Final week of class

Last week in class we talked about the ending of Othello and how Iago's power was in his words because in his last line he said that he wasn't going to talk anymore and he doesn't. I think that maybe what Iago could have also been referring to was that he wasn't going to talk anymore because he knew they were going to murder him for the evil he did. Either way, it shows how Iago was able to control people very precisely just by talking to them and inserting ideas that make the person curious and to ask questions. In the last day of class we also went over all of the quizzes we have done since the beginning of the semester. Reviewing the quizzes that we already took helped me remember the stories we had talked about and also to remember what questions I answered wrong in the quiz and during class I was able to point out which ones I got wrong and was able to answer them correctly this time around. I think that many people, like myself, learn more after they review material like quizzes because they know what material they need to know and how the question will look.

I would also like to say that before I took this class, English 231, I had never read any of the stories we read in class. I had never read a shakespeare play because I had always heard that it was difficult to read and that most of them are dumb. I think that after this class I will look into reading more shakespeare because Othello was a good story, it had a good twist, a great villain, and a tragic resolution. The only story that I didn't like to read was the Dao De Jing on Daoism because like we discussed in class, it is very difficult to read, even to Mr. B. I think that Daoism is interesting, but it can be very confusing as well and it requires heavy reading and concentration in order to "understand" it better. Before reading The Ramayana I thought that it was going to be very boring and difficult to read, but it turned out to be the only story that I was able to read without having to look up a lot of words in the dictionary because most of it was straight forward. My favorite story that we read in class was Beowulf because he was a great warrior and was happy to proclaim that he was. I think that Beowulf is a superhero because everything he did in the story was to protect the weak, even though he was also being cocky at the same time. At the end, he died because of his stubbornness of wanting to fight a dragon without any armor to show his people that he was a good king and a good warrior, which were great values in those times.

I also liked how the class was structured, the stories we read, and how we had to blog every week about things related to class because a lot of people, including myself, don't talk in class. I have had other english classes were we didn't have to blog and in class it was really quiet and I think that blogging is a good alternative for participation for people that are shy to bring up something in class.


word count: 568