Extra Credit Blog

     So I'm just now getting around to writing my last blog, and school has already started! School isn't too bad this year, but I think I definitely still liked summer better! I didn't do much this summer, besides swim, so i decided to write my blog about the swim camp I went to at Indiana University. It was really challenging , but I still had a lot of fun!
     At camp we had to stay in a dorm room with a roommate. Lucky for me, another girl from my swim team went with me. Our day started at 5:30, when we got up and ate breakfast. We left the dorm room at 5:45, and walked a quarter of a mile or so to the pool. Morning practice was really hard, and only swimmers considered elite could sign up. We had to do the same practice as the college swimmers that swam at the pool! They even had these really cool pulleys that you attached weights to then tied to your waist to pull the weight up while you swim across the pool. Some of the college swimmers could pull up to ninety or a hundred pounds, but the most I ever pulled was35 or 40. After that we went to a meeting room inside the natatorium and the coaches presented a powerpoint on some drills and techniques we could work on to get faster, then we did another practice. After that our day was half over, and we walked to the cafeteria for lunch.
     After lunch we walked back to our dorms for 45 minutes of downtime. We were all so tired by tired by that time that we could barely walk up the stairs! After that we had one more practice, and we are finally done for the day. We were only there for a week and when we got back, we were exhausted! On the bright side, I learned a lot and made a lot of new friends. I met some people who came from up north in places like Chicago, and they thought I had a Southern accent! I thought that was really funny because I didn't think I had one at all, if anything they had Northern accent! I even met a girl there who spoke fluent polish ,german , and English! I was really impressed! I'm really glad I had the opportunity to go and I think it was a great experience to get to swim in Indiana's pool, because its super nice! I also really liked that I got to meet so many new people! So overall, I think I had a pretty cool summer!



   ~Savannah K:)
     

The Fault in Our Stars

    The third and last book I read this summer is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  This book is about a girl named Hazel who has an extremely dangerous form of cancer. But not only does Hazel have to deal with her own hardships having cancer, her boyfriend also suffers from cancer, and her best friend has eye cancer, causing him to have to have his eyes removed.  This book takes the reader through the life of hazel and through all the issues and problems she faces in her every day life.

       The Fault in Our Stars made me realize how lucky I really am to have good health and for my family members to have good health.  Because of Hazel’s conditions she is forced to grow up faster than most other kids. Due to her life-threatening condition she dropped out of high school and got her GED so she could start college in case she passed away before graduating. Hazel had to be very brave in order to live with her cancer and still accomplish her goals. But, Hazel didn’t just have herself to focus on, towards the end of the book her boyfriend died of cancer, and she had to cope with the loss of the person she spent the most time with. Also, Hazel has to help one of her only other friends deal with losing all of his sight when he has to have his eyes removed. As you can see, Hazel has a lot to cope with.  I can’t even imagine what I would do if I were her!

     This book also made me consider how I would react if one of my family members or close friends had cancer like Hazel. Obviously, I would be really scared for the person’s well being. I would probably want to be around them a lot, just to make sure that their always okay. In the book, Hazel’s parents always try to spend as much time with her as possible. In the book, Hazel doesn’t really even think of her cancer as a bad thing usually, she just thinks of it as a way of life. I think the reason she thinks this way is because the people around her have supported her and taught her how to cope with her condition. I think that if I ever had a family member with a serious illness, I would try to help them take their mind away from their sickness so they don’t have to think about it too much.

     As you can tell, this book was really sad, but it was also very interesting. This book took me no time at all to finish; I couldn’t put it down! The Fault in Our Stars was a great book to finish off the summer with!

   ~Savannah Kingery

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

     The second book I’ve read this summer is Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. This book takes place in the years of World War II, in the city of Seattle. Henry, the main character, was a Chinese boy, but went to an all-white school. Henry absolutely hated it; he had to earn his tuition by working in the cafeteria and all the kids made fun of him because he wasn’t like them.  He had absolutely no friends, until Keiko came along. Keiko also had to work in the cafeteria during lunch, so she became instant friends with Henry. The only problem is that Keiko was Japanese. Soon after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Keiko’s family along with many other Japanese families on the Pacific Coast were taken to internment camps to make sure they weren’t spies for Japan or of any danger to America. This book is all about Henry’s life during the war and trying to stay in touch with the girl he loved when she had been taken away from him.

