For our second half of this quarter, our class has switched from having Ms. Maxwell as our teacher, to having Ms. Willemse as our teacher. Not only have we switched teachers, but we have also started a completely new unit with new guidelines. In our new unit, we will be studying women’s suffrage, William Shakespeare’s play “The Taming of the Shrew” and how it relates to women’s rights in our recent history, and how to properly identify continuity and change in literature and society. During this unit, we are required to submit a weekly blog post summarizing what we learned for each week. Although this is technically our second week. I have decided to combine our previous week with this weeks post. Mostly because there have technically only been 7 classes instead of 10, this is because we started this new unit in the middle of the week.
Starting class on Thursday I was greeted by a fresh assignment. Except I was not prepared. During the summer we were tasked with reading a book, although the choice was optional. I decided to take the easy route out and not read the book. So for our initial assignment we were tasked with ‘reflecting on a classic’. Were were required to take a classic book that we had read, and reflect on it through a short essay to prove why that book deserves the title of “classic”. I decided to write about a book I read for last years English class, The Lord of the Flies.
One of the main things I learned from that assignment was that identifying a classic was harder than I thought! I went into the write-up thinking it was going to be a breeze but in the end I actually found myself digging deep into my memory to come up with reasons to reinforce the books ‘classic’ reputation, but in the end I think I really pulled it together!
In the following week our class really dug deep into the suffragist movement and gender equality. We did some reading from text books and also did some research online. We also analyzed shows such as Sex and the City, and The Golden Girls, for their role played in showing progressive and modern-day issues associated with women.
Some analysis of the word ‘slut’ also underwent. On one hand, the word is used to objectify, defame, and disrespect a woman who has has a reputation of having a lot of sex. When on the other hand, the word is used amongst women in a comedic sense. This also relates to the importance of analyzing text properly and concisely, something that I think we will be doing a lot of in the coming weeks while reading ‘The Taming of the Shrew’
