blog #6

“The Nightmare Before The Christmas” is a nice animated movie not from Disney. It was about Jake Skellington, the Pumpkin King, who lived in Halloweentown. One day he went through the door in a tree and arrived in Christmastown and saw how happy and beautiful it was over there. When he was back in Halloweentown, he showed his friends what Christmas was like, and he suggested to do Christmas this year instead of Halloween. And things didn’t go as planned.

At first I thought this would be a horror movie. But when I watch the movie, I was scared by it in the slightest. “Nightmare Before The Christmas” is both a horror film and a musical, fantasy and suspense movie, comedy is thrown in at just the right moments. I don’t really like holiday movie because I always find them to be bursting with slapstick comedy, or way too sweet and too dramatic. But this movie is perfect for someone like me, who likes a little bit of darker movie, but expects a Christmas movie to have a good message. I don’t know if that’s just because Halloween and Christmas are my favorite holidays, but I really feel like this movie is great for older children and adult.

Blog #5

I chose “Because of you” by Kelly Clarkson. When I first heard this song (without watching the mv) I thought it was her talking about a lover and it killed me because I knew she was too young to have experienced such love and heartache. Then I watched the mv and figured that my thoughts were not correct. The song is about scarred from not having a perfect childhood as others and being torn between parents. In this song, the trying not to make the same mistakes her parents did. She is scared to fall in love, in fear of going through the same pain her parents did. In my opinion, the parts in song where Kelly sings about being scared and not taking risks because she did’t want to get hurt the way her parents did is what kids (who parents has divorced) feel or think. Once you had to deal with your parents’ divorce, you don’t want your child to feel like that. There are so many people can relate to this song because so many kids have had to deal with divorce. The song was so right because it shows how hard divorce can be on kids and people’s actions do have effect on their children. 

Blog 4

This article is about a black queer teacher taught a nineth-graded English Language Arts classroom in Washington.DC. One day he heard the debate between two students about the existence of unicorns. He thought :” there are many things that we have little physical evidence to prove exist, but still believe in. That we can imagine something is aligned with the power of ideas that give rise to many inventors.” and he realized that if he didn’t tell the students who he was, it’s like he doesn’t exist. As he a black queer and pro-feminis teacher, he felt like he didn’t “exist” in the world for p-12 education. He didn’t talk anything about his private life or something about his queer identity. He has been thinking about the “Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation in the Classroom” discussion but he had never felt OK to be himself in classroom. Incidentally he have heard an argument between two student where the “f” word was passed around and he was offended by it. So he told his students that he was gay. Then they stopped saying that and everyone’s lives were still normal. In my opinion those who truly love you and care about you will always be pleased when you’re simply being yourself. 

Believing in myself

In my opinion life is an adventure. It always contains unfortunate upheavals and surprises. It is a chain of sadness-happiness, suffering-satisfaction. We all have uncounted failure at one point of another but of course we have to believe in ourselves. That allows us to re-evaluate our lives in a positive manner.When you want to achieve your purpose, you have to believe that you can do it. Believing that you can accomplish anything you set to do is the beginning of success. 

I could remember when I was a little girl, I had never been confident in my art works. I couldn’t draw anything beautifully or couldn’t color within the given border. I always thought I could never do this so I was afraid of drawing and painting. Incidentally, my counselor put me in art last in my senior year. I thought :” OMG I may fail this class”. But then I tried my best in order to pass my art class. And my art work was first held on the wall in my class. You know once I achieved my goal I wanted the next time to be better than the last time.

Billions of people fail to live the life they wished to live. One of the strongest causes for this attitude is that they do not believe in themselves. So if you know your dream, stay focused and do not let anyone discourage you. Even if no one believes in you, you excuse it as a motivation and believe in yourself and prove to them that you can do it. Once again you have to believe in yourself and people will be forced to believe in you. 

There are four members in our book club : Dana Ly, Jake Catura, Toni Flores and me. We usually collaborate together in class. We dicided the use “The fault in our stars” for our book club. My goal is to explore the story carefully so that I can understand it. I haven’t read this story before. I just read its summary and reviews. And I think this is a persuasive, emotional story with strong, positive message about sacrifice, truths and true love : the two cancer patients fall in love with each other; they find joy and fulfillment. I haven’t joined any book club before. I hope we have some meetings to discuss the book. Even though we are part of group discussion and are good at listening to each other, it still need a leader. (it’s just my opinion) :). 

Superman and me

The author started to read with comic books when he was very young. He loves reading and he read everytime, everywhere because it is the way to save his life. He had a purpose to read books. So do I. I read books because I want to improve my English. I moved to America two years ago so my English is not very good. I’m struggling with reading and writing especially vocabs. I heard that the more we read the more we improve our English so I started reading as many books as possible. I spent my free time reading books which is the best way to help me improve my English. At first I couldn’t understand anything. But after reading many books, I could understand what the stories are about. If I couldn’t understand anything, I would use dictionary to translate into my language or I would guess what it means. The one influenced me in continuing my education is my mom. She bought me many books. I couldn’t understand anything that’s why I didn’t like reading books. And I was so lazy. But my mom always as me to reading as many books as possible. I started to read in order to  make my mom happy. And now reading books become my habit. I usually read in my spare time. ” I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose.” That’s right. Reading books is the best way to improve English and it can give us a better life.