Dear Ms.

Zen,

Reading and discussing literature this year has thoroughly changed and developed my

understanding of the world around me. For example, when we were reading Things Fall Apart, I

realized how much I lump all of Africa into one place and characterize all the people as being the

same despite their distinct cultural and lifestyle differences. Another book that helped me

redefine my understanding of the world around me was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the

Nighttime. Reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime from Christopher’s point

od view helped me understand what life is like for someone with disabilities and the everyday

hurdles that are presented to them. This book also showed me how much I take certain things for

granted, such as being able to read people’s emotions and to not have to think about what color

my food is before I eat it. Reading both The Odyssey and The Penelopiad has given me a firm

example of the contrast between the different perspectives of an event. Overall, reading and

discussing the literature this year has shaped my understanding of the world around me by

putting me in other people’s shoes and showing me what their life is like and how that is

different from my life and even from how I pictured their life.

Revising my Midnight Summer Night’s Dream paper and my The Odyssey Chapter 16

paper has shown me how much I have grown as a writer over the course of this year. I was

surprised at how different the smoothness of my writing was, especially in The Odyssey paper, I

was writing very choppy. Going over my Midsummer Night’s Dream paper, I realized how many

careless mistakes I made, from not having a title to only having a thesis and no introduction and

not having a works cited. I also added more evidence and analysis to back up my thesis.

In my Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime creative piece, I incorporated

diagrams and run on sentences to make the chapter as similar to Mark Haddon’s work as I could.
The diagrams show what is happening in Christopher’s head and helps us understand him. The

run-on sentences show that he has a lot to say but he doesn’t quite know how to so he just dumps

his thoughts out without thinking about grammar. Another choice I made in this paper was for

Christopher to distract himself from how fast the taxi driver was going to doing something that

he liked, in this case figuring out the equation for the fare meter. These things make him happy

instead being scared about the taxi driver’s driving. At the same time, it brags about how smart

he is and I put it in a very condescending tone to demonstrate Christopher’s feeling of superiority

towards the reader. Another way I demonstrated this idea of Christopher being smarter than the

reader was by solving the equation and explaining to imply that the reader would not be able to

solve the equation and would not understand what the variables meant. In the chapter, I also

jumped around in my ideas. I did this to show that Christopher’s mind didn’t really stay on the

same track, instead it jumped around to a lot of different things that were semi-unrelated.

My second creative piece was a poem written by Penelope. At the beginning of the poem,

she talks about how she misses Odysseus, but for the majority of the poem she talks about the

suitors and how they are destroying her house and stealing her wine and food. Despite all of this,

she is still tempted to just marry one of the suitors to make her situation stop. Though she talks

about being tempted to marry a suitor, she says that it is just a temptation, and the final couplet in

the poem is about Odysseus returning. She also talks about Telemachus which shows that

although her focus is on Odysseus and the suitors, she definitely still loves him and hasn’t

forgotten about him through all of the chaos.

During this assignment, I had a few minor struggles. One of the main problems for me

was to come up with my second creative piece, which took several days. I ended up taking the

advice of a friend and doing a poem on the Penelopiad from Penelope’s view. I also had some
trouble writing my Curious Incident chapter the way that Mark Haddon would have.

Specifically, it was hard for me to write as much random stuff on a topic as he did because the

details that made up those chapters do not come to my mind. Coming up with a diagram was also

hard because many of the diagrams are complex ideas that I do not know. To deal with this, I

would just take a 5-minute break to clear my mind and then get back to it with new ideas.

However, as usual, my biggest problem was time management and even though you told us

exactly where we should be and gave us a two-day extension, somehow, I got behind. The only

solution to this was just to try and work really hard really fast. The two-hour lunches also helped

me a lot.

I grew tremendously as a writer and also as a person this year due to your energetic and

engaged teaching style. This style made me want to come to class every day and also made me

listen to you. I really enjoyed your class this year and I hope I get you again next year!

Thank you so much for everything,

Ryder Cone