The Blind Side - A True Story

In today’s class we saw a movie called The Blind Side which is based on a true story. The story is about a black boy named Michael Oher, also called “Big Mike”. When Michael was a little kid, his mother was a drug-addict and his father was absent. Because of the family’s circumstances, the Family Services took control over his life, sending him from one foster home to another. When we meet him in the movie, he is homeless and is enrolling in a private Christian school to play football. At school, Michael gets a new friend called S.J Tuohy who is a lot younger than him. As S.J’s family sees Michael wandering around the streets at night, they pick him up and take him home. As the Tuohy family grows to love Michael, he gets his own room and bed in their house.

Even though Michael isn’t the best at school, it turns out that he’s got big protective instincts. No matter what happens, he always does whatever he can to protect the Tuohy family. At the field, Michael doesn’t get the hang of the game in the start, but as Leigh Ann Tuohy, the mother of the family, encourage him to use his protective instincts, he finally succeed. The Tuohy family is a white Christian family, and their friends think that this “little project” with taking care of the big black boy is ridiculous, but Leigh Ann is proud of the new member of her family and sets her friends straight.

As Michael continue to succeed on the field, several offers to play at university level comes up, but to be able to do this, Michael has to be better at school. The Tuohy family hires a tutor to help Michael, and his grades rises to the point where he is able to play for a university. Even though he has several offers, he ends up choosing the university where the father of the Tuohy family once played football and Leigh Ann once were a cheerleader. After choosing the university he wants to play for, a female investigator questions Michael to see if the Tuohy family forced Michael to go to their old university, so that they could benefit from that particular university. Michael gets suspicious about what the investigator said and questions Leigh Ann, but realizes that the Tuohy family is his family now and only wants the best for him and his future.

I really liked this movie because Michael was so easy to like because of his kindness and his protective instincts. I also liked the movie because it is based on a real story, and this makes it easier for me to relate to the story. To be able to do what the Tuohy family did for Michael is really fantastic, and it shows us that there can always be hope when people like them exists in this world.

Election in the UK - The First Debate

We have just seen the first election debate ever sent on television in England. The Conservatives with David Cameron, The Liberales With Gordon Brown and The LiberalDemocrates with Nick Klegg were gathered to answer questions from the audiens and to defend themselvs against each other. All three were asked tough questions, but i think David Cameron had a little more trouble defending himselves. Both Klegg and Gordon attacked his manifesto. Klegg, who is the one with the least amount of power in UK politics did really well. It might have somthing to do with the fact that he weren´t asked to defend himselves as much as the other two. They have never been in power and therefore the people have not much to say against their manifesto. All three manifestos are quite simmilar. It seems like they all want to achieve some of the same goals, but they have different ideas about how to get there. I think Nick Klegg won this debtate because he had the easier task to just explain his manifesto instead of defending it.

Devolution in the United Kingdom

Our task from today's class was to make a Power Point, Glogster or Photostory about the Devolution in the United Kingdom.Pauline and I chose to make a glogster together and this is how it turned out:

"The Road"

As I have written in an earlier post, we have all been reading a book. The book I have red is “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy which I think appeared as a boring book in the start, but after a while it got better.

The book is a story about a father and his young son who walks through destroyed America heading for the coast. We do not get to know what has happened to the world, but it is clear that something has destroyed all civilization and almost all life on earth. On this journey, the father and his son doesn’t have much except from the clothes they’re wearing, a cart of scavenged food, a gun for protection and each other. The father has understood that they will not live trough the winter and leads his son to the coast in the hope of finding warmth, food and other good people like themselves. The other people they see on the road, which are referred to as “the bad guys”, are people that has no problem killing and eating other people to survive, and therefore the father and the son has to hide and watch out at all times. Sometimes we follow the father’s memory back in time to meet the boy’s mother. She was pregnant when the nature disaster hit and committed suicide when the boy was born, leaving the father alone to take care of the son. The reason the father is taking the son to the coast is because he is sick and he know he is going to die soon. In the end of the book, they reach the coast, but the fathers attempt for seeking warmth and food is a lost cause. He has thought his son how to protect himself from “the bad guys” and then he dies. In the end, the son sits with his father’s body for three days until he meets a man who promises to take care of him.

Personally, I think it took a while for the book to get interesting, because there was a lot of walking and description of the landscape. I felt that I had to concentrate a lot to not start thinking about something else when I read, but when I came halfway through it got more interesting. There was a lot more situations that caught my attention and I have to admit that in the end when the father died, I started to cry. So I have to say that the last half of the book was good and exciting and I wish that the whole book was like this. 

Question Time

In todays class we got some assignments to work with. Pauline and I worked together, and this is what we wrote:

In question time Wednesday February 24, Gordon Brown had to answer though questions. He appeared engaged, interested and sincerely concerned with the issues that were presented. His body language projected that he was restless and at the same time very focused on answering the questions in the best way. Any how, the Prime Minister did not answer all the questions as correctly as others, maybe because he did not have a good enough answer prepared for those questions. The debate started calmly, but after a while the temperature was raised to a higher level. It’s not hard to see that the MP’s are involved in the topics that they are presenting.

