1st Semester Reflection

For this assignment, we are suppose to respond to the things that we learned in English class that stuck with us the most. For me, probably the thing that stuck with me the most was our Night Unit, when we read the novel Night, which is about a young Jewish boy named Elie Wiesel, and his father, trying to survive and stick together throughout the horrific attempt of genocide against the Jewish people known as the Holocaust. It stuck with me because it was so terrible, and we did a lot of background information on it and had to do a journal on a specific person that was in the Holocaust. It was pretty crazy on all of the facts and disturbing things that we saw from the films and the horrible things we read from diaries, or journals that people wrote of their time in the labor and concentration camps. Another crazy thing about the Holocaust was that no one had any idea on what the Nazis were doing with the Jews. People knew that they were putting Jews into labor camps and such, but they never knew that the Nazis would kill thousands of Jews everyday either from hunger, thirst, overwork, or from the Germans killing them in some horrible ways. They killed them by burning them alive, or using them as guinea pigs in the Nazis' horrible experiments with toxic chemicals and other experiments like that.

Another thing that we did in English class that really stuck with me was reading the novel I am the Cheese, which is about a teenage boy named Adam who knows hardly anything about his true past and still trying to stay sane in the process. What was so interesting about this book was that you can have many opinions about the book, like if Adam is a schizophrenic or is just a part of a government conspiracy. My opinion changed periodically throughout the book, on whether Adam was a schizophrenic or a part of a government conspiracy. But in the end of the novel, I think that because it is a little bit of both, but I believe that it leans more towards government conspiracy, because of the tape series that was involved throughout the novel, which makes it seem like that Adam is being interrogated by a man named Brint. At the very end of the novel, it talks in the tapes that the man that was supposedly helping Adam and his family, seemed to tell some organization, probably the Mafia, where Adam and his family's position was. Adam's mother and father were killed when the Mafia heard where they were. But the man that gave up their position was not fired or put on trial because of insufficient evidence. The man, 'Mr. Gray', was probably apart of the Mafia and was an inside man.

Those were the two main things that stuck with me throughout the 1st Semester of my Sophomore year of high school.