USA was taking place in the 1930's after the Great Depression of the '29. When in the black thursday the prices of almost every company in america went down in Wall Street. Here you can see people making lines to get a bowl of soup, a coffee or a doughnut. You could even see children asking for food or for a job for their parents. In some very extreme cases you could see women selling their children in the black market because they couldn't afford their food or education.

Harper Lee's activity

She was born in April, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father was a newspaper editor and a lawyer.

About the cultural and educational background, she studied in Alabama and after that studied laws for some years but she never finished a degree, also studied some English literature.

When she was younger, she had a lot of contact with racism against black people because her father was a lawyer and had to defend some Afro Americans in some cases, that made her develop a lot of social conscience and I strongly think that all of this situations that happened when she was little and all the discrimination that you could see in that years, made her think about this and finally wrote all that sad feelings which were kind of trapped in her head on the book. The result was " To Kill a Mockingbird".

Rationale

This written task which is a Blog Entry, is related to my study of the mass media, specifically to the media manipulation.

 I decided to write a Blog entry because with this type of text I think that I can adress exactly the segment of people that I want. This segment includes teenagers and adults who are concerned about the things that happen all around the world. Being this a blog entry, I can freely express my opinion and reach a huge amount of people who may be interested in this topic.

In this publication about media manipulation I approached the topic by giving two examples. The  First one is about the Gaza strip conflict in Israel in which I talked about how the information get´s twisted depending in which country is being presented. While my second example was about an image taken in Egypt which it was being used to topple Nicolas Maduro´s government in Venezuela, trying to make the people think that the image was about two Venezuelan soldiers dragging someone by the floor.

Finally, I would like to add that in this Blog entry I used an authoritary voice trying to convince the people to inform themselves better and to make their own opinions by gathering information from different sources so they do not fall in this horrible mechanism called Media Manipulation