Lord of the Flies; Not One Fly Mentioned (So Far)

This term for English my class has been doing a novel study on the award winning dystopian fiction Lord of the Flies.  As the class total has read to: A plane full of a group of kids separated by 2 age groups crashes onto an island.  A lucky conch leads to the gathering of the children as a hierarchy is formed, separated by 2 groups determined by age.  As the prospect of an adult-less land excites the leaders of this hierarchy the group slowly devolves over time as event after event shows the destined savagery of society.  The book itself, in my opinion, is an allegory that demonstrates the worst aspects of a society under no order, if not society as a whole.

This blog will talk about the allegory of the story, that being the worst aspects of society.  As discussed before the hidden meaning of the book was the darkest problems of society, as shown in how the boys handle societal problems.  The biggest example of societies secrets is savagery.  As shown in how it’s a bunch of children on an uninhabited island, any person could expect signs of savagery.  Jack, the leader of the assigned hunters of the hierarchy, is the biggest sign of savagery (by chapter 4).  The hunters are a group assigned with hunting meat.  During hunting though the group was shown as almost obsessed with the idea of meat, comparable to a cult and their god of worship.  They’d even created a chant by the end of chapter 4: kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood.  So much for “We’re not savages, we’re English.” :/.  A note on that quote, that’s most likely foreshadowing the future due to the path Jack is going.

Another one of society’s secrets is fear.  This topic is tackled on with the representation of the beastie.  The beastie is described in chapter 2 by a child with a mulberry birthmark on their head.  They explain the beastie as a long “snake-thing” that was able to blend in with the creepers of the island… creepers being long vines.  A large beast which hunted at night.  Even though the existence of the beastie was impossible to confirm until seen with their own eyes, all of the small children were still afraid of it while the big children were either denying its existence or promising to hunt it down.  As demonstrated by the mere thought of the beastie to the children, people fear whether they know truth or not.  This concept is continued onwards by the fact that the “beastie” essentially evolves.  Becoming instead an abstract concept bound not by one description, but many.  The beastie suddenly attacked from the water, or flew from the air.  No one knew if this was true,  in fact my prediction is that none of them are true, yet they still feared.  The ever-expanding idea of the beastie became so outlandish and everyone was still scared of it.

Society does this too, not just in fear but fear is what is streamlined.  On the internet for example.  Bloody Mary, heard the name before?  Say her name in a mirror 3 times and she will appear.  Only god knows whether the myth was true or not, and yet everyone was still afraid to call her name.  Everyone was afraid that she’d appear behind you and do something bad, but there’s no way that’d happen right?  Well, are you going to try?  Not really, that’s what everyone was thinking.  Why should I put myself in danger just to know whether something is true or not when I could ignore it, be afraid.  Instead of risking myself, why don’t I just… not?  In summary, that’s what being scared is.  Running in the opposite direction of danger, it’s obviously not bad to be scared.  It’s just that no one’s taking that step into proving it wrong.  That’s what was happening in Lord of the Flies.  All the big kids could do is make promises and call out hearsay, hoping that it would be true.

The last example of an aspect of society that is discussed in Lord of the Flies is… rebellion of social constructs (or just rebellion).  The book (so far) has tackled the idea of rebellion with Roger.  A big kid who is described to be a more sinister kid.  Apart of the choir and acting as Jack’s right hand man in mischief.  Roger is described to have this “taboo of old life.” This taboo is based on how society’s enforcers punished him for rebelling against society’s rules.  Because of this Roger, even while in complete freedom and release from society’s enforcers, still wasn’t able to break the rules placed.  This is shown in a scene where he is attempting to throw rocks at a child, apart of the little kids.  No matter how hard he tried he was never able to throw the rock at the child, the rock always kept 6 yards from the crying child.  The arm of his previous life kept him from hitting the child in his current.  But… this taboo.  In context the book puts this taboo as a sort of obstacle to overcome, something that take time (and should be) banished of.  Thanks to some spoilers, I am aware of the result of this taboo.  In the end, Roger was able to overcome his old life.

