Something Interesting

In the class discussion of "Lobsters," one of the ideas that a classmate, I forget who, brought up which I thought was interesting was that the poem is sort of showing how death is random. The lobsters in the tank have no idea who will be picked to die next, but they all know that it will happen to them eventually.

However, this does not only apply to lobsters. It is the same for any creature, humans in particular. Everyone and everything that is alive will die eventually, whether it be after a few weeks or hundreds of years. I believe that the author is, in particular, referring to humans in this comparison, for a couple of reasons. The first of this is that throughout the entire poem the author compares lobsters and humans, so why wouldn't he compare them here? Another reason I believe this is that humans have the "most random deaths." While anything can die at birth, or from disease or old age, humans have many other ways in which they are killed. They could overdose on drugs, be run over by a car, be shot by a fellow human... the ways go on. By comparing the lobsters to humans, the author shows just how random and inevitable death is.

So Many Paragraphs, So Many Skills

In order for one to write a great 5-part-paragraph, it is important that your topic is focused, but not extremely narrow. If your topic is too broad then your paragraph may be confusing or hard to follow, whereas if it is too narrow it may become boring or repetitive. In general I think the majority of papers read in our class were very good, but a lot of them had a few errors (I am no exception). I think the most prevalent weakness amongst our classes' paragraphs were the transitions- on a lot of papers they were very weak (next, finally, etc.) and on others they were missing altogether. There were also a couple of other errors, although none of them were as bad as the transitions. I noticed that on quite a few essays, there was some plot summary in the commentary, and there were also a couple of errors regarding the format the quotes were in (problems with conversations in quotes and lack of page number primarily). Overall, however, I am happy with how our class performed on this assignment and hope we will do similar ones in the future.

I was honestly not very happy with my own paragraph. While other students seemed to think it was alright, and I got an OK grade, I feel as if I didn't put much effort into it. While my concrete details, commentaries and transitions were alright, I feel as if I did a bad job on pretty much everything else. I forgot to put page numbers after quotes, I didn't like my introduction and my conclusion was quite short. I also failed to fill out the outline which was due at the beginning of the project, mainly because I had trouble understanding exactly what we were supposed to do with it (that, and I hate using graphic organizers anyway). I'm hoping we won't have to use many of those in the future, although I understand that this is probably a bit much to hope for!