     While reading this book I considered how I would feel if I were a person of Japanese origin, and was taken from my home to an internment camp. Overall, I think I would feel very betrayed, because many of the Japanese sent to these camps were American citizens! Also, lots of people immigrate to America for the sense of freedom, but we gave people no choice in this! We ordered all Japanese people considered a threat to leave their house, friends, and most of their belongings behind to move to internment camps where many people even got split up from their family! To me, it seems completely unfair to make anyone do this, especially considering most of the Japanese sent to the camps were either citizens or children.  Then, when people returned to their homes after the war, many found their Japanese cities and neighborhoods to be totally changed! This book made me feel very sympathetic for Japanese-Americans living during World War II

         Another thing I thought about while reading this book is how I would feel about the Japanese during this time period if I were a Caucasian American. Many people resented all Japanese people, and some wouldn’t even allow Japanese people to eat in their restaurants or shop in their stores. I always have sympathy for people who are considered outcasts like the Japanese were, so I think I would be accepting of them. In the book, Henry writes to Keiko while she’s away but never gets a response, because his dad disapproves of his friendship with a Japanese person and makes sure the post office never delivers Keiko’s letters to him. To me it sounds crazy that Henry’s dad would keep him from getting letters from his best friend just because she’s Japanese! I think that everyone should be treated equal, and that the Japanese should not have had to be punished for the actions of a country they no longer lived in.

      While this book had a bit of a slow beginning, I ended up really enjoying it! The author does a great job of showing how what happens to Henry as a boy effects him when he grows older, through an epilogue sort of ending.  The next book I will be reading will be my choice book, and I think I’m going to choose The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I can’t wait to read it!

  

    ~Savannah Kingery

Feed

   The first book I read this summer is Feed by M.T Anderson. This book is set in the future where Internet connections feed directly into the brain through a small chip placed in the users head. In this book the world has changed a lot! All houses are surrounded by domes and have their own artificial sun, and there are literally no forests left in the world. Also, they have air factories that create oxygen! Almost nothing is like it now! This was a strange, yet still very interesting book. Feed really makes you think about the future of technology and what really could be possible.

    The question that I thought about all throughout the book is if I would want the feed or not.  There are a lot of pros to buying the feed, because you can look up anything you need to, anytime you want! The feed turns you into a genius, with all the knowledge of the whole Internet! Also, it’s a built in cell phone, you can chat with your friends using the feed. On the downside, the feed is also pretty dangerous. In the book, the main characters get hacked by a man they saw when they were vacation on the moon (yes, on the moon). The man managed to hack into their feed making them under his control!  After a trip to the hospital everything turns out okay for most of the characters, but one character, Violet has permanent damage to her feed. Since the feed is connected to her brain, the damage can cause her to lose mobility in parts of her body, and even impair her speech. So, while I think it would be cool to have the Internet with me at anytime, I would want to be safe and keep away from the feed. Not to mention that people with the feed are constantly being bombarded by ads from websites trying to sell you their products. I don’t even like watching ads on TV! I think it would be really annoying having them in my head all the time. So, for now I think I’m okay carrying around my IPhone to text and look things up on the Internet!

     Also, throughout the book I thought about if I would want to live in the way that the characters do.  Some parts of the future are pretty cool! For example, it’s normal for people to take vacations to the moon or even to other planets! They’ve even invented flying cars! But, with all of this cool stuff, there are also some downsides.  In Feed you cant even go to the beach with out wearing a protective suit to protect your skin from the toxins! That wouldn’t work for me, because I love to go to the beach! There was one point in the book where the characters Titus and Violet went to a filet mignon farm. I was expecting a lot of cows roaming around, because that’s where filet mignon comes from. I was shocked when the author described the farm as hedges of red meat with tubes running through them, bringing blood to the meat. Where are the cows? The book even went on to say that there was a steak maze for visitors to go through. To me, this sounds un-appetizing! The people in this book cant even enjoy nature at all, because there is none left! There are no trees or flowers. Every house, neighborhood, and store has to be surrounded by a dome to protect from Earth’s real atmosphere! So, while the flying cars and advanced space exploration is really cool, I want the world to stay how it is now! I want to be able to go outside, and plant flowers, and eat steak from a real cow, not a genetically mutated meat hedge.

     So as you can see, the futuristic setting of this book is really interesting! I was shocked on how simple things like trees, and even cows were pretty much gone! I thought about what people would do if their feed just stopped working. At school, the kids don’t even learn about math or language arts, most kids cant even read! All students learn about at school is how to use and operate their feed, because their feed can give them all the knowledge they need. I wouldn’t want to be so reliant at technology, because it could always break or stop working. So, overall I think that the world we’re living in now is better than the futuristic world that M.T. Anderson writes about. With that being said, Feed was still a really good book! Next, I think I’m going to read Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet! J

 ~Savannah Kingery