5th Beloved

Quarter 3, Week 11: No, I’M Gambling with my Grade. Take a look at when this blog was posted. That’s right, “Thursday, February 17th, 2022.” For those of you mathematically challenged like myself, you may notice that Thursday, February 17th is indeed after February 16th at 10 P.M. Is this simply the result of my habits of procrastination and laziness that worsen day by day? Of course not. This is, as many other blog posts of this cohort have been, pushing the limits of a student’s power. All jokes and masterful satire aside, I have indeed forgotten to publish my blog post, but as old people say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And while this blog may never be able to achieve full points, I will make use of this err on my part and create a fun and topical blog post. This week I will talk about one of my favorite cliches in almost all forms of media these days: the power of the “Late Entrance.” I think I can say with little to no lashback that the portal scene from Avengers: ...

 Gambling with my grade (credit to Sean for title and Sophie for idea) V2 (part 2 of Sean's Week 9 and continuation of Sophie's Week 10)     Why do we have annotations plus this plus a bunch of other things on top of POAS? I'm basically writing this an hour before this is due. I don't know what to write at all. My mind is just blank.  Empty. Now remember Sean's blog (Gambling with My Grade, remember that?). Damn. I could just do the same. What do I talk about though. And then there's Sophie's blog. I got my idea. Thanks Sophie and Sean. Thanks a lot. The credit for this blog goes to you guys.     I know I can write about basically anything, but I will write about nothing. Yes, nothing. Seems strange right? How am I supposed to write about nothing? It sounds impossible. It really does. But here's the thing: writing about nothing is still something, right? So nothing is contradictory in its own self. Just like  the image above. Yes, I literally searched ...

Q3 Week 3 - A Second Language By Raymond Yu (A map showing the most popular second languages around the world)      American high school has a second language requirement for graduation. What is it about a second language that makes it a mandatory requirement? What is it about a second language that is so vital that it takes its place among math, science, and history?      As it turns out, an article called  How a Second Language Can Boost the Brain by Ramin Skibba in Knowable Magazine shows that  a second language seems to correspond with increased cognitive function. Learning a second language improves executive function, the skills which involve managing attention and planning as well as focus. This corresponds to increases in gray matter volume and density in the brain. Being bilingual also protects white matter in the brain from the effects of aging, allowing the brain to maintain its efficiency. Another benefit of knowing a second language...

  Week 11 (The Power of Choices & Poetry) - 2/16 [6:22] “Don’t believe everything you know for sure.” Deep, right? Poets have a way of using words to completely transform the way we look at the world. Most of the time it doesn’t make sense at all, but in a way, that’s the whole point. The poet understands the world in a specific way, they share that specific perception, and people make of it what they will. If it makes sense to the reader, the poet succeeds, and if it doesn’t then they still win; either way, the reader learns a valuable lesson: either the lesson the poet intended to teach, or that nothing will make sense until you’re ready for it. It takes quite a bit of talent to form a single sentence that can really make someone question their entire outlook on life.  For a little context, the poet who wrote the poem above (yes, that’s the whole poem) goes by the name Atticus. He’s a well-known American celebrity of some sort, but he keeps his identity secret. No one ...

       A popular video game, titled NieR:Automata is famous not only for its brilliant mechanics, story, and design, but also for the music. As I had watched every member of my family play the video game, I was mostly interested in the music.  Almost it’s entire playlist is made up of songs in a language that does not actually exist called “chaos language”. The songs were written by Keiichi Okabe, a Japanese composer who worked with Emi Evans to write the lyrics. Okabe would go to Evans to tell her the languages in which he wanted the words to sound like, to which in turn, Evans would study the language and create words.       In NeiR , Evans and Okabe combined their skills to seamlessly transition into new atmospheres. For example, when in the campsite, the music and singing would be more peaceful. After a boss fight, the music would become sullen and more dramatic, almost as if it was mourning a loss (Ave Maria esque).     ...

Last semester I remember writing a quick blog about Ronald Reagan’s Challenger speech when I first began considering the POAS project. Now, with one day before the impending due date, I’m writing this blog out of a mixture of frustration, fatigue, and admiration. I started the project reading a biography that was unabashedly opinionated where even the author acknowledged that he wrote the book because he was disgruntled with the current sentiment regarding the 40th president. I too, came in biased, hoping to get this project over with by choosing a President with such a questionable legacy. Since my mind seems to only be occupied with the due date haunting me relentlessly, I will take the time to write what I couldn’t in my POAS paper.  Ronald Reagan’s legacy has nothing to do with his accomplishments because at the root of everything was his incomparable popularity and the speeches that built that immovable tower. Ronald Reagan truly lived the American Dream, going from struggling...

