Reading Response

You never want to be  in a situation where you have to fly to stay alive. That is what the main character, who goes by many names, is living in the book I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore. This book is focused on the life of John Smith and how he has to adjust to every situation and also has to stay calm and each one of those situations. I believe that this book is unfair for the main character because he is forced to do things that he may not want to do.

If I was ever getting bullied I would stand up to the bully but John is encouraged not to. The minute John walked in to the class he received A warm welcome from a student named Mark. Mark and John had plenty of conflicting moments including when Mark and his friends pushed John to the lockers and surrounded him. Even though John has super powers, he cannot use them in the public which makes him pretty much hopeless because if he uses them, the whole world would find out and he would be executed. Furthermore a quote on page 98 explains, " at my locker I noticed something immediately off. The metal handle is covered with dirt, or what looks like dirt. I'm not sure if I should open it, but then I take a deep breath and force the handle up. The locker is half filled with manure..." John immediately realized it was Mark who did it but I can could not do anything about it.

Apart of staying secret is that you have to lie to the people you love. Most of his life he has been forced to lie to the people he loved to keep his secret. This part of the book is what really makes it unfair for him because he can never have a real friend. Also he has lost many family members of all sorts and he had to move on and pretty much become a new person just to stay alive. A very impactful line came on page 11 and it said, " my current name is Daniel Jones. My story is that I grew up in California and moved here because of my dad's job as a computer programmer. Daniel Jones is about to disappear. I light a match and drop it and the pile ignites. Another one of my lives, gone." this line was really important because it shows how he has to change himself every once in a while which is really hard to do.

Overall, I believe that this is a very unfair book because of him having to change his identity and tell lies to the people he loves. In the real world people have to deal with this in many scenarios so this book is an example of what people have to go through. I believe that those people should be reading this book to help them deal with the situation.

Outline

Hook: Any situation in which you are forced to fight in is a bad one

Thesis: Given that the main character isn't allowed to fight if he is getting bullied or has to lie to the people he loves just to stay a live makes this book unfair.

Body paragraph #1

Topic sentence: Throughout the Book John constantly gets bullied but can't do anything about it.

Evidence: A classmate of his always instigating fights between John and himself.

Evidence: Mark puts a pile of manure in Johns locker.

Body paragraph #2

Topic sentence: John often has to lie about his identity which hurts him deeply every time he does it.

Evidence: Every time he has to move he is forced to leave the friends he tried so hard to befriend.

Evidence: Beginning of book when he said he had to change to another one of his lives.

Authors Note

Authors Note

As you may notice, my book contains a character that is bullied through out the book. Bullying is a huge issue in our country and it appears to us in many ways. Not only does it effect children, but it also can effect adults to. It has many negative effects on people such as depression, fear, and even suicidal thoughts. “stopbullying.gov” says that bullying can also lead to mental and physical health as well as substance abuse. The last thing we want children to be doing is drugs. I believe that we as a country should fight to end bullying to put a stop to all of the deaths annually because of bullying.

I myself haven’t really ever found myself in a situation in which I was being bullied. Given that, I definitely have seen bullying whether it’s on the street or in my school. In fact, 70.6 percent of teens like me have too. This is quite a big number which tells us that there is a problem that needs to be stopped. To stop this problem we should work as a team to give everybody the help they need to either prevent themselves from being bullied or to help them recover from being bullied. Also, there are many different types of bullying. There is the regular type, with variations like, sexual harassment, purposeful isolation, stealing someones belongings, rumor spreading, and teasing. All of these things have something in common which is that that they all can start off as a joke. I want people to be aware that it may be funny to you, but the person you are aimed at could be having the worst time of his/her life. People need to learn that there is a fine line between joking and bullying. If that could happen then we can have a chance to stop bullying. 

Bullying can lead up to many other things beside just “hurting someones feeling.” By now we probably have all heard of many tragic school shootings. Well according to “NoBullying.com” 75 percent of school shootings have been linked to past bullying. This statistic is so powerful because it is talking about all of the lives lost maybe cause someone started a rumor about you. We need to teach everybody that any joke taken too far can become destructive to someones mental heath. The fact that a little joke to you can cost the life of another person is heart-breaking because that life could have easily been saved from a little attention from a parent or teacher.

Synthesis Page

Hate List

by

Jennifer Brown

Question: How does this book help you to think about social issues you care about or causes you are committed to?

Bullying- This is the main problem of this book. All the the people who made hateful remarks to either Valerie or Nick caused the shooting to happen. In this book and in the real world, bullying causes deaths that could be prevented by just telling a teacher or caring for one another. Overtime, bullying starts to take a negative effect on people and it becomes so serious that they start to think to the extreme. For example, on page 100 in the text Nick says, “ Yeah. You’re right. But I could do it. I could totally blow those people up. It just wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.’ We’d both laughed.” This quote is very powerful because it shows how sick he was and what the bullies had done to him. If someone would have addressed the situation, he would’ve received help and lives could have been saved. That is why in real life we have to try our hardest to stop bullying and we can prevent the deaths of kids across the world.

