Literature: Art for To Kill a Mockingbird

The second assignment for me is spatial.

The tasks (out of which I have to pick one):

1. Design a map for Maycomb (think Google map!) Take into consideration the location of the homes, streets, etc. (I have totally no clue for this, I'd better play safe!)

2. Design an obituary for Mrs Dubose (this sounds morbid, no way I'm doing it!)

3. Design a comic strip for the Tom Robinson trial

4. Design a civil rights movement poster for Maycomb.

I picked the fourth and last task.

Analysis:

Purpose:To encourage people to support civil rights for the Blacks

Audience: People of Maycomb

Setting: Maycomb (fictional town in Alabama) during the 1930s, a time of extreme racial prejudice against Blacks

I have tried to infuse the themes of courage and prejudice in this poster. I hope I'm successful...

A note here: the person with a lot of bullet holes and who is shedding tears is Tom Robinson. Why so gory? Ermm...that's the price for not having civil rights! >:)

Literature: Nature in To Kill a Mockingbird

Since one of my two strongest areas is nature, I have to do the To Kill a Mockingbird task about nature.

The task:

Do a research on the natural habitat of mockingbird. In your research, include the kind of flora and fauna you think exist in Maycomb and explain why the mockingbirds live in Maycomb.

Mockingbirds are a fairly widespread species and live in areas such as the Galapagos and North and Central America. The species of mockingbird in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird is the Northern Mockingbird, which lives in Northern Mexico, USA and Canada. They are intelligent, highly adaptable and bold birds which dare to nest near houses but naturally live in areas with open ground and shrubs.

Mockingbirds eat ripe berries, garden insects and small vertebrates such as lizards. The Radley’s yard is mentioned to have pecan trees with numerous pecans. (“tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children” page 15) This would attract the opportunist mockingbirds looking for a meal. Maycomb also has a wide variety of choice insects, as seen from the “roly-poly”, “lightning bugs”, “night-crawlers” and “flying insects” present about the area on page 244.

Maycomb also has good habitats for mockingbirds. Mockingbirds prefer leafy trees to pine trees and have a particular preference for high places (“tall pecan trees” page 15, “oak trees” page 14), such as the topmost branches of trees. All these characteristics are present in the trees of Maycomb. Furthermore, mockingbirds like to forage for food among vegetation or on open ground. Maycomb has low-lying vegetation in gardens which would allow such behavior, such as “Giant monkey-puzzle bushes”, page 155, “azaleas”, page 14 and “rabbit tobacco”, page 14. Mockingbirds use dry grass and small twigs to construct their nests, of which Maycomb also has plenty, having species such as “nut grass”, page 48, and “johnson grass”, page 155.

In all, Maycomb is an ideal place for Mockingbirds to live in as it has their preferred habitat and ample food for their dinner menu.

Some types of flora and fauna in Maycomb have already been mentioned earlier- roly-polys (which are probably woodlice), lightning bugs (which are fireflies but fireflies aren’t actually flies but beetles) and deciduous leafy trees such as oaks. Some other wild animals were mentioned throughout the length of the novel-such as opossums, adaptable, forest-dwelling marsupials which the Negroes cooked for Christmas, and rabbits, which unfortunately were also included in the Negroes’ barbecue (page 177, by the way Atticus is wrong, wahaha, possums live in Australia). From Jem’s description of Boo Radley eating “raw squirrels”, I can also safely infer that American red squirrels, which are widespread in North America, are present in Maycomb. However, their main food source is the seeds of conifer cones. Therefore pine trees probably exist in Maycomb as well. And since m ockingbirds have a strong preference for certain trees such as maple, sweetgum, and sycamore, which are present in North America, there are probably these trees in Maycomb too.

Multiple Intelligences Test

Hmm. My school is currently conducting e-learning (yesterday and today), and this is a compulsory language arts blog posting. To make it clear for all, for Language Arts e-learning we are supposed to take a Multiple Intelligences (MI) test, post its implications on the blog, and according to that pick our To Kill a Mockingbird assignments (two of them, which we shall also post on our blogs). Oh well, here goes nothing.

I do not know how to post a picture of the Birmingham grid for learning, but the url of the website which I took the test is www.bgfl.org and my secret code is cc2shg8gd88028g. You can view the results if you want to.

As expected, my strongest two areas are Naturalistic and Spatial. Not much of a surprise…if you read my profile. My other stronger fields are Interpersonal and Linguistic. I would gladly exchange my Intrapersonal score with my Interpersonal score, though. I do need to brush up on my interpersonal skills. And now for the ouch part. Logic, Interpersonal, Music and Kinesthetic- I expected that too. I guess it did not take this MI test for me to know my abilities. Oh wait-that means that the test result stating that my Intrapersonal abilities being high is accurate!

