Personal Narrative Grade

I feel that on my personal narrative, I should receive no less than a B. I took in your suggestions on at the beginning of scenes be more descriptive, and expand the ending more. That was also what was said on my peer review so I tried to change what was suggested. Overall I think its the best paper I have written so far in this class.

He talks about his yellow teeth, his hair was dusty, but when he looke at his mouth he saw pink. Also the same about his workers.

They yellow teeth show the type people he was working with.
The dusty workers showing how hard the work is and pink mouths just showing how dirty they really get.

My Grandma

My Grandma isn't like anyones grandma. I swear she is like a super grandma! She plays basketball with me and my little brother even though she is 62! Shes even tried to play COD. My grandma has ambitions, she still wants to get a tattoo. She is always there for me, my brother, and my mom. "Grandma we're starving" My brother and I tell her. "Well I'm in town what do you want to eat?" She replies 80% of the time. I guess you could say my grandma spoils me. Not so much with material, but love. Has the most unconditional love I have ever seen or experienced before. She is never self center and rarely thinks of herself. For example if we invited her over for a surprise dinner, she would end up cleaning the kitchen and washing the dishes! Even after we tell her not to, we catch her cleaning something. "Grandma! Put that down your suppose to be relaxing right now!" We say as she puts the dishes away. "Oh well let me just put the rest away!" She'll reply. Whenever my grandma wants to take us out to eat and asks us where we want to go we'll say "McDonalds" or "Taco Bell" and she'll reply "No not more of that garbage, why don't we get you a salad and some fruit." She's always concerned about our health. My Grandma is very neat and likes to have stuff clean. When I was growing up my mom would tell me to clean my room and I naturally wouldn't want to but I'd have my good ol' granny behind me saying "Come on Bubba we can get it done in five minutes." The funny thing is, after 19 years of doing that she will still say the same thing. Basically all it comes down to is I love my Granny with all of my heart.

My Knee

My 7th grade summer I went to a summer camp called Lutheran Island Camp. First couple of days past and it was seeming to be like any other camp I had attended previously. Fishing, campfires, games etc. One day the camp as a whole was playing a game called Eagles Nest. The object of the game is to take the "eggs" from the other teams nest and bring it back to yours without being tagged. I was running with my counselor to the other teams nest, we grabbed one egg and were running back to our nest. An opposing team memeber was heading toward us to I passed off the egg to my counselor as I ran down a little divot in the ground, when suddenly I heard a loud pop and fell to the ground. An excruciating pain was coming from my left knee as I layed on the ground holding it. The camp counselors came over helped me to a bech and got me a bag of ice, and some crutches. My knee swelled up to the size of a grape fruit.One counselor told me he thought I had sprained my knee and to stay off of it for the rest of my time at camp, and that it should heal up fast. After the week was over and the camp was done my mom came and got me. She brought me straight to the emergency room. I got a couple of X-rays and soon found out that my simple "knee sprain that should heal up soon" wasn't so simple. Infact I had dislocated my knee and chipped part of my knee cap off. On top of that it required surgery to fix! So after I had gotten the surgery it took many doctors visits and physical therapy to get it to standard working position, but every since my knees haven't been the same since.

Tim O'brien Essay

Tim O'brien tells stories of the war in Vietnam. He starts off with the death of Curt Lemon. Curt's best friend Rat, writes a letter to his sister telling her how great of a man he was. After no response he calls her a dumb cooze. O'brien goes on to explain how Curt died. Rat and Curt played a game they call yellow mother, where they threw a smoke grenade back and forth until one of them chickened out or it went off. Who ever had it last was the yellow mother. Rat threw the smoke grenade to far and Curt ended up stepping on a booby trap and blowing up. His body landed up in a tree. So a couple guys from the platoon had to climb the tree and retrieve the body parts. O'brien combats the gore of the scene by covering up how terrible it really was. He says how it was almost beautiful because of the sun rays coming down through the trees.

What I ended up taking away from this was soldiers at war see a lot of bad things, but when they come back and/or tell the stories they end up not telling the whole thing, or make it out better than what it was. That the soldiers invent some of the stories or at least parts of them. Basically that it is hard to distinguish between the true war experience and story telling.

1) My mom crashed her car into a tree.
2) Air bags deployed, hot coffee landed on me, and my ferret flew to the front seat.
3) Mom, Brother, Ferret, Neighborhood kid, and I.
4) Jumped out of the car screaming and swearing.
5) Person
6) Pissed off.
7) Yes I was aware, but it was just my reaction.
8) Kid drove away really fast and my mom thought i had a brain injury.
9) No I think I would probably react the same way.

Summary of a Paragraph from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Martin Luther King Jr. states in the above paragraph from a Letter from a Birmingham jail that, Negros have waited long enough for rights they should have been born with, they have been waiting far too for the simple pleasures that every human being should be granted. Even after segregation had been outlawed it still exists and is controlling the rights of colored people. Eventually if there is not change there will be chaos if there isn't change.