Journal #20: Final Journal

Hello everybody!

Still I can't believe that we finished this class because this semester went very fast! I remember the day that we met with each other in the beginning of this semester when Sean gave us syllabus and plan for this class and that day was like yesterday. In this class we spent a good time to learn important skill and even learning writing sort of difficult this class wasn't boring because the teacher and classmates have been nice and go really along with each other.

During this semester I have learned a lot of things and composition class was the most important class that changed my writing skills mostly. Now I know how the paragraph must be written. Topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence were the main parts of the paragraph. A group of paragraph represents an essay and that essay has different styles descriptive, compare/contrast, cause/effect...etc. Each style has its own method of writing.

I really valued the effort that has been done by our teacher Prof. Sean because he helped us to do well. However, there is a small problem that I face it usually in toefl writing section which is time. When I write an essay, I need a lot of time to brainstorm ideas and arrange them into a good essay. If I'm limited with a certain amount of time, my ideas become really bad. Currently, I'm working on this problem by using time writing to overcome timing problem.

Yejin and Jamie

Journal #19 : Reaction - Baraka

A lot of people have seen many movies from many kinds like action, drama, comedy...etc. There are other kinds of movies which describe nature and human. Baraka is one of those movies that give you an overview of how people and nature live on this planet. It has a lot of sadness scenes that make you think about other people. This movie starts with giving an image of how people and nature lived together in the past in a balanced way and how people life have changed to the negative side. Pollution, wars, and poverty were the most effective scenes on me.

Very thin people wearing dirty cloths and poverty was pictured on their faces were looking in trash for anything valuable that could help them to live. I couldn't imagine how this happened and I couldn't believe my eyes! What a hell! Think about it if you don't have money and anything useful to make you alive would like go to trash place and searching for valuable stuff? It is poverty that make the Indian people in the scene go around the trash with their cows to find something to eat or to sell.

You may ask why they didn't eat their cows? Some Indian people have religious reasons that forbid them to eat these animals even they are in desolate state. While other people in the world find what they need to live easily not only this some of them use golden spoons, plates and other luxury stuffs to use them to eat, other people were searching in the trash to find a piece of bread!

We don't care about poverty because we have enough sources for us and for our children. Yes this is the answer that most people think about it when someone ask them to find or suggest a solution for poverty. We lost the sense and the feeling. We lost the human being concepts. We just think about ourselves and this concludes that we live like animals or worse than them.

In that scene sadness was my company and the image of a group people children, youth, and elders looking for their food in the trash give you the definition of the word "Poverty". Poverty has roots in all regions and countries and my grand father told me stories about their hard life before oil age. They lived simple life and they couldn't eat meat daily or weekly and I was thinking if time goes back can I live like them?

Ceyda and Sun