Dear Students,

You are invited (and, let’s be honest, required) to use this blog as a forum for collecting and reflecting upon the connections you make between our class discussions and your lives beyond the walls and windows of F102. My sincerest hope is that through this process of observing your surroundings and writing about them, you’ll begin to notice the relationship between our literature and your own personal community—the community that uniquely exists for you alone with your family members, your friends, your advisory, your team mates, your teachers, and on and on and on.

I hope you will begin to see how the themes we discuss with our world literature appear repeatedly in the forms of entertainment in which you invest your time and your money. You’ll begin to notice how characters in movies react in the same ways as those we meet in the pages of our texts. You’ll see how people in the tv shows you watch exhibit the same qualities as our fictional friends.

Through this process I hope you will gain an appreciation for cataloging those events and ideas that bring you pause and that you will see writing as more than just the dreaded Five Paragraph Essay and instead view writing as a tool for introspection and as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the world you inhabit.

And so, your task is to use this blog to write about and share the connections you make between English II and the bigger picture. While this is indeed an assignment, I challenge you to see this as more than a number in my grade book, and instead as a way to truly use the education you receive by thinking critically about the reasons for why things are the way they are.

With my greatest respect,

Ms. Amanda Hepp