The ongoing election that takes place in Britain gives the politicians the opportunity to have TV-debates with question time. This occurs when MP’s ask questions of Government Ministers which they are obliged to answer. The questions that are asked in these TV-debates are usually pre-arranged by the organizers of each party and are intended to allow the Minister to discuss the virtues of government policy, or to attack the opposition. Skilled Ministers will often attempt to turn around the opposition’s question, but there is not allowed to lie or providing misleading answers to Parliament.

In the USA they do not have Question Time for the President, but he shall from time to time give the Congress information of the State of Union. 

Collaborating in class

In today’s class, we were divided in to five groups called Front Desk, Research Group, Journalists, Teachers and Designers. Every group had their own tasks, but the main goal was that everybody was preparing for the test next week. I feel that I didn’t learn a lot from this method because I was writing about one topic the whole time, and I also think that some of the other groups didn’t learn or do nothing, but that is because I was on the group that had to do the most. I had fun today, but I didn’t learn very much, so from 1-10 I would rate this day as a 5 J

"The Road" - To be continued

In class, we could chose between two books; The Road by Cormac McCarthy or The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I chose The Road and have read about 50 pages now and to be honest, I didn’t really understand much. From what I understood, the book is about a man and his son who has no place to stay, and is always on the run from “the others”.

I know the book has been made in to a movie, so I went on YouTube to check out the trailer:

After having watched the trailer, I understand a lot more of what I have read. I think that it will be more exciting the more I read, so I will just have to keep on reading. A lot of people tell me that it is a good book and that is why I chose to read this one. I really want to see the movie, because the trailer looks exciting, but I will resist my temptations and finish the book before I see the movie. After all, I have learned that it is best to read the book before you see the movie, and not the other way around because I always get disappointed when I do that.

"Obama Rama Drama"

Last Tuesday in class, we watched a documentary on YouTube were we saw the reactions and views of the Republicans before the election in 2008. The people that were interviewed hated Barack Obama so much that they said he was a terrorist working with Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaida network, and called him names like “NoBama”, “Barack Hussein Obama” and singing songs like “O-O-Bama, he’ll tax to the max so you’ll feel real pain! No-Nobama, so vote with your brain, chose McCain”.

The source of the hatred for Barack Obama lies a lot in his believes and adolescence I think. They feel that Obama has been living in cities all of his life and does not know how it is for those who live in the country. They believe in God, not homosexuals or abortions. They also feel that they are the hardworking people who keep America running and that Obama can’t relate with them like McCain can. The Republicans are not ready for a black president.

Obama are also being connected with Hitler by the Republicans. Obama is a great public speaker and so was Hitler, and by that they think that there will be another WW2. Personally, I think what their saying and their behavior is ridiculous. The Republicans said that if Obama was elected President of the United States, America would be ruined and they would be scared for their lives and for their country. On Election Day they all cried when McCain lost just like if the world was going to end, but it seems to me like America is still going strong and Barack Obama is doing a decent job.

Here you can see the clip from YouTube!

Senior Project

For my Senior Project I have chosen to write about terrorism. I am going to include The 9/11 terrorist attack and the aftermath, but I'm going to focus mainly on why the terrorists act like they do, why they act in the name of God and how it is for those muslims that aren't terrorists but still get judged. We connect terrorism with Islam, but that is kind of ironic since Islam teaches to not harm other people.

We are also supposed to choose a book to read in class, and I have chosen "The Road".

The government says: Democracy is the right to dissent.

They mean that dissent gave birth to the United States and that freedom of speech is a critical mechanism of democracy and therefore guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Dissent is a theme of American history. It is written in the constitution that people can go out and assemble and protest . It's the mechanism for change in America. If there's something you don't agree with, you can be apart of a group and implement that change. Almost every group has an organization and protests, and this gives us and the government an awareness that there is a problem. People have the ability to speak their own mind and voice out the contempt that they have for the government. You shame the authorities into redressing something that they see is wrong. Jefferson wrote; all men are created equal, so after the constitution was written it was clear to a lot of people that not everybody was having these rights. The constitution is like a contract between the government and the people, and if people aren't being covered by that they're demanding the right to be covered. If you can't fight for those rights, then you're under a controlled society, and that is not what democracy is.

There were dissenters  like Susan b. Anthony who voted and got arrested because she was a women, and she said in a speech; is it a crime for US citizens to vote? And today we think: how can that have been considered a crime?

The positives of a democracy is that it's actually controlled by the people. Government changed America when people spoke up against the government. The phrase; all men are created equally means something different now then when Jefferson wrote it. There are always people who feel that they are not being treated fairly, and sometimes they are quite right!