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My reflection on our work on The Merchant of Venice

Unit four reflection

The Merchant of Venice is a play written by William Shakespeare, and it was first released to the public in around 1596 or 1597. It featured a Merchant, who had a debt to settle with a greedy Jew called Shylock, and how if the Merchant did not repay, the Jew would cut a pound of flesh off of his body. It featured tragedy and sometimes comedy and it reflected the way Jews were shown to be at the time. Greedy and good for nothing money lenders. That’s not true, of course, but it was seen as the typical Jew attitude back in Venice during the time. We had to write an essay in language arts class, which showed how much we sympathized with the main Jew, Shylock, who did many bad things in his life but was also a victim to many bad things. It wasn’t easy, and in many ways, I felt stuck. I had to use different skills to work on my essay and make it efficient, and I’d like to tell you how I handled it and what I found difficult.

Connect

When I was reading this play, I was getting many familiar feelings throughout. I felt prejudice. As a Muslim, I know how all the Jews in this movie felt. Muslims are usually bashed around for, well, being Muslim. The Jews in this movie were bashed around for being Jewish. I could relate to the pain that those millions of Jews were feeling then because that pain is what millions of Muslims are feeling today.  This also made me a little more interested in the topic, which more enhanced the quality of my essay. It also provided more ways to help me sympathize with Shylock the Jew, as it was quite a long essay.

Extend

Before I started The Merchant of Venice, I was a little confused about the way justice worked. I thought of it as a man just going to prison. But now I know that justice is created from a person’s viewpoint on something. I learnt that if a person despises a criminal due to a personal experience, then their idea of justice would be different than a person that has never been experiences with a criminal. This is what happened in this movie. Christians hated the Jews, and their view of justice for the Jews was changed because of personal and religious background, changing the way they were treated in court. This is same for African Americans that were discriminated in America in the early 1900’s, as they did not receive proper justice either.

Challenges

There was one huge challenge that I had to overcome. The way I thank challenged me. I’m usually the kind of boy that goes into his own world and comes up with crazy stories to let people have a good time. For this essay, I had to change that thinking method into a more analytical way of thinking. It was difficult, as in the morning I am usually creative, and have to switch from that mood into a more critical, analytical mood. It is challenging to be something different from what you were just a second ago, and that hounded me for a long time. However, with help from many teachers and other students, I got enough feedback to make my thinking more analytical than before and leave the creativity out of it.

Thank you for reading! By the way, here is a link at the bottom that leads you to an imdb page which tells you a lot about the Merchant of Venice movie, which was released way back in 2004.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Thought provoking questions

Three hundred word response

If you had to teach something, what would you teach?

If I had to teach something, I would teach the public about the true nature of Islam. It is a peace loving religion which is nothing like they show on television. It has a very interesting history behind it, starting from the first Islamic prophet, Adam, all the way down to our last Imam, Mehdi, who is currently in hiding, but was born thousands of years ago. Islam has miracles as well, which were transferred through the many prophets and Imams of the old times. There are different Islamic sects as well, which have no need to be there, but are there due to small misunderstandings between them all. They all have tiny differences, but are still Muslim. Our religion also has the Qur’an, which is similar to the Bible for Christians and the Torah for Jews. It holds the stories of all of our Prophets and Imams, along with important prayers. It differentiates right from wrong, and was sent to our Prophet by God. The most interesting fact about the Qur’an is that if one has a problem which is troubling their heart, then as soon as they open the Qur’an to a random page, their answer will be right in front of them. The center of Islam is in Makkah (Mecca) and started out as a small tent when Adam made it, but has now developed to become a giant building. It is considered to be “God’s home”. No bird has flown over the monument, or the Kabah, to this day, and neither has any plane. If one brings even the hungriest carnivore into the Kabah’s grounds, it will attack no one and harm nothing. If a very whole hearted Muslim enters the grounds, and goes inside the Kabah to pray, then there is a chance that Imam Mehdi, the Imam in hiding, will meet him. One will not know if that is him or not, but he will meet him.