Okay, and so what does this mean? Basically, it paints a rough picture of what my strengths and weaknesses are, and what I am like. I am clearly interested in nature and art, reserved and not so social (and therefore not very good in mingling around with others), stronger in the languages but weaker in logic (I always knew that!), music and body (both kinesthetic and strength-wise).

But a note of warning here: while the results I obtained from the test are fairly accurate, this test is prone to much inaccuracy. MI tests judge you on your opinions (e.g. questions: I know myself well, or I keep or like pets), which are subject to your own perspective of definitions. Your very good may be another person’s normal. Therefore such tests are only a rough gauge of our abilities. You would probably know them better yourself, anyway.

Laptops in green technology

It's surprising for me to talk about technology; I think I was influenced by the talk and use of laptops in my class.

Our class is a "guinea pig" for the Future School Programme, in which students will rely more on technology such as laptops, e-portals such as wikispaces or wetpaint sites and the internet to learn. In other words, we are being used to test whether the usage of advanced technology will prove to be successful in our school. Better to be safe than to be sorry, isn't it. So far, not many of us are bringing laptops to school. In a class of 28 students, about 9-10 of us have our own laptops. I guess most of us will have laptops around the Chinese New Year season due to the laptop subsidy programme.

But the thing is, not all laptops are environmentally safe. Several laptops do contain hazardous chemicals such as cadmium, lead and mercury. Just for interest's sake, I will introduce two fundamentally different, interesting and eco-friendly (in their own unique ways) computers on the market.

Macbook Air

Features

-mercury and arsenic free
-highly recyclable

-thin and light; portable

-5 hour battery life

-120GB hard drive, a lot of storage space

-not very affordable for the mainstream (1499 USD)

My opinion: Fusing technology, creativity and consideration for the environment is not what one sees everyday. This laptop is great in both technical and design aspects (design is Apple's specialty after all). Unfortunately in a green revolution of laptops the Macbook Air would not be as appealing to the mainstream as compared to cheaper yet almost as efficient laptops due to its higher-end cost.

XO-1 laptop (OLPC)

Features
-energy efficient
-light (about 1.5kg) and small, portable
-durable
-no toxic heavy metals
-very cheap, being less than $200

My opinion: OLPC's cause is more than commendable-they seek to provide poor children with low-cost yet stylish and efficient laptops. The organization is a non-profit one, and it can be seen that they really have the needy children in mind when they designed the notebook-it is child-safe, having rounded edges and being light enough for young children to carry. The laptop also has the programme SUGAR which is targeted at young, growing children.

However, the XO-1 laptop is definitely not as powerful as notebooks such as Macbook Air and mainly appeals to children without considering adult users (designed for children). All the same the XO laptops have quite a lot of potential both in aiding humanity and saving our environment.

It is amazing to see how technology has made such progress in a mere few decades, and thankfully several major international companies do consider the environment while making their products. Green technology is definitely a key to our future success, and introducing it in the form of laptops, devices most people of the younger generation use in this computer-age, would definitely jumpstart a green technology revolution that will reverse our planet's precarious situation. I wonder what green computers of the future will be like?

The Revamped Blog

Hi all,

It has been many months since my last post. Now my first year of blogging has about ended, and I have decided to spruce up my blog. For those who have not visited my old blog, let me describe to you what changes I have made.

1. Change the blog template

My previous blog template was almost entirely composed of hues of green with tinges of white (the words) but I have recently change it to a different template and edited the template to contain shades of cool colours such as blue, green and purple.

2. Delete unnecessary widgets

There were too many widgets on the right sidebar, many of them rather useless. I got rid of them. Frequent visitors of my blog will also realize that I have changed many aspects of my mixpod. I have changed the skin to that of a MiniPod and added several more new tunes, including several pieces from Kevin Kern's Endless Blue Sky disc and Richard Clayderman's Autumn Leaves. All the soundtracks in my mixpod are new age soothing music.

3. Change my profile

I have decided to change my profile picture to one I edited using photoshop (and got from wikipedia prior to that). I have also edited the content of my profile completely. In my profile I now clearly state my interests and fragments of my school life. I have changed my profile name too, to prevent distancing myself from others due to different interests.

4. Change my blog title

I have changed my blog title (originally "the environment...and much more!") also because of the aforementioned reason-to make it appeal more to readers as a whole. Not everyone shares the same interests as me, but people of my age and in my social circle definitely are schooling!

In all, the current layout and personal profile of the blog will give you a rather truthful insight into me.

For once, a short and sweet post!