March 10th Yayyyyyyyy

We’ve officially begun the juggle between the research paper and the essays in our Lit For Comp books. We started class today with questions about the research paper and Ben asked if autobiographies are useful. Mr. Laz told us that many materials are useful, we just need to be judicious about using them. He warned that many autobiographies have a bias and we need to be careful to how we implement these works. Jasmine then asked if we needed to list the volume/issue number for magazines. Mr. Laz said we don’t have to, only for scholarly journals etc because they don’t come out as often.

We didn’t get very far in the Lit For Comp discussion because we started with the quotes in the beginning of the section. Ian jump started the discussion by stating that the quotes that were in favor of America seemed abstract, but the negative opinions of America seemed more specific. Christy disagreed and she used Pearl Buck’s quote as an example of how general some of the ‘negative’ quotes were. Paige felt that all of the quotes were extremely general.

Jasmine was the brave soul who first brought up the Clinton quote. She said that it seemed specific but it was actually very general when it was examined closely. We began to discuss the flag; Ashley felt that the last line of Clinton’s quote reminded her of flag burning. The discussion drifted towards whether it was justified to burn a symbol, even though it harbors a great deal of meaning to many people.

The diverse and intellectual people in our class brought a lot to the discussion; people had very passionate feelings about the subject. Some didn’t understand why people would want to show such disrespect to the troops by burning the flag, while others felt that if someone was impassioned enough to burn it they should be allowed to. Mr Laz pointed out that the Supreme Court has upheld that flag burning is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Amy was the last to speak on the subject, and she drew the connection between burning the cross and burning the flag. She believes that when you burn the flag you aren’t protesting the government you are protesting the very ideals of American society. However, Mr. Laz brought up that you never know why someone burns a flag unless you open up communication with them. Since the flag is a symbol, which is not clearly defined, any action taken against it can mean anything that the protestor wants it to mean.

Overall it was a good day, we are to continue our readings and research for the term paper for homework.