The Evolution of MyAmerica: Part III

For my last metapost of this year, I decided to make a Word Cloud (from the website, wordle.net, which Mr. Bolos showed us earlier this year) of all the writing on my blog.

When I look at this visual representation of the most commonly used words on my blog, I feel like it is a completely accurate summary of my entire year in American Studies. Though some of the words might not seem as important as others, I like the fact that every little concept I thought about this year is represented. For example, if asked to describe the main things we discussed in American Studies, I probably wouldn't think to mention the word "iPhone" anywhere in my summary, but when I saw it on the word cloud as a commonly used word on my blog, I realized that it represents part of the technology we discussed many times throughout the year.

One of the words that sticks out to me the most is "friends". I think the inclusion of this word is really meaningful because it shows how, through this blog, I was able to merge the worlds of school and personal life together. In previous discussion-based classes, I only thought about the class material for the 40 minutes of time allotted to that class period or while completing homework for that class. My experience in American Studies was very unlike these past experiences. This blog allowed me to always subconsciously think about the discussions from class and relate them to things I see in the "real world". Now, it is just a natural reflex for me to be hanging out with my friends and somehow end up finding a parallel between whatever we are doing and a concept from American Studies. I think this is an invaluable skill I will appreciate for the rest of my life and always credit it back to my American Studies class during my junior year of high school.

**The blog post I would like you to grade is The Food Revolution**

The Help- part II

[Read my post from earlier this month to see the plan for this post]

Here are some of the first similarities I noticed between our curriculum in American Studies and the novel, "The Help", by Kathryn Stockett.

-Early on in the book, we find out that one of the African American maids, Aibleen, has a special gift for making things happen whenever she prays for it. On page 26, Aibleen doubts her supposed abilities by saying, "You saying people think I got the black magic?" This reminds me of a discussion we had a couple times this year, while reading Frederick Douglas and while reading Huck Finn. We talked about the old stereotype that African Americans were more likely to have some sort of supernatural connection, also known as "black magic". One modern day example of this is the show "That's So Raven" on the Disney Channel. At the time it aired, it was the only show with an African American main character and she happened to be a psychic teenage girl named Raven.


-One of the main focuses of this novel is about Miss Skeeter, a young girl just out of college, deciding to write a book of stories about what life is like from the help's perspective. She conducts many interviews and has to edit their stories to make them ready to be printed in a book. You could say that she was writing a book of oral histories. I can definitely understand where she is coming from when she talks about how difficult writing this sort of paper because we wrote an oral history paper at the beginning of the school year. Our challenge was to interview a person and then edit their words (the original transcript of my interview was about 10 pages long) into a cohesive story without adding any of our own words. I found this task very difficult but intriguing at the same time. I can only imagine how difficult it was for Miss Skeeter to write an entire novel this way.