Blog #1

This week in class, we have been talking about "To Kill A Mockingbird", by Harper Lee, and the themes it shows. The themes are race relations, childhood innocence, and rural poverty. For my essay, I will be writing about Race Relations and how people acted and lived during those times of which there was a lot of racism. This week we worked on our essays and learned how to plan them. We worked on our hook sentences, introduction paragraphs, our story background, and our thesis statement. We also traded our essays with our partners to get feedback in how to make our essays better. At the beginning of my hook paragraph, I added many extraneous things that I didn't need in my hook sentence. Then I refreshed it and made it much more clearer for it to be understood. This week, Mr.Keating also taught us about the sentence cohesion, that clarifies our paragraphs and sentences and makes them better. He used the staircase as his metaphor to go step-by-step and making your paragraphs more clearer. My theme, Race Relations, connects to the racism and the immigration services of Arizona. We Mexicans are always thought of : "We are never going to go to college!","We don't have money for anything!", "We don't have good jobs!" "We all cross the border for a better life!" People are always abetting other people to think of Mexicans, blacks, etc.. as bad people or not as equal as everyone else. All of these stereotypes add up and they are just like how people in Maycomb County felt about the black people. They always thought ,"Yeah, they are the ones, they are not equal and no one likes them, so we should punish them for things they didn't do, because no one will believe them! " In "To Kill A Mockingbird", mostly all of the white people were dogmatic about what the black people thought and how they felt. Even though you were just defending a black person that was on trial, and you were white, you were considered a disgrace to your people. An example of this is when Francis calls Atticus a "Nigger-Lover" and says that Atticus is a disgrace for the family and no one is happy about what he is doing. Just like in the story when Mr. Ewell coerced and spat in Atticus's face for accusing him of abusing his own daughter. After Tom Robinson was convicted as guilty, everyone in the Finch family was insipid. Even though Atticus had everything to prove Tom Robinson innocent, the judges still convicted him as guilty. When Tom Robinson went to prison, he tried to escape, and the guards shot him 17 times. White people in those days hated black people. All different colors had their own designated places like water fountains that were labeled for black people only or white people only! I believe that everyone is created equally and if you just get to know different people, you realize that there is not much of a difference between races and colors. EVERYONE IS CREATED EQUAL AND NO ONE SHOULD BE JUDGED BY THEIR COLOR OF SKIN!