Rebellion in society is both something to be proud and to be shunned of, due to how society views rebellion.  It all depends on context, in this context it’s viewed in a negative light.  Rebelling against the placed rules to harm those innocent.  It happens in society too, it’s called crime.  One of society’s darkest secrets… is crime.

Although the last paragraph may have been explained poorly, I hope you can see my point of view.  How Lord of the Flies is an allegory for society’s greatest faults, worst secrets.  What everyone tries to hide.

The Freedom Writers, Learnt your Lesson yet?

Last term and all of this recent term we have been learning about the Freedom Writers.  The Freedom Writers, in summary, are a class (Students + teacher) which objected the more-or-less racist system by writing their experiences in diaries and publishing them to the public.  We learnt about them, dissected the characters, then analysed their traits and relations.

The class had to do 2 (+ 1) things.  Firstly we had to analyse the film and find a life lesson which the film taught.  We then had to write about a character and how they were or were not a role model.

Here are the excerpts:

An important lesson that I have found from the movie is how you will never truly solve something by doing it alone.  If you try to advance through life’s issues alone you will never come out as a happy person, having someone else help you along the way will make your experience infinitely better.  Almost every single main character in the movie was struggling with issues in their life: Mrs Gruwell struggling to follow in her father’s steps, Alejandro’s homelessness and how the class gave him hope, the students and their now-not endless battle in their respective wars.  After Mrs Gruwell became the teacher of room 203 everything changed, all of their lives became better, if slightly.  Mrs Gruwell was able to follow her father’s footsteps, Alejandro was able to find his true home and each individual student came together and reconciled with each other.  With that as proof it is shown that having someone to help in your issues is important to successfully overcome them.  Without someone else you’ll suffer alone, don’t try to do everything by yourself because in most cases you can’t.  Perhaps you can, there’s no harm in getting help though.  We’re all guilty of trying something we realistically can’t; I’m especially at fault for trying something by myself. I try it a lot.  This taught me not to try everything by myself and instead get help… I’m not going to stop though.

Now a character who I found was a positive role model from the film was Marcus.  Marcus, at first, seems like a very unlikely role model due to how quiet he is.  He’s the kind of character that sits in the background, not giving his opinion and not participating in unnecessary conflict.  In the movie, at first, he is depicted as so.  Only engaging during conflicts against Mrs Gruwell, clearly situations where he feels most offended in.  As the story progresses Marcus slowly shows himself.

Now this character is a role model due to how collected he is along with how much he actually cares, in contrast to this picture he paints.  In various situations it shows how Marcus cares.  When the picture is being passed around he objects, when the class starts pressuring Mrs Gruwell he presses further.  When the person who sheltered Anne Frank visited he gave her his utmost respect and gratitude.  When that student was made over how Anne Frank ended up dying Marcus gave her his perspective.  Marcus is a role model because he cares, even if it doesn’t look like it.  He does sit in the background but he stands up for anyone in trouble, watching with a careful eye in the background.  He isn’t the ideal role model, the best role model is a person who can stand out in a crowd and lead.  The best role model is a role model you can actually notice.  Marcus on the other hand is a background character, just sitting there watching.  He doesn’t have to lead to be a role model.  A role model doesn’t have to be bright to be a good example.  

Marcus, in summary, doesn’t necessarily act at all.  He’s just there.  At first I thought he was just in the background until he began to show himself later on in the movie.  After watching the film again I began to notice what he really was doing.  

He’s a good role model due to how much he cares.  There sure are better role models, like Eva for example, but he’s a role model nonetheless.  A role model I like at least.

Thanks for reading :b

Advice for @Tahlia_T – CAA Response

Response to a supposed post

“Everyone at school posts perfect photos, and I feel like I can’t keep up.  Sometimes I delete my posts if they don’t get enough likes. How do I stop caring so much about that stuff.”

