How school sucks...rocks...

After going through the first semester of English 10, I have found some things that suck, and some things that rock. One of the things that rocks is Mr. Cheng and how brings a lot of energy to class every day. He makes the class very enjoyable. One thing that was bad from first semester was the jigsaw reading assignment. I feel like in theory, the idea of people in a group each reading a different article and coming together to share what they learned works. However, when it was applied to the class, people weren't sure of what information was the most important to tell the other person in the short amount of time they had to share. I think that it would be helpful for the person that is reading the article see the questions on the test that have to do with their article. This would not be so that the person could give the other group members the answers, but so that they would know what important ideas the teacher was getting at. This also might work more on paper than it does in the real world. Another thing that isn't necessarily bad, but kind of weird is that the work load in this class is inconsistent. At times, we won't be doing much and then all of a sudden we're reading a really long book in a short amount of time. This could be good, though, because it might be boring staying on one project/unit for a longer time. One last part of first semester that I didn't like is how a lot of classes are going paperless. This is a good initiative that the school is trying to do, but for some classes it just doesn't work. For example, in my Civil Engineering and Architecture class, they are having us just do the assignments in Microsoft Word. With a class like Engineering, there are a lot of calculations that you have to do which is hard to do in a Word Document. I think that in English 10, it is okay to go paperless because we don't have calculations or anything like that.

Rabbit Proof Fence Response

After reading the articles and considering the movie, I think that Phillip Noyce went too far in manipulating his audience in trying to make a strong, emotional movie. Making a movie about something about something like the "Lost Generations" is very dangerous because as a filmmaker, he has to make something interesting that people will react and respond too. This might cause him to detract from the true story and create plot points that reflect steps of the Hero's Journey. This is also dangerous because in a story with a hero, there has to be some sort of a villain, which might cause in this case Noyce to accentuate Mr. Neville's bad intentions. For example, Peter Howson and Des Moore write, "[Neville's] mother received about 500 letters from Aborigines praising his efforts on their behalf. A true story would have shown his humane actions to protect them from exploitation by whites or their own kin." Although some might disagree with the what he did and how he did it, Neville had good intentions which is shown by how many letters he received from Aborigines. This shows that his actions turned out to be successful in many cases. However, in the movie, they make him out to be "a devil" which is what they have the girls call him at Moore River.
I don't think I can totally side with Peter Howson and Des Moore on the view that Neville's actions were completely out of good intentions and that the movie is way off from the truth. However, I feel that the evidence of the 500 letters received by Neville's mother and other evidence make a case that the "Rabbit-Proof Fence" movie is somewhat exaggerated.