Response to Alyssa to David

 Is Alameda better or Oakland? I think Alameda is more peaceful, but at times Oakland can be peaceful too.
Alyssa says,

   I do not have any statistics to back up these factors, but I think Oakland has a bigger population than Alameda.  If there are more people wandering the streets of Oakland, accidents are bound to happen. On the other hand, Alameda barely has any shopping places except for South Shore and maybe Park Street, making accidents less possible.
Oakland is much dirtier where I live and there are a lot of homeless people there. In Alameda, the streets are much cleaner and I don't see any homeless people around here. There are much more events in the city of Alameda compared to Oakland.

 She says Oakland's population causes accidents. If there are more people, I agree that there will be more accidents. With a "Chinatown" in Oakland, they have more stuff being sold. At Alameda, it is much smaller than Oakland and easy to handle when bad things happen.  Oakland can be dirty in some areas and cleaner in others, but it isn't all dirty. There are more places and sites to see at Oakland because of it's size. I prefer Alameda over Oakland because I may always have to live in fear when I step out of my house. Sometimes, Oakland events can be rumored to be out of control when people describe drive by shootings. I enjoy Oakland because there are much more places to walk around and in Alameda, you are always walking around the same area. There is more diversity in Oakland. The people there can be nice or mean or both, but I like how not everyone is the same.
    Why do some people hate Oakland so much? I think they hate Oakland either because of the things they hear, or the bad luck they have in that city. Some people are struck with one accident and they are scared to death to go back to Oakland so they decide to leave. Some people hate Oakland because they hear that its bad. Some people just tell other people how bad Oakland is to sound tough or have something exciting to say.

A long way gone, Discussion #3

   In the third discussion of the book A Long Way Gone, we spoke many times about events in the rehabilitation center and the death of people in the war. The book ends with Ishmael, the author, being chosen to go to a rehab center with half of the soldiers he worked with and to recover from his past experiences. In the ending he works well with a lady, Esther, who helps him recover and a man Leslie who helps him find his Uncle who just happens to live in this new place, Sierra Leone. Along with this, he is united with a family member who loves Ishamel and Ishmael attends a conference in New York to talk about children who deal with war. He goes back home after the conference to Sierra Leone and Sierra is raided by rebels and soldiers who are fighting each other but disrupts the capital. Ishmael doesn't like the news but doesn't panic as much as the civilians do because this isn't his first time dealing with war. He is all too familiar with these war tactics and leaves the city because he doesn't want the soldiers to recruit him, again. He fears joining the army again and witnessing deaths of people he care about.
   The most important factor of Ishmael's life is rehabilitation center because he learns to get off his drugs and stops being so violent. He says he is a child now and not a soldier. Because of the center he turned from "kill any rebel, no matter what" to a regular boy who enjoys life. He craves drugs in the beginning of rehab and sells school supplies to a dealer. He throws stones at people who get water and stabs people that are rebels. He makes people's lives miserable, but everyone claims, its not their fault.
    Our discussion discussed why he seemed like he liked war more than the rehab center at first. He seemed as if he liked war more possibly because of the violence he enjoyed. He only fought rebels because the soldiers recruited them and told them that they killed their families. The soldiers kind of brainwashed them by telling them lies to make them kill the rebels off and giving the young soldiers drugs to take to relieve of pain when they are shot so they'd have no idea and just keep fighting harder and harder. He seemed as if he liked war more because of his lieutenant because when he left his leader, he wanted to turn back around the truck he was in, and go back.
   Ishmael didn't know what war meant. He'd rather stay in war than go to rehab, a safe place with food. It is easy to survive. He ends up having to escape Sierra Leone and given a story told, but his family keeps on leaving him.

Response to - Jealousy

When people are jealous, it isn't always bad. Jealously leads the human life. In a quote from Max'd,

    I then found out another ASTI kid wrote about this blog. Looking at their two blogs, I read something that I have never even thought of before. Jealousy. They talk about how being jealous makes us all these things, "Being jealous is a dangerous feeling in my opinion. It can lead to depression, angriness, and other unwanted feelings" Along with this they discuss how instead of feeling like this they should be thinking about how grateful they are for things. I was a little puzzled by this. How is being jealous the same thing as being grateful.

   He describes being jealous as a dangerous feeling in his opinion. I think its a good thing to be jealous in life. First of all, it is a feeling of being alive. The only way you can be jealous is if your still alive. Second of all, being jealous just drives humans to work harder. If your jealous of your peer for reading about a hundred pages more than you, you would work harder to read more than him. People like to gloat, and in order to gloat, they have to be better than their competition. People often cheat when they are jealous, however. They give up and don't believe they can achieve what other people have achieved, so they turn to cheating. This is one con of jealousy. It causes people to do things they would have never done if they weren't worse than someone. Jealousy, Max describes it, can lead to depression, angriness, and other unwanted feelings, but if people are jealous, it just pushes them to work harder. It is a great experience in life. When someone runs a mile in three minutes, the next person would want to run faster than the first person in order to be noticed. Jealousy causes people to achieve more. 
   However, another downfall for jealousy is hatred. When someone is jealous of another, they would hate the person until they are better than them. They would focus on achieving higher than that person than talking to them. Talking to them just reminds them to work and work, to step up.
   Jealousy can lead to good achievements and bad occurrences, but I see jealousy as a driving force to human life. It makes them want to work harder.

