Chris,
There were a few grammatical/spelling errors in your post, but overall I felt like you got most of your ideas across well. Your last paragraph was thought-provoking, I would imagine that if you were in such late stages of cancer that you would know that you would die fairly soon. And really, when you are that sick just about all you can do is lie in a bed. He could barely eat and needed morphine, I doubt there was much he could have done differently Chris.
Your paragraph about the stigma that is associated with people who have AIDS was very relevant to our group right now, because in Jamaica Kincaid's book that is a very important theme. I think there are parallels to that social disassociation in nature, the sick and dying are shunned in many animal groups, and are usually culled from the herd. Maybe there's some base instinct to avoid a sick person that stems from a survivalist need to avoid getting sick yourself.
(Comment from Lucas London)
Hi Chris!
I think you tackled some really tough subject matter very gracefully. You made it clear that although you've never been in such a position, you can still understand the range of feelings someone experiences when someone close to them passes away. Your line "The pain of seeing someone almost helpless ... wheeled away by a celebrity guest doctor" really struck me, because it hits very close to home. As a teenager in America, I'm no stranger to the horrors of fatal illnesses; it's hard to watch TV at night without stumbling across at least one show romanticizing hospitals and sick people. It tends to make people desensitized, so that when they come into contact with real-life death experiences, they're shocked by the level of seriousness and loss.
I'd say you could improve your writing by getting a little passionate. You come off as a tad stiff, like you're concentrating more on using nice words and concise sentences then you are on conveying your ideas. Get passionate! Think about what you're saying, and let the reader in on your thought process. It's a lot more relatable that way. :)
Comment from Isabel Jenkins
chris,
I think you answered the question Andy posed thoughtfully, fully and in a very organized manner. I think this was pro aswell as a con. I think your post can be more interesting when you find an insight you are either knowledgable about or curious about and persue it to the best you can. I very much enjoyed the second to last paragraph and the last one I thought it was the most insightful and you could have definitly expanded on it. I think that you should try to think deeply on the topic itself rather than precisely following a rubric. The rubric helps when ur struggling no doubt, but if you want to improve your own insights and make it more interesting for myslef think deeply and try to find a passionate idea you have. when u love the idea the reader loves reading about it. hope my comment helps
Comment from John Tabor
Lucas,
I think you have a lot of good thoughts and I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. You do a good job of answering the questions but there is no third paragraph to talk strictly about your thoughts on what she said and not the thoughts that she relayed to us.It was also easy to see how your thoughts connected to the thoughts of the speaker and I like how it is easy to tell the difference. I know that when some people try to do this, it can be confusing to find the point of views that they have opposed to the points of view that someone else had. I think that this work could have more "beauty" if perhaps you have had a personal experience with someone dying and maybe talked about that. There is also the chance that you haven't had this experience and if not I also feel that knowing your internship is in a hospital, you could talk a little bit about that when you make the reference to the doctors in the hospitals. Only because I was there when Beth was talking and I know a lot about her views and the assignment says to talk about that but when addressing beauty I personally feel that it is easier to have some sort of natural beauty when you talk about something personal because everyone has a story and telling by the ability of your writing it would be interested to feel some of your personal views. That could also make it more passionate making it that much better.
(my comment to Lucas)
Hey John,
I like a lot of what you said and I think you got a good point across about what Beth was saying and you did a good job answering the questions that Andy presented. Also, when I know that you most likely had some of the feelings that Beth had and you mention that when you say, "Before my own father died I felt more distanced from him he wasn’t the same image of my father I had when I was younger". But even though this could just be something that may be to personal for you to want to talk about I feel like even though you compared your feelings to Beth you could go more into depth about the differences and the similarities of how you felt with how Beth felt. The question does ask you to compared both of these things and I think you do address this but for someone who has experienced this I thought maybe you could bring up something that you thought she might have felt that you felt. As for the beauty in the work and the insight, I feel that you also bring something up that is very smart about the norms changing, which is something that I didn't really think that much about when she said he was a "stay-at-home dad". Besides this, the one thing that I thought could have made your blog better was just going more into depth IF you feel comfortable with that about your experience because that would have brought out a lot more beauty in this assignment.
(my comment to John)
Hey Burt,
I think that the strongest paragraph you have in this was the second paragraph. In that short paragraph I think you stated something that not many people have stated in their blogs and it is one of the most key pieces to what was being said by Beth. You mentioned that we normally don't see people die. I think this was the beginning of a really good paragraph but you failed to make a follow up statement about this. I think your work could have been much better if you would have talked about this more or staying home helping someone more considering that you said it was something that jumped out to you immediately. Posing some questions and trying to dig deeper is something that I really encourage you to do for the remainder of the blog post. Also you seem to answer the questions pretty well but the questions do say compare and contrast the insights that you have and I would like to see how some of what you think. Then for the questions you do ask, I feel like some of these could have been questions that you tried to answer when you talk about other things in the beginning of the post. So what you overall need to focus on for later is expanding on your ideas because they will probably be good, maybe adding in something from personal experience and making sure you compare and contrast your thoughts. Doing this will completely answer the homework question.
(My comment to Jasper)
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