__________________________________________________________________

Hi Tahlia, that is quite an unfortunate situation.  Sadly I’m unable to feel your pain due to my lack of online interaction.  How ever, I can understand what you mean.  In my humble opinion, the best way to stop caring about your media position is: to start ignoring your social media as a whole, disconnect yourself from other people’s social media to focus on yourself, or practice your photography.  Hope you’re able to get better.

Kaikohe film Festival: Finding Jacob

I, and a team I will mention the names of later, submitted a film for the Kaikohe Film Festival… or well at least submitted it for voting within the school.  The name of the film is in the title of the blog: Finding Jacob.  The theme was related to treasures but I don’t know exactly what the theme was.  The film follows an anthropomorphic Pounamu lost to his owner, Jacob’s, neglectfulness.  The pounamu spends the film trying to get back to Jacob.  With a blend of CGI and animation the pounamu was brought to life.  First, how we got there.

The film began where all films begin, a storyboard.  About an hour or so of storyboarding and we had our general idea of a film.  Honestly it didn’t help that we had no idea what we were going to make. Taira, essentially a mentor, came up with the perfect idea.  A lost Pounamu which we animate over.  We get to it, I take a bunch of camera shots of a Pounamu , we also use a drone to take some cool shots.  Then it was the animation.   About 3 weeks for animation, maybe 2. “A god forbidden long time for 3 minutes”  I thought.  It made me realize how much goes into animation, thinking about it less optimistically a 1:1 week to minute ratio is horrible.  Anyways, after the animation was done we got into the effects.

Time to meet the team.  Jacob was: Voice acting, main actor, composer.  Asher was: Music, animation, assistance with the camera.  I was: Camera, animation.  Ariana was a miscellaneous help, helping out with animating the hard shots.  In my opinion the most important person, Taira: mentor, CGI animation, also supplied the camera equipment (very important).  I mean you can’t do something you don’t know, this was the first time any of us were doing this (besides Taira).

The film taught me a lot, not only about using Adobe for animation but also about camera shots.  Something that year 9 English would never properly teach me.  I learnt how important lighting it, how camera focus works, also how to actually use a camera.  The best part, it taught me the craft of film making and how much dedication needs to go into it.

                                                             

Second week of walking around and being a menace to the offense A.K.A amateur’s touch.

The title describes it all.  The week was about communication, defense and dummy halves.  I didn’t really do much, I did learn a lot of technical stuff.  For example, how dummy halves work.  I learnt how the dummy half is essentially just an excuse to stop people from solo stomping, instead they duo stomp.  Most of the time, the dummy: picks up the ball after the person with the ball is touched and plants the ball.  A ball planting is basically just placing the ball down for the dummy half to pick up.  The dummy half then either passes the ball to someone else, passes it back to the previous owner (I swear there’s a difference), or tries and scores but fails because dummy halves can’t score.  That was interesting to learn because without context there is zero reason for there to be a dummy half other than balance.  

 

Another important part of the week was about positioning and defensive “sliding”, literally just walking to match the person you aim to stop.  I believe the most important part would’ve been the communication.  Knowing your comms is vital to playing efficiently because this game has been catered towards teamwork and NOT solo stomping.  Especially when you’re with a bunch of people that defend on offense.  In summary, next week will be absolute hell.  Zero highlights by the way if you were so curious.

My first week of touch. :(

In PHE after having done sexuality we’re starting a new topic, touch.  I really don’t like it, especially because our planner foretells a tournament among the class.  This is actual hell, I could barely do basketball and sexuality, usually  seen as the worst thing ever, was my saving grace.  I don’t play much sport, I’m not the most athletic, I REALLY don’t like physically impairing activities.  Touch is a simple game: you have a ball and a team.  Your team’s goal is to reach the end and put the ball on the try line.  Whenever the person with the ball is touched they give the ball to another person.  When they are touched with the ball a few times the other team gets a try at attacking.  All defense does is go and touch the ball holder, when touched they must retreat 7 meters.  That’s really all the game is but obviously there’s more to it.  