This was new. I had no idea that my staff was so powerful. I thought it was just a grey stick that only served the purpose of taking up space. Apparently, my staff could not only touch the ground, like any other staff, but it was apparently used by a miserable old wizard who used to abide in this castle. He made the staff so that it could command any thing. A man got attacked by a hyena one day, and I climbed over a rock and commanded it to stop. It went to go eat a sandwich after that.

My thought process which led to my Passion Project

We are doing a passion project in our Language Arts class, and we basically have to come up with an idea for a project which has to do with our passion. I started off, listing my passions.

• Drawing

•  Singing

•  Eating

•  Creative Writing

•  Sleeping

• Video Gaming

I chose my two greatest passions, creative writing and video gaming, and I immediately knew what my project would show.

VIDEOGAMES  + CREATIVE WRITING =  …………….

How can literature be used to express the plots of some of the greatest videogames of all time?

Or….

How can videogame plots be expressed through the use of literature?

Two of my passions had been combined. Next, I decided what materials I would need.

• Video game consoles
• Videogames
• Computer
• Paper
• Imagination

Then, I decided who my helpers would be. My Language Arts Teacher was the first helper who came into my brain. But seeing the technological aspect of the project, I decided that my school tech teacher, Mr. Ade.

I designed my outline after that, which consisted of general steps which would guide me through my project. I wrote about how I would investigate my video game collection, pick out the best and so on. I arranged deadlines for each step, to keep sure that everything would b ready for May 8^th of 2015.

Lastly, I thought of things that could tell me that my project succeeded in impressing the public, also known as the “Criteria for Success.” This would also help motivate me to make this more interesting than just a regular look and read.

Attached to this blog post is the actual proposal for my Passion Project, have a read at it, and maybe if a passion project shows up in your life, you would know how to handle it. PASSION PROJECTproposal

My school was the first school I went into in which I could actually play an instrument. I chose piano, of course, as the use of all your fingers to play a complicated music was basically my cup of tea. I don’t drink tea, so that was a big deal for me. I also chose piano because once you learn piano, you can basically play any other instrument, as they all use your fingers, and piano lets you practice with all ten of them. Sometimes, I get to hear what the other students’ instruments sound like. The French horn surprised me the most. You would expect an instrument with a mouth so big to release the roar of thunder. But no. All you hear is what sounds like something that they would play in a sad soap opera, let alone an action movie. Also, I do not understand he differences between a violin and a viola. Could someone please tell me the difference. All I see is that the viola is smaller than the violin. Same with the cello and the bass. They look exactly the same, except the bass is a darker brown and is bigger, maybe a little deeper sound. I do not understand why they couldn’t manage to put all of those in one. It is kind of like having a violin slit between three different parts. Same with the trumpet family, why do they do this? However, the slide trombone looks fun to play, but it’s a risk for your face, especially if you are as clumsy as me. Anyway, I would like to know what instrument that you play! I play the piano, as I have said before, but I would love to know what the other people in the world play, and how they do it!

Hello there! My other post was a little….eh. Today, however, I will talk about a nice little unit that I did in my Language Arts class which was about film study. The unit was very nice and it opened many oppurtunities for many young directors to try and learn more about their dream job. We learnt about the relationship between the camera and the positions of the actors, and how one little change in the camera can change the whole feel of the movie scene. Also, we learnt about how music can affect the mood in a scene. If you replace a tom  and jerry cartoon’s upbeat music with a sad tune, it would feel as if tom aand jerry had gone through a disaster and you are watching a tribute directed towards them. To end our film unit, we watched a movie called “The Rabbit Proof Fence” which was an exceptionally great movie, and the movie used many of the different aspects of film making that we had learnt  throughout the whole unit. After we finished off that movie, we analysed it, and dissected every little tune that was in the movie, why it was there, and how it changed that little millisecond that it played during. When we finished off that lengthy series of events, we moved onto creating a creative project which had t do with a specific aspect of the movie, and we needed to give examples for those specific criteria. After that, I was introduced to this website. You probably have already read what happened after that.

Want to hear a joken about pizza?

Never mind…it’s too cheesy.

I tried to catch some fog earlier

I mist.

What’s a pirate’s favorite letter?

‘Tis the C!

Why couldn’t the skeleton cross the road?

He didn’t have the guts to do it

I think you know where these puns are from.

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