Dear Ms. Berner,

"We don't have to agree with what we read, but we should learn from it" That is from banned book essay contest winner, Brandon Redlinger. Shielding children from the world does not change it. I do not think adults should get to decide what is appropriate for children and what is not appropriate. I do not think we should ban books at MS51. I think the student should get to decide what is right for him or her.

Parents and school executives act as if reading the books will hurt you but sometimes they help you. In the article “Banned Books Week 2010: An Anti-Censorship Manifesto,” author Ellen Hopkins tells a story about how she was giving a talk about her book, Crank, which is about a meth addiction, and how afterward, she was approached by a young women who told her a story of how the book pulled her out of addiction. This is an example of a banned book helping people become better. In the article, The Fault in Our Stars Has Been Banned in Schools, parent Karen Krueger said that “The thing that kept hitting me like a tidal wave was these kids dealing with their own mortality, and how difficult that might be for an 11-year-old or 12-year-old reading this book.” But when John Green responded to this,  “I am happy because apparently young people at Riverside High, California will never witness or experience mortality since they won’t be reading my book, which is great for them. But I am also sad because I was really hoping I would be able to introduce the idea that human beings die to the children at Riverside High, California and thereby crush their dreams of immortality.”He brilliantly showed how banning the book would hurt the children more than just keeping it on the shelves.

Parents and school executives should be able to decide what is right for everyone. They do not know what everyone wants. Ellen Hopkins says, “Censorship cannot be allowed to flourish in America. If you don't like content in a book, don't read it. If you don't want your child to read a book, take it away. But you do not have the right to decide "appropriateness" for everyone. What's perhaps not right for one child is necessary to another. Ignorance is no armor.” I agree with all of this. It is not right for adults to judge what is right for an entire school district without even reading the book they are banning. You can’t make children ignorant to bad things in the world. Dave Pilkey made a great drawing that is talking about banning books. He talks about it in the article, “Too Graphic? 2014 Banned Books Week Celebrates Challenged Comics. I had a drawing of a very angry grownup saying 'I don't think children should read this book,'" he says. "And then the simple change was ... I added the word 'my.' So instead of saying 'I don't think children should read this book,' it becomes 'I don't think my children should read this book.' " This is showing how a simple change could solve the whole banned books problem. A parents control should not reach beyond their child and into another parent’s child.

On the hand, people like Meghan Cox Gurdon in her article Darkness to Visible. She says “books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.” She is saying that by reading about them someone might want to do them. I do not agree with this statement. I think that when you give someone another person, fictional are real, to empathize with, it helps them. Ellen Hopkins talks about this when she is responding to being banned. This is taking place after a book signing, “as the room emptied one lovely young woman remained. She came forward and when I asked her name, she crumbled into tears.” Hopkins then talks about how the girl had been a meth addict but when she found that book she saw she didn’t want to be that person. The changed her lifestyle because of that book.

The banning of books should not happen. How will you ever know what is right for you if other people just decide. The book could help you become a better person. It is unfair that adults get to decide what other people can read. I find that it unfair to make it harder for other people to have the experience of reading that book because of their opinions. I think that books should never be banned.

From,

Xavier Markowitz

1984 blog

I am reading, 1989 by George Orwell. This book is based in a futuristic communist society. The world is at war. Winston's life, and everyone elses life is ruled by Big Brother. Big Brother and the Thought Police are always watching you. They can basically read your mind. When someone is thought to be a traitor by the Thought Police they disappear into the night without any trace of existence. This book shows how important memory and thought is. The Party tries and succeeds at controling people. They do this through memory.

Big Brother and The Party control people using fear and memory. They use fear by having a pair of eyes on you at all times. There are eyes in the television. The thought police can practicaly read your mind. this scares people into not doing anything out of the ordinary. They control using memory to. Winston's job is to take past files and change them. For example, Big Brother predicted that "the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As is happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened." This shows how Big Brother controls people with memory. He changes all the documents to prove that he was right so people would still be loyal to him.

