The terror is (almost) over...

First of all, I want to congratulate everyone for surviving this week! I know it was a killer, but, at least, its over. Not only did we have a lot to do for ASAMST R2A, but for other classes, meetings, and events as well. I know that alot of people taking CHEM 1A, CHEM 3B, MATH 1B, PHYSICS 8B, and probably some other classes have midterms this upcoming week. So it may not be over quite yet, but i want to encourage everyone to hang in there. You can do it.

Well 1 thing i need to say about the exam was that it was not what i expected. The thing with that exam was that it already is pretty difficult to identify the correct character and book from which the quote originates, and identifying who is being spoken to and the context of the quote isn't too bad once you know for certain who said it and from what book BUT the analysis, etc. was not my favorite. In addition, covering materical from 4 full-length novels was a daunting task because there really is sooo much context to cover. I actually felt that I had I really hard tme studying for the exam bacause I didn't know how to go about it. Sure, some of the quotes were pretty obvious but others could fit into any novel. I don't think I did that well on the exam but am intent on doing better on my next paper so that I could counterbalance that grade.

So for my next paper, I'm writing on America is in the Heart, partly for the same reason as Jen is writing on A Gesture Life. But really the main reason is because I really enjoyed the book, even though it was so dense. It was pretty evident from all the highlighting and notes on the book that i took, that it would also be a logical book to choose. I decided to write about how Carlos is inspired by people who he doesn't necessarily know too well or for that long. But that doesn't deviate from the fact that they left him valuable life-lessons that, based on his pattern of behavior, remain with him with each action that he takes. He learns about nature from his father, who he technically lived with on the farm but he didn't really know his dad in the sense that he didn't know too much about his dad's past and such. That mainly could be accounted for because Carlos is still a child on the farm and doesn't completely comprehend everything that a grown man would. Amado's instillment of the importance of education and Pascual's advice concerning writing.I also talked about Millar's friendship and Marion's love. Then Leon's teaching of sticking to one's convictions and Claro's call to duty for Carlos. I felt like the majority of these characters were overlooked, but as I was perrusing my book to support my original thesis, I realized the importance of what these characters had to say. I honestly felt that this paper is alot better than my first one. It probably helped that i wrote it in one sitting, I shut myself out of the world and stayed in the library for hours so that I could crank this paper out and enjoy the rest of my week since I had SENIOR WEEKEND! coming up. So i finished it and had my conference with Chia-Chi and was glad with the feedback I received. He agreed that it was a stronger paper than my first one, but, once again, I needed a stronger more concise thesis. But the ironic thing is that this time the thesis was too specific, and more like four thesi rather than one. So my mission is to find a way to connect all of the into one unifying idea/theme. I hope your essays are going well for you as well.