Friday 2 December 2016

English Summative

English Summative Part 1. King Lear


King Lear! One of Shakespeare's many tragedies. The deceptive,  darkened and mad story took readers or play watchers into the chaotic reality of life in the time of King Lear. Altho it was written by the amazing and infamous Shakespeare, I did not particularly enjoy reading King Lear. I’m not sure if it was the evil theme in the play that made me turn my nose up or the fact that King Lear was such a jerk to everyone but then seemed like such a nice person when he was crazy. I guess King Lear just isn't my cup of tea. Even though King Lear was not too exciting I found the ways we further our learning very exciting. The most effective way I found was either reading the comics in class with everyone reading in different voices or reading the SparkNotes, No fear Shakespeare by myself. After or during every discussion I made sure to take notes and summarize the book so that I could look back in the future and understand the main ideas from every section.   


King Lear had a lot to do with our weekly themes. Personally, I found that it went very well with 2 specific weeks. Week 8, which had to do with respect and week 11, which had to do with Responsibility. Now I know what you're thinking King Lear has little if not anything to do with respect and responsibility but my friend it has everything to do with respect and responsibility. Let's start with respect, King Lear has 3 daughters two of which (Goneril and Region) are the worst daughters in the entire history of awful daughters and well being the worst daughters in the entire history of awful daughters they deceive, anger and most importantly DISRESPECT Lear. When Lear steps down from being King he has 3 requests, to always be treated as King, to have 100 knights always with him and he gets to live with either of his daughters every month. So when Lear goes to live with Goneril for the first month the disrespect starts almost immediately. Goneril requests that all of her servants are to be rude and ignore Lear. Well, to be fair Lear was also being disrespectful being loud and rowdy with his knights all night long, drinking and probably some dancing and singing keeping the whole castle up. But still Goneril could have just talked to her dad she didn't have to go and be disrespectful yet again and trick him break his heart and basically banish him into a storm because she didn't want to go and find him. Then to make matters worse she also gets rid of 50 of his knights and then keeps getting ride of more till Lear no longer has any more knights basically now breaking 2 of the requests. And of course being the world's worst daughters they just have to go and break the 3d request. They both treat Lear so bad that he doesn't want to stay with either and then he leaves to go out into the world. The whole play she disrespects him I doubt that girl even has an inch of respect in her and don't even get me started on the whole love triangle with Goneril, Edmund, and Region. Or how Goneril kills her own sister Region and of course takes her own life after Albany her husband finds out she cheating on him with Edmund who also ends up dying.  It's basically just one big tornado of disrespect. But then there are the good respectful people. Cordelia and Kent, a daughter and a faithful servant. Throughout the whole play through Lear's health and craziness, they always respect him and keep him safe and treat him as the king till the end when Lear dies from a broken heart. Now onto responsibility, responsibility is a very important part of life and is mostly viewed as a good thing but in King Lear, it’s a whole other story (hahaha Story). Lear is not very responsible, he gives away his own kingdom to whoever loves him the most, showing that he's not responsible and doesn't care about his kingdom and only giving himself a lot of time to rest and retire before he dies (which is sooner than he thinks). Goneril and Region are somewhat responsible they are definitely a lot more responsible than their dad but only to a certain degree. Yet again they do not want/show any sign of being responsible for their father. In Lear's request, he wanted them to take care of him while he grows old. But within the first week, they have already begun to plot a way to get rid of Lear showing how irresponsible they are towards certain things. Goneril does however openly take responsibility for the death of her sister who she poisoned. There are really only a few people who actually take responsibility in a good way. Upon her return, Cordelia takes full responsibility of Lear and she continues to aid him till her death. Kent along with Cordelia also take responsibility of Lear even though Lear had him banished and was basically a really meant to him. King Lear went very well with some of our weekly themes and even though most of the time it was not in a good way at least it gives us an example of how not to give away your kingdom.  




English Summative Part 2. Sketchnoting


Sketchnoting is a relatively new style of writing/creating notes in the 21st century.  Sketchnoting is a style of taking notes for everyone on everything. You can take sketch notes for math, your plan for taking or the world or English and just about every other topic there is. But first what it sketch noting? Sketchnoting is a creative and imaginative way to write notes. And get this you don’t even have to be an artist to sketch note. All you need is your imagination and you’re set. You might be thinking sketch noting doesn't sound so great it doesn't even sound helpful, well guess what you are very incorrect. Sketchnoting is actually a lot more effective than taking actual notes, and there are a few theories to support this idea. The first is the Picture superiority test discovered by William E. Hockley in 2008. He found that “presenting items in pictorial form rather than as words not only benefits memory for the individual items but also provides a memorial advantage for associations generated between random pairs of line drawings”. The second was discovered by Allan Paivio in 1971, Our minds have two different stores for information so  learners require both Verbal representation and mental images in order to retain knowledge in an effective way.  The third is not a theory but more or less an idea  People have 4 different ways of obtaining information Visual so seeing , Auditory, Reading and writing and Kinesthetic. People have to have at least two of these ways to actually and effectively retain information. Or they take one of these ways and combine it with an emotion. But by doing sketch notes you’re using all 4 of these different ways. I use sketch noting all the time and it helps me to remember my work better because of the drawing and visual aspect. I prefer to use arrows, bubbles, text etc in my sketch notes but the best part of sketch noting is the fact that you get to draw/doodle your notes and adapt them for yourself. Another plus you can use sketch noting basically anywhere. I mostly like to use it as an alternative for writing essays and instead get my point or idea across by drawing.


Organization is one of the main parts of sketch noting so wasn't it fitting that one of our weekly themes was organization. Some students have a hard time understanding written notes because they are visual learners and handwritten notes can also be very unorganized and hard to read. The thing about organizing in sketch noting is to one person things may seem messy but to another person to might seem clean. Students can organize their sketch notes so they can understand them and make sense of them. Students can also use sketch noting to organize study notes or basic notes. Or summarize insights to present to groups or just to help make sense. Another weekly theme that goes very well with sketch noting is designed. Sketchnoting is one of those great things where it doesn't matter what your work looks like because it's not about your artistic talent but about your creativity and design of the sketch note. Sketchnoting opens up students minds and allows them to design what their perfect sketch note would be with things that make sense to them. Sketchnoting can also be very helpful in designing just about anything. Need to kick start your business but don’t know where to start, try a sketch note and design/write all of your ideas on there. Sketchnoting is a very effective way to do anything and let's not forget the fact that it's so much fun.