Underage Drinking- I think that the author was trying to prove a point when coming up with the character that Nick is. She made a character that does horrible things in his life to prove that you have nothing to gain from it. This is compelling to me because it also relates to the topic of peer pressure. Nick drinks and smokes weed and then convinces Valerie to do the same. This causes them to make despicable decisions which costs the lives of people in the school. Doing drugs and drinking can mess with your brain to cause you to be educationally challenged, especially at a young age. In the real world, this can easily be prevented if parents pay attention to what there children are doing and who they are hanging out with.

Gun Control- This is a world wide problem because governments cannot keep guns out of the wrong peoples hands. A clear example is Nick, who shot up his school with a gun that he got from a friend. His “friend” shouldn’t have even had a gun in the first place. If Valerie’s parents had watched who she was hanging out with, than the list could have been stopped. If governments worked a lot harder to ban guns on the streets, than lives could have been saved.

Overall, I believe that we as a society should be using books like these to help improve our communities by taking all the wrongs in the book and make them rights in the real world. For example taking guns off of the streets could definitely save insane amounts of lives over the course of a year. Yet we are still struggling to take charge and that is why this book should be used as an example to help society to fix its problems

Argument essay

Banning a book can mean many things. It can be because some people think it is not appropriate for a certain age or that they believe it it is so full with profanity that it should be removed from all libraries. The book Lord of the Flies by William Golding is about a group of boys that landed on a mysterious island. They have to adapt to living by themselves which most of them ending failing in trying to do that. In fact, they even started to kill each other off in order to survive. This is a main reason why it is constantly challenged and later banned from schools. This text should be removed from middle school libraries because it corrupts teenagers which leads to them acting unjust to their families and teachers. 

Racism is a huge problem and is a main reason why this book should be banned. If you were to read this book thoroughly, you would find plenty of terms that put down different races and also the disabled. This has sparked a lot of anger and hate on William Golding which is why it is challenged so much. One of those terms is “nigger” and people despise that word so much. People are trying so hard for that word to be eliminated and it is constantly being brought up in this book so this book should be stripped from middle school libraries. I don't think that middle schoolers should be reading a book with that type of language, and you can't eliminate just the words, so this book ultimately should be taken away from middle school libraries.

Most of the Controversy around this book has been because of the explicit language used in this book. In this book, the author repeatedly refers to sex, which is a inappropriate topic for middle school children. It would be ok if it is only talked about once or twice but for it to come more than that is inexplicable and it needs to be taken away. Also, this book makes hateful comments towards women which has sparked anger around world. Talking about women that way is a very sensitive topic because if you go to far, you will have all types of criticism. This book definitely went to far because pretty much every chapter, there was a sexist remark about women.

The amount of violence is inexplicable and could stand as the only reason this book should be banned. All throughout the book, especially towards the end, the boys trapped on the island had been desperate. However, this book took it to another level because their desperation took control of them. They started to kill off one another until they were saved. We wouldn’t want middle schoolers being exposed to violence like this which is why it should be banned. Further more, they eventually started wild fires that could have burned forests down. Taking care of our environment is a big deal and this book totally abolished that idea. On page 188, it states,”Jack made a rush and stabbed at Ralph’s chest with a spear. Ralph sensed  the attack and made a rush and stabbed at Ralph’s chest with a spear. Ralph sensed  the position of the weapon from the glimpse he caught of Jack’s arm and put the thrust aside with his own butt.” This line is just a glimpse to how brutal this book is, because it shows how eventually they turn on each other in order to survive. 

Overall, this book contains so much explicit content that I believe it should be banned from all middle school libraries. If children read and follow what the boys did, it would be hectic because of all the terror that happened in the book. I believe that children should do the exact opposite of what happened in this book by staying calm and under control of their actions.

Social Awareness Picture

http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/jn/images/02-JN_WTC_3-34GA.jpg 

This very powerful image by James Nachtwey was taken during the fatal attack on nine eleven. This one day is believed to have been a moment that has changed America forever. This one picture captures the day where millions of lives were taken. It symbolizes both death, and the start of a new city. Building it self together again, while uniting all of its people together. 

This photo is one of my all favorite works of art. It captures exactly what is going on at the time and it also includes a piece of religion in it. This very deep photo is very compelling to me because of multiple reasons. One was that James Nachtwey was able to get close enough to the action to catch this great moment. On the other hand, it symbolizes a new start for this city that has since then grown from the incident. 

Social Awareness Poem

Ferguson 

Some say it was unfair,

Then others started to stare.

It became a big deal,

For the family could not heal.

It became extremely public,

The topic was making people sick.

They wanted justice,

because Michael Brown had been shot.

They went to court,

Because the town was all out of sort.

They made a decision, 

No one was guilty.

Now the town is in sorrow.

The topic I wrote this poem on was the Ferguson case involving Michael Brown. I chose to write about this because it was a really important trial that everyone in the country was paying attention to. While writing the poem, I rhymed sometimes on two lines and sometimes not at all. I chose to do this so that when I didn’t rhyme, those lines could stand out. Also, I capitalized the first letter in the first word to make sure that the sentence had a powerful start to it. So overall, I wrote about this topic to explain what was going on in Ferguson and I used specific structures to do so.