Group discussion #2, ideas.

   While discussing with my group about the book, A Long Way Gone, ideas that were brought up were ideas such as the soldier's use of drugs for energy for the younger soldiers and another idea was the idea that the soldiers only fought the rebels to relieve their pain, but did killing the killers of their family really relieve pain or was "they killed our family" just an excuse.
    In the second chunk of the book A Long Way Gone, Ishmael trains to be a soldier and accomplishes it after running from several villages who either kicked Ishmael and his friends out or Ishmael and his friends decide to leave because they fear that rebels would arrive at that village and devastate another village. Ishmael and his friends lose their family because of a man picking banana leaves who knew the direction to the village but caused the boys to lose their family. The boy's families were supposedly in a village that the boy's nearly arrived at, but the rebels beat them to the village and burned everyone there. They explained that "no one escaped" and that they thought it was fun. The boy's arrive at a different village and are forced to become soldiers to protect the village. They crush the rebels on their first encounters and two of Ishmael's friends die in front of him. This gives him the anger he needs to start being gruesome and cruel. The boys smoke drugs, watch war movies and go to war. This is their life now and they need to do this in order to protect the rest of the people of that village. The plentiful drugs they are given give them energy but makes Ishmael not hungry. In our discussion, we discussed if the drugs were good energy for the soldiers because towards the end of this discussion, the soldiers going to rehab was mentioned and they go crazy after days of not having the drugs they are addicted to. In my opinion, I think the drugs should go away and they weren't good energy for the soldiers even if it gave them energy.
    We discussed how the soldiers turned mean and started to kill. They would have never killed if the high ranking soldiers didn't mention that the rebels killed their parents, which then gave the soldiers a reason to want to kill the rebels. My group mates explained to me that the higher ranking soldiers needed to give the new soldiers a reason to kill the rebels because they really needed the recruits to fight the rebels off. This changed my perspective of the soldiers and why they did this. I believed that they did it to lie to get recruits to kill the rebels, but instead they were fending the rebels off to defend the village occupied by many people whose been separated from their family.
    The discussion allowed me to think differently of the methods of the soldiers and how and why they did what they did.

Book - A long way gone, discussion ideas.

     From A Long Way Gone, many values of life and death shown in the book were revealed during discussion. The book, A Long Way Gone, tells a true story about a boy living in a world of danger. Rebels of his country attack and he is forced to flee village to village, gripping onto his life as he sneakily escapes multiple situations of death. A Long Way Gone written by Ishmael Beah, shows cruel scenes of the rebels by describing their way of torture by misusing their guns. The rebels are fighting to make a point. In discussion of the rebels, the rebels are believed to be in this rebellion for such an amount of time, they forget what they are fighting for. Life and death shown in the book were scenes when the narrator had to to anything they could to survive. Examples of his quick decisions are when he steals corn from a boy much younger than him with his friends. He steals a cob of corn and allows the boy to run away crying, but this was beneficial to him because the boy's mom offered his friends and him more corn. Ishmael also almost faced death when he decided to return to Mattru Jong when he was in need of money. He believed money would help him but no one valued money enough to exchange for food because if they were to become without a home, they'd need the food for themselves. Life and death situations caused Ishmael Beah to commit to actions he wouldn't have committed if he was not as desperate.
     In discussion with the group, things in the book went from worse to terrible. Kids such as Beah at his age of twelve couldn't be trusted anymore because everyone feared that they were rebels in disguise. Ishmael Beah found a family at a river and noticed that they didn't trust him, so all he could do was ask him for directions to his next destination. Villages not torn apart yet had strong volunteered men guarding the village for rebels. Ishmael and friends and family were rounded up by the men and almost drowned because of the preference of the villagers. The villagers chanted for a drowning of the kids, but after being questioned, they were let off.
     The group agrees that Ishmael Beah portrays a worthless way rebels use their money. The picture on the front shows a boy holding a gun and walking alone with broken sandals. No one would and could help him because they were hiding in fear. Rebels tore apart the homes of the residents and caused people to go desperately trying to survive.
     A Long Way Gone gives a sense of nonfiction because of Ishamel's luck. The end of discussion closes with  Ishmael and the new seven boys. They are rumored to be the seven boys, and have encountered muscular men together. The boys of the book adapt to their circumstances, and for that reason, they can overcome obstacles that some can't.