It’s so simple yet deadly for people who don’t want to play it.  PHE is essentially just that for me:  I wait patiently for sexuality so I don’t have to do stuff but then the next topic the bell tolls and the most athletic sport is forced upon me.  During the actual week I didn’t really do much, just ran with a ball essentially.  I believe that’s what the rest of the unit will end up being.  Since I really need to (try) improve something I want to improve my passing.

Forces and motion, Newton said about this I guess.

Forces and motion are essentially what describes how something moves.  For example gravity, everyone knows it because it’s a topic 7 year olds bragged about knowing when they just saw it off the internet.  Gravity is a force, the force that pulls you inward to the earth’s center.  Every action you take probably has some kind of force for there are various kinds of forces.

There is: Support going upwards going against gravity which is going down.  Push goes against friction, those two oppose each other but can go both ways (even in space! although ’tis very little.).  Motion is essentially the action while forces are what describe the act.  We use force in many ways, like the simple machines.  There are things like the lever which uses a flat surface to lift an object up.

VolleyBall for P.E. It was fine.

In Pe in the first 3 weeks we had learnt and played Volleyball.  My best learning moment was learning the footwork for spikes.  That wasn’t really interesting but miles ahead of the other topics.  As you should know I am not confident in any athleticism let alone skills.  Thus by proxy every skill needs working on.  I learnt nothing in terms of game smarts because there isn’t much at the base level of volleyball.  NOTHING has changed since week 1.  If volleyball were to appear again in my agenda I would work on my reaction skills.

 

Atoms: they could be you, they could be ME, they could even be-

Yellow, this term my class has been learning about atoms and related things like their atomic structure.  It’s quite simple really, the atom is basically a conglomerate of  3 things: Protons, neutrons, electrons.  These three things each have a diffrent electrical charge: Protons have +1 chare, neutrons have no charge and electrons have -1 charge.  Here’s the structure of an atom.

This is a carbon atom, what carbon is made out of.  As you can see the electrons are circiling around the protons and neutrons.  Those circles are called shells, a certain amount of electrons can be in each shell.  The first shell (the inner-most shell) can only have 2 electrons, the rest of them can only have 8 max.  For example the inner shell of the atom has 2 electrons, whereas the outer shell has 4.  This means the outer shell is incomplete.  If so the atom will try to gain a full outer shell, the atom will always go the easier route, in this case both routes (losing or gaining electrons) are equally easy.  This means the atom will try share electrons with another atom, for example another carbon atom.

As the title suggests atoms are literally the matter of this universe and everything in it, with a few exceptions like light.  Why am I sharing this?  I thought it’d be nice if you youngin’ learnt about atoms, of course this is an abriged to the proper explanation.  It’s also a nice way to recap on what I learnt.

Globalisation, what is it, what does it do?

Hello, in recent times my class has been learning a new topic in social studies/science.  Don’t know what social studies is?  To put it simply it is the American’s idea of history class, although american classes can be more political.  Globalisation and its effects are an example of political history, although its not exactly history.  Globalisation, in my opinion of course, is the procsess of the world (or globe, considering its in the name) intertwining thanks to the act of trading and sharing culture with one another.  Basicly it is how the world connects with each other, my best example being the exchange that goes between markets.  FOR EXAMPLE, that chromebook of yours, probably made from china as always (it isn’t).  Chromebooks require a large amounts of reasources considering it is only the height and length of your forearm.  Because of this, china needs more stuff to make more product.  They start trading (most likely money, bad sign when they trading with resource for resource )  to get what they need to create the Chromebook.  They make it,  send it, then a shop elsewhere receives it.  Last of all the chromebook is sold, to you… maybe.  Chromebooks aren’t the only thing sold, another thing we talked about, weirdly enough, is the selling of humans.  That sadly counts as globalization because it is a trading of product and the connection of countries.  If you want, you can think of globalisation as a fancy word for the phrase: overseas shopping that effects the economy.

I didn’t explain it greatly because I kind of lost track but I myself learnt a lot from this topic…