When I think about power, the first thing that comes to mind is authority, control, and influence. However, I gained a new perspective on it while writing a majority of my POAS paper this past weekend. My Person of American Significance is Henry Ford. I’m sure all of us know Henry Ford for the assembly line that revolutionized mass production in America. I’m also sure we see Ford trucks as often as we see Teslas in Fremont. Okay, maybe not that often, but you guys get what I mean. One of Henry Ford’s most well known quotes is “failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Ford took to his advice pretty well, because although many of us have heard about his Model T and the way he changed the automobile industry, there is also a lot more to Ford. Ford created various models before the Model T. He had two companies prior to Ford Motor Company, but they both failed as he was either forced to leave or the company had to be dismantled due to its insuccess....

Image Source   For my Person of American Significance research project, I am studying the life and work of John Davison Rockefeller, best known as the founder and director of the Standard Oil trust and the Rockefeller Foundation. Despite giving away more than half his wealth, at his peak, Mr. Rockefeller controlled two percent of all American gross domestic product in the 20th century, and he was undoubtedly one of the most powerful individuals in United States history. However, what I find interesting about Rockefeller for this quarter’s blog post is not his use of language, but rather his lack thereof.  John D. Rockefeller grew up as a devout Northern Baptist—a Christian religion which spread rapidly across the United States in the late 19th century. The Northern Baptists prized discipline in religion and life while shunning expressive displays of emotion and ego, and this mindset rubbed off on young Rockefeller. As Chernow writes in his biography of Mr. Rockefeller, Titan, ...

Press Ctrl + A      Congratulations. You've escaped the simulation.      To an unsuspecting individual, this mass of white text would have merely seemed like an empty post, devoid of all brainpower and effort. But thanks to your complacency and utmost obedience, you heeded my instructions so helpfully listed in the title of this blog post. One might even say I "CTRL-ed" you. (I'll see myself out.)      This week, I want to talk about the power of perception. More often than not, we allow our perception of things to cloud our judgment. For instance, if I had not written the title I had, you might have thought me forgetful, lazy, or even downright dull-witted. Of course, I would have never allowed that to happen. I am, as the kids say these days, "cracked". Think back to when you encountered something unexpected. Why did you expect something else? Most of the time, we as humans have the tendency to believe something because of preconceived noti...

Q3 Week 2 - Does Language Influence Thought? By Raymond Yu (Spaghetti brains make spaghetti words)     Recently, I was reading an article called "The Power of Language: We Translate Our Thoughts Into Words, But Words Also Affect the Way We Think" by Guillaume Thierry and wanted to share the contents of the article. The article essentially discusses how many languages have compound words (superwords) that describe ideas that the language did not have words for before. The author uses the examples of "butterfly" and "whatsoever" to explain how languages often form these superwords from two or more distinct words and the end product has no direct relation to the meaning of those words separately. Thierry points out how these words are often unique to each language which causes trouble in translations, since the whole is greater than the parts, preventing a literal understanding. Thierry then points out that many languages also have unique words which are prac...

Yi-Kuan Cheng Benedetti AP English P5 2 February 2022 Quarter 3, Week 10: The Im-power is Sus        In almost everyday life, we can use our words to win us the smallest, most insignificant victories. A slight jeer, getting the last laugh, or convincing a teacher to raise all his students' grades up to an A are all examples of these victories (that last one was actually a pretty big one). But without contention, the biggest victory is undoubtedly sweet, sweet revenge. While I myself may not have any memorable instances of these verbal revenges, I have one anecdote which I hold very dearly that comes from a friend. Constantly being singled out, “Pyke” always found it hard to avoid the harassment of the ringleader of his old friends, “Sova.” The most concrete pattern of Sova’s bullying came in the form of constantly kicking and banning Pyke from group chats for petty reasons, or sometimes none at all. One time, during a casual game of the hit sensation Among Us , Py...

  Week 10 (The Power of Nostalgia?) - 2/22 [7:22] We all have that one special thing that makes us feel better when things are tough. It could be a movie, a favorite dish, or music, but it’s that one thing that we reach for when we’ve had a bad day. I know that when I feel completely done with life, I’ll lock myself in my room, blast twenty one pilots (not capitalized because that’s how they roll) and stare at the wall, and for some odd reason, it really helps me feel better. Why do these random, stupid things bring us so much peace? In my case, it’s nostalgia.  Junior High was really rough for me; it was a period of loneliness, anxiety, and self discovery. I was trying to figure out who I was, and I didn’t really know what my sense of style was, or what music I liked yet, so I was incredibly impressionable. So impressionable, in fact, that there was a period where I was listening to Florida Georgia Line (if you don’t know who they are, just read it again and take a wild gue...

