Blog Post #15

A Reflection of My Time at Millbrook:

My experience over the past four years in high school has been one that has indisputably molded me into the person whom I am today. Four years ago, I was, in many ways, a completely different person than I am now. Throughout my time at Millbrook High School, I have grown in ways that have allowed me to become the person that I have always wanted to be.

I remember my first day at Millbrook vividly; the first class I ever had was Mrs. Jones for Algebra II. As I sat there in the morning, I remember that it had marked the end of a major portion of my life, which was significant for me. For as long as I could remember, I had gone to Magellan Charter, a school where I knew everyone by their first and last name and had grown up in. When I got to Millbrook, I was separated from all of my closest friends I had been with on a daily basis for a lifetime. For a while, the transition was difficult for me; I struggled to make other, close friends which took a toll on me. During my first two years at Millbrook, I was unhappy with the circumstances I was in. When I joined the IB Program, however, all of that began to change. As I began to spend time with more people who were motivated in life and shared similar interests to my own, I built up strong relationships and developed a group of close friends. I became confident about who I am as a person, and stopped caring as much about what others thought about me. Due to this shift that happened between my sophomore and junior year, I view my high school experience as very positive. It has been a period of my life where I reflected on who I wanted to be, and became that person. When I reflect on who I am currently, I know that I have no qualms with myself.

When I look back on the time that I spent at Millbrook in the future, I know that I will remember it fondly. I have made friends that I will remain close with for the rest of my life (Cody will be my roommate in college at NC State) and have had a level of fun and a quality of experiences that will be unforgettable. I will be sad to see my time at Millbrook come to an end, but I am ready to start the next phase of my life. I know that I will be successful down the road, and I am ready to tackle the rest of my life.

P.S.- Thank you for putting up with me for three years of teaching Mrs. Genesky, you have been a great teacher and I am grateful to have been in your classes.

Blog Post #14

Step 1)

The journal itself is extremely worn, but this could just be a product of the fact that it is more than a hundred years old instead of Whitman’s usage. The writing style of Whitman often seems to be scribbled and randomly strewn across the page in a hurried manner. On a page titled “Brochure” there are the initials A. L.—this could be a reference to Abraham Lincoln. On a page containing a poem that starts off with “Welcome the storm” I can see that Whitman has crossed out several words and replaced them with different ones. I find this interesting because it shows that Whitman was human and made mistakes that he found necessary to correct. There are several doodles of who appears to be Whitman. Some of the seem to almost be distorted due to their incorrect bodily proportions, which could mean that Whitman has a sense of humor. The picture of the skeleton on the final page is eerie and out of place. It has a morbid theme to it, and could mean that Whitman was contemplating the idea of death. Over the course of the poems I often had a hard time reading Whitman’s handwriting.

Step 2)

If find it interesting that Whitman put names and addresses on the inside cover—it shows that he thought of it as something more personal to him than simply a place to store his thoughts. I am intrigued that he chose to comment on his beliefs on religion, contemplating the ideas of the Greek sage and Judaism and Christianity. I think the theory of using “Liberdad” instead of “Liberty” is interesting because it shows that Whitman may have believed that the concept of freedom wasn’t limited to America alone. I also find it interesting that Whitman reached the conclusion that the history of the world depended on the success or failure of America’s democratic experiment before the President did. The fact that Whitman often passed his notebook around, as evident by the doodles of him that he likely did not draw, raises questions on whether or not we can be confident that everything found in them is his own work. I enjoyed the picture of the skeleton with the sword through his heart; I think that much of the notebook shows Whitman’s self-reflection on the circumstances that America was in and how he found them dire.