A Seperate Piece

A Seperate Piece by John Knowles is about boys living in New Hampshire that go to a private all boys school during World War 2. Phineas is a very athletic person that is very competitive. Gene is more of a conserved person that is more about school than sports. Although they are opposites, they just so happen to be bestfriends. Phineas is the one that makes all of the rules and Gene is willing to do anything that Phineas tells him to. One day they come up with the idea to jump out of a tree and into a river. While up in the branches, Phineas falls and breaks his leg. Since there is a war going on and everyone is getting closer to getting drafted they decide to enlist. Gene was going to enlist until the morning that Phineas came back. The story is about Gene and Phineas and the War that was going on at the time and they way that everyone deals with it.

I thought that this was a good book. It really showed the way that some people were feeling durning the war and the way that it affected the teenagers. I liked it because it was about the different ways that different people dealt with the problems that were handed to them.

I would recomend this book to general tenth grade classes. It had a good amount of large words in it and I think that they could benefit from reading a challenging book. It was a book that was written with a lot of different emotions and you could tell what he wanted you to feel.

Blog Response #6: Find A Poet

The poet that appealed to me the most was Jack Richards. His poems were very descriptive and made it easy for me to get a picture in my head of what he was describing. The way that he was writing made it seem as if he was watching someone. It also seemed as if he and that person were one, as if he could feel as they were feeling. I also liked this poet because he writes with a lot of emotion. Throughout the poem it had some rhyming but when it was used it didn’t seem forced. This poem also appealed to me because in the poem it wasn’t imaginary some of the things that he wrote were very true in the life of a dancer.

I can relate the poem Lonely Dancer to my life because I also take dance classes and he captured the way that some dancers feel when they are dancing for an audience, or even just practicing. When you are out in front of an audience all of your fears go away and you just dance with your heart.

My personal definition of poetry is a poem that captures a feeling and you are able to picture or feel what they are writing about. I think that the best types of poems are when you can feel the emotions that they are try to portray and you can imagine what they are talking or writing about. I think that a good poem must flow well and not just be a bunch of random words put together on a piece of paper.

The Color Of Water

The Color Of Water by James McBride is about an African American child with a White mother and without a father. He also has eleven brothers and sisters that are African American. When he is little he never understood why his mom was not dark like him, when he would ask her about it she would say that she was just light skinned. As he got older he wanted to know about his mothers past and family, but she never answered any of the questions. Throughout the book you learn his mothers story and his as he is growing up.

Although this book had many lessons that you could learn from, it did not particularly appeal to me. It felt as if the book was just a book about their lives and didn't really have a plot.

A general tenth grade class could read this book without any problems. This book may be a little challenging to follow because this book is about two different peoples lives and it goes back and forth between every other chapter. They may like this book if they come from a diverse enviornment because it mostly deals with racial problems and racial interactions.