With all the control, and everyone being scared, people are afraid to be different. Everyone is the same. No one knows anything about their past. I think that when Big Brother shields the past and changes the past, he is turing everyone the same. The past is what makes you, you. By making everyone's past the same, Big Brother makes everyone the same.

YA Essay

Dead Father’s Club Essay

Xavier Markowitz

808

When Philip Noble’s father dies, he is left very confused. He becomes even more confused when he starts seeing his father around the family owned pub. In the book Dead Father’s Club by Matt Haig, Philip has to make some difficult choices. While talking to his father, Philip learns that it was Uncle Alan who killed him. This seems strange, because Uncle Allen has been being very nice to his mom. During this time Philip has many interactions with his dad’s ghost. Some of these can be negative and some of them are positive. Philip’s trust in his father changes throughout the book, depending on what the father does.

When the dad helps Philip, Philip trusts him more. During Halloween, Philip, Ross, and Gary, who are Philips friends, put a stink bomb in Terry’s house. Terry is Uncle Alan's friend. The father tries to help Philip run away but Terry catches up. Then the father instructs him to tell Terry that Philip, “knows who he is, He knows he smashed the pub, and he knows he works for Uncle Alan.” This freaks Terry out and he runs away. This makes Philip appreciate the dad for helping him get out of a tough situation. Also Philips father predicted that a group people will try to smash the pub, which is the family business. The problem was that he predicted the break in one month too early. When they do break into the pub, the dad tells him to scream When he does it,  the thieves are scared away. Philip now trusts his father more. Philip even says, “I am going to believe in dads ghost from now on.” When his dad helps him, Philip trusts his dad more.

Philips father also messes up sometimes and this makes Philip upset. He then trusts the dad less because of this. This happens when the father tells Philip to steal a minibus while on a class trip so he can go to the pub to stop it from being smashed by the intruders. The father accidentally gets the dates wrong though and philip steals the minibus for no reason. Philip then feels that his father lied to him. He is upset at the fact that his all knowing father is not that perfect. Philip also gets very upset with his father when he tells him to set fire to the garage where Uncle Alan works, with him inside it. This plan backfires when it turns out that Uncle Alan’s friend was in the garage at the time. This makes Philip feel guilty and he takes it out on his dad. He pushes his dad away and ignores him. These are some examples of the dad hurting Philip.

The father helps and hurts Philip. When he helps Philip, Philip trusts and likes him more. When he hurts Philip, Philip pushes him away. What the father does affects how his son feels about him. This shows how other people’s actions can affect our own life.

Ashes Essay

Ashes Essay

Xavier Markowitz

808

People’s life is affected by other people. In the short story “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer, Ashes, the main character loves her dad very much. Her dad is very nice to her and he compliments her with every chance he gets. But there is something about him that is not quite right. Even though he is very nice he can let Ashes down sometimes. Her feelings about her father change throughout the story. As this happens, her emotions are expressed through the weather, as a form of symbolism. As Ashes feelings about her father change, her view of the world changes.  

Ashes’ father tries to be nice to her every chance he gets. This makes her feel good and this feeling is shown through the weather. He always compliments her and says how nice she looks. He says things like “You look radiant,” and “You could be a model.” He says very kind things to Ashes to make her feel special. At the beginning of the story, when you are just meeting the father character, Ashes says that “every time I saw my father, the sun cast off just a little more warmth than it had the day before.” She is happy when she sees her father and this is expressed through the sun. This symbolism of her emotions makes it easy to see what Ashes is thinking.

Although Ashes’ father can be very nice to her, he always manages to let her down. This feeling toward her father is also shown in the weather. Ashes says that “When she was little, her dad used to promise her the stars as a necklace, but like most promise that one never came true.” This is showing how the dad lets people down by making false promises. At the very end of the book, while she was stealing her moms money, Ashes, “looked out the window and saw only ash gray sky.” This was a day when she was with her father so the day was supposed to be sunny and clear and nice but instead the day was gray and cold. Instead of being nice to her, dad has forced her to make a decision about something that is morally wrong.

