H English 10 Blog #4

Simon's Dead Body

This is my fourth blog in English class, and will probably be the most difficult one due to the fact that we didn't do much in this week. We didn't do much due to the PSAT's, and other interferences. On the first two days of the week, we actually read Lord of the Flies, and those days were very productive. We are near the end of the book, and the boys are starting to lose control. They have expunged Simon by brutally beating him, thinking he was the beast, when in fact he was trying to tell them that the beast was just a dead man with a parachute. And as Simon was killed, the "beast" got blown into the ocean and drifted away. The death of Simon symbolized all hope being lost because we see him as a Christ-like person that was the only one who knew that there was no beast, and now that he is dead, there chance of figuring that out is very low. This act of murder shows that the boys have completely lost control and have been taken over by man's essential illness. We also watched the introduction to the movie for Lord of the Flies, which is posted at the bottom of this blog, and as doing this we tried to point out different sounds and pictures, and their significance. As doing so, the classes received a candid comment from the infamous Adrian Camarena, basically saying that maybe there was no significance to the photo's and sounds and the director just wanted to throw them in. This comment was quickly replied to, by Mr. Keating, saying that even if the director didn't mean anything with the sounds and pictures, that it is our job to find the significance in them on our own, which is a very well-stated reply. Furthermore, for the first time, we got in our book club and spoke about the outside reading book that we were reading. This actually

 helped me understand a copious new amount of things about the book I am reading, All Quite on the Western Front. We also took the benchmark this week as well. It was 20 questions which were fairly easy, and didn't trouble me at all. Also, I personally learned about something new that I have never heard of, the Lucifer effect. After hearing about the Stanford prison project, and how it had to be ended prematurely due to the fact that prisoners became depressed and guards became sadistic, I became very interested. I learned that there is a book that is all about the Lucifer effect, called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. I hope to one day read this book and understand more about the Lucifer effect and how harsh environments cause good people to become evil, and how even the best of people have can be taken over by man's essential illness. They also have a whole website dedicated to the Lucifer effect, here it is: http://www.lucifereffect.com/. That is my blog for this week, thank you for reading it.