Blog #2
6/10/20
Period 9
Aven Zeng
SOPHOMORES 2020
AIM: How are the readers of 1984 warned about the power of manipulation?
The Do Now of the lesson encouraged us to think about how our feelings are created and whether or not we or someone else could control how we felt about a certain situation. While I was thinking about the prompt, I realized that in many situations in everyday life, I usually could not force myself to feel a certain way. However, if the person that was influencing my feelings was someone I trusted, my feelings could be forcibly changed. Many other students also felt the same way about the prompt and we agreed that if that someone was a person we trusted, we would feel inclined to believe them, especially if it was a younger age.
We then followed up the Do Now with work about Julia and Winston:
During our class discussion, we agreed that Julia and Winston were complete opposites of each other. While Julia is a person who lives her life to the fullest and does things only for the pleasure of it, Winston is a person who always contemplates about his actions in the most negative way. He is a pessimistic person and is always paranoid that his actions will cause him to be captured by the Party. As we follow through the novel with Winston, we can see the author is trying to warn the readers about the dangers of a totalitarian. The obvious signs about “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” to how people are tricked into believing 2 + 2 = 5 are all warnings.
After that, we had a Quick Write, in which we had to try and remember what we had done last Friday. While some students visibly struggled in trying to remember, I like to stick to a schedule everyday and so the prompt wasn’t as difficult since I do the same things everyday. However, when it came to actually pinpointing what I had done at a certain time, it was way more difficult to remember. We followed this prompt up with a class discussion about these questions:
Personal Reflection on the Lesson
Throughout the lesson, we focused on the importance of feelings and how it tied into the dangers of manipulation. While George Orwell had written this book in 1948 to warn people about the totalitarian society, the lessons gained from the novel can be applied to everyday life. For example, how we shouldn’t blindly follow mass media information and how we shouldn’t always let our feelings decide the majority of our actions. I’ll apply this information to how I browse social media and generally communicate with others.
Feelings about World/Community
My own personal feelings about the coronavirus pandemic still hasn’t changed much from my last blog. None of my family members have been affected yet and thus, it does not affect me at all. Unless something drastic happens and my family is heavily impacted by it, I generally will not care much about the pandemic. However, if this graph keeps going up, I might be affected sooner or later.
This mainly tells us how the US was majorly unprepared for a global pandemic which is another bad impression I have for the government. In comparison, South Korea has almost contained the virus from spreading. Hopefully, with the passing of this pandemic, our government will learn from their past mistakes and will be able to prevent another global pandemic (should it ever happen).
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