Ashes’ life is affected by her father in that the way she feels around her father is expressed through the weather. A person’s life can be affected by other people and this story agrees with that statement. A person’s life usually changes because of other people or because of something another person did. This shows how we can make difference in someone else’s life even if we do not know them very well.  We can do this by just being nice to other people and making them feel good.

Summer Reading Blog

Ed Kennedy is pretty much your average person until he accadentally stops a bank robbery.  Then an ace appears in the mail and his life gets turned around. He goes from being an underage cabdriver who is in love with his best friend and owns a coffee addicted dog. To a messenger. Someone who helps other people and makes other peoples lives better. While being a messenger he has to figure who is doing this to him and why. Throughout the book Ed Kennedy learns how to be become a better person by believing in himself.

Ed becomes a better person by meeting new people and helping new people. One of the new people he meets is Milla, an old woman. She is very old and she thinks that Ed is her dead husband. In order to make her feel better he reads stories to her. He also helps a girl win a race. He does thi selling her to run barefoot instead of using running shoes. He also helps a priest fill his chapel by throwing a party. By helping all these people he becomes a better person.

Ed becomes a better person by helping people. This is a good lesson for humanity because sometimes we feel disinclined to help people. By making someone else's day better, we make ourselves better. This is what Ed learns in the book. He is so focused on completeing the messaages that he doesn't realize how much of a better person he has become.

The Brain

The most mysterious part of the body is the brain. Scientists have thought about it for a very long time. Many early scientists had fantastical theories about the brain. Aristotle thought that the brain cooled the fiery heart. They also thought that "animal vapors" swirled around our brain cavities, and through our bodies, making us do what we do. We are now far from that. Carl Zimmer of National Geographic magazine talks about the recent advances in the understanding of the brain.

These scientists are starting to chart its biochemistry, others are looking at one individual neurons. Neurologist Van Wedeen maps out the brain's wiring. He has found a very interesting thing. He has found that the brain, magnified a lot, is completely made out of grids. The structure of it's pathways intersect at right angles. He has shown that even rats and monkeys have the grid structure. Some scientists are skeptical, but he thinks he has discovered something greater. Other scientists at Caltech and UCLA study how the brain takes in what the eyes see by showing people pictures of celebrities. In 2005 they found that one nerve cell fired only when the test subjects were shown pictures of Jennifer Aniston. Studies after this one imply that there are neurons that are only involved in representing one person, place, or concept. This shows how good the brain is at storing information.

These studies would be an extremely big help to humanity. Knowing how the brain works could help save lots of people's lives. This could help people with autism, Alzheimer's disease, or people who have had strokes. This could help people know how the brain works. It could help people know how the brain developed. Although people are figuring out a little bit more, there is still a lot to learn.

I just finished reading the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I t is about a kid named Wade Watts in a dystopic future. There is a lot to deal with in reality but Wade has a wayof escaping it. A virtual reality video game called OASIS. Everything is perfect in OASIS. No one knows who you are, any thing can happen. Wade even attends school in OASIS. When the creator of the game dies, his will states that he will have a contest to see who will collect his fortune. The author is trying to teach a lesson. I think that it is face your fears.

Wade's fear in this book is his fear of reality. Wade tries to escape this fear through OASIS. he does this because reality is really bad. Wade decides to shut out reality. Instead of going to real school Wade goes to school in OASIS. Throughout the book Wade learns how to live witout OASIS. At one piont in the book he goes ino seclusion in an apartment and only plays OASIS. He can't hide forever though. In order to win the contest, Wade has to go hack into one of the biggest companies in the world. He can't use OASIS to solve this problem. Wade has to leaarn to face his fear of reality in order to win the contest.

This connects to teenagers. Facing your fears can help in a lot of situations. Sometimes a fear can hold you back from what you want to do like Wade in this book. Wade's fear was very big but small fears can hold someone back too. Being afraid of things can hold you back from completeing your dreams.