     As many people know, and are probably writing about for this quarter of blogging, words hold power. A simple sentence or phrase could make or break a person’s day. The effects of a few words could be the same as the usage of many.  I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out what I wanted to write about for this week’s blog. The topic being as broad as ever.       Our prompt for blogging this quarter leaves me at a loss. But after a bit of thinking through this flex-work period I’ve been given, and scrapping my blog multiple times, I’ve come to a conclusion. I believe that we could write on just about anything for this prompt and leave the analysis and connecting to the prompt for the students writing comments. The topics for each blog so far have made it easy to write about whatever we wanted, as long as it's possible to connect it to the main idea. For this prompt, “language and power,” one could just jump to the conclusion that all words h...

image source Throughout my life, I've been disinterested in politics. So apathetic, I really had to scratch my head when asked "What's Obama's last name?" ... Thank you Vihaan, I now see it was a joke. However, for a brief period in 6th grade, politics was the only thing I could think about. I would watch CNN on the daily, read all that I could about the happenings in Washington, and even tried to get involved in some Democrat volunteering. So what changed? Donald John Trump. Love him or hate him, it is undoubtable that he is a genius at wielding language to influence millions. As just a celebrity businessman with no political experience whatsoever, he was elected into the highest office of the world's most powerful hegemon. 5 years later as an AP English Language student, I still find myself wondering how he managed to become the President of the United States, and I seek to explore this in my blog post this week. Through my research, I notice that one of Tru...

Jeff Bezos currently has a net worth of 175.5 Billion USD. On Forbes’ Billionaires 2021 list, Jeff Bezos came in first, followed by Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, and more. Although I think we can all agree that this list comes as no surprise to us, I thought it was interesting that Bezos was able to retain this position even after stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in July 2021, and instead taking the position of the executive chairman. The wealth that Bezos holds is almost limitless, and this can account to the significant amount of power he holds. Last year, I remember coming across infographics and articles criticizing Bezos for not using his wealth to solve major world problems. After Bezos spent several billions for a trip to be launched into space, people on twitter took to the idea that he could instead be solving world hunger. The $5.5 billion that he used to go to space in competition with other billionaires such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson, reportedly could have sa...

 The Power of Language (article)     As I have learned from other's blogs last week, I will do the usual thing I do when I don't know what to write about: search up an article. This time, I found and article titled "The Power of Language." I skimmed through it and it seems very interesting.     So this article seems a lot like a phycology lecture about I. Yes, the word I. Very strange how I has its own power. According to the article, you naturally say phrases like " I have, I choose, I love, I enjoy, I can, I will" when you feel powerful. That doesn't make much sense right? Well, after a bit of thought, it does. Saying "I choose" implies you have the power to make a decision. Same with "I can and I will." Its very interesting how sentences that you use everyday show that you have power.     In the next section, the article talks about manipulating peers to do what you want. Interesting, am I right? According to the article, instead o...

Faith Qiao Ms. Benedetti English 11AP 2 February 2022 Burn I was thinking about how to tie in Language and Power to my creative writing excerpts and I’ve come to the conclusion that because language stirs the imagination and imagination is power, me sharing these excerpts is testing the power that my writing holds in giving you guys the power of imagination. Hence, with every supposedly off-topic blog post I write this quarter, I’m excused. 

Sean Wang Week 10 - THE HERO !!      That was a quote from Saitama, the infamous One Punch Man from the anime of the same name. Now don’t get me wrong: contrary to popular belief, I generally don’t like anime. But the concept of One Punch Man has always intrigued me, mostly because of how transparent the whole plot line is. We’re all familiar with the stereotypical main character and their seemingly unlimited ability to grow in power (through a strenuous training arc, of course). However, the writers of One Punch Man took this one step further. In a stroke of satirical genius, they created Saitama, the crown jewel of overpowered main characters. Capable of defeating anything and everything with just one punch, Saitama is the answer to the question found in every hero’s journey: “Just how powerful can a main character get?”      Ironically, Saitama’s greatest weakness is — get this — boredom. Yes, boredom. Plagued with a lack of “things to do” and an...