Skip to main content

Raisin' Some Money



In our humanities class called Drama we entered a unit titled: Matriarch. This unit we read continued our streak of reading famous plays that had a massive impact. This unit we asked the question of what is a matriarch? As we made guesses of our own as to what this word could really mean we began to read a book that we could use to put the word into context. The book we read is called ‘A Raisin in the sun’ by Lorraine Hansberry. ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is a play about a black family living through a segregated Chicago sometime in the late 1950s. They struggle through much as a family and even more through the way they were treated racially. The book hints at many issues of the time including: societal gender norms, blockbusting in black neighborhoods and Uncle Tom’s’

    While reading this book we also attended workshops at the Goodman Theatre right down the street from GCE. We came here to learn from people whose job it is to understand, interpret and consider these contemporary plays of the time. We also got lessons in acting, identifying plot points and understanding black matriarchal stereotypes. Doing this helped us to better understand the social nuances of the play.

    While reading ‘A Raisin in the sun’ I learned a great many things but throughout it I kept finding myself relating to the father of the family the book follows called Walter. Walter would end up making a grave mistake and no matter how flawed he was I can always identify with his humanity and the human way he makes mistakes. I wanted to get to the core of his dysfunction and his deepest motives and dissect why he did what he did because he seems like an wholesome and good man who loves his family. I believe the point where he went wrong was when he got put under pressure to provide for the family as a man of the house. Being in a house full of strong and self-sufficient matriarchs who looked down on him couldn’t have helped. Found below is a slide show of my further dissection of Walter as a character. I learned lots from this character and I hope my findings might be able to help you understand the humanity of this character as well through the means of a classic Greek Chorus to speak praise and yet highlight and teach a lesson from his shortcomings.




    In conclusion, I hope I got you to see Walter in a better light because of what I've presented to you.  One thing that i would like to point ou was that I had a lot of trouble with the formatting of this project.  I went to great lengths to properly format everything in a way that makes sense in terms of what makes a Greek Chorus.  I can't really find anything I would do differently. I feel like I really got my point across and that my project help to inform the reader of a view point they might not have seen.  From this I learned a knew less formal but equally informative way to write something to persuade someone into seeing things your way.  Thank you for reading!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Drippy Stats

      This week at my unorthodox, project based high school, GCE lab school, we have finished up with our first Action project of the year for our water class. An action project is a project we complete that can be used to broadcast and show our learning in a unit, this unit we learned about conversions, fractions, and part vs. Percent. These topics were then applied to the real world when we learned about how many around the world do not have easy access to clean water and how this means that many around the world must walk long distances every day to bring home surface water to sustain themselves and their families.  This units action project echo's what we've learned and has provided us an opportunity to teach others about this ongoing tragedy.     to get some perspective on water usage we used a website to calculate approximately how much water we use on a daily basis, I learned that I use about 161 gallons of water daily which I found out is MORE than the US national avera
2 comments
Read more

The US vs New Zealand: Push for Rainbow Leadership

     This week (10/22/21) in our humanities class, 'Sustainable Development goals and You'. We learned about Gender Equality and more specifically what gender is. We explored the gay rights movement and the women's suffrage movement. We saw how discrimination for gender or sexual identity badly affects things like safety and access to quality medical treatment. To see this in a different light we took a field experience to Andersonville to meet H-Melt and Molly who are activists for the gay rights movement. Molly created a mural in Andersonville that displayed what an abolitionist feminist world would be like, and H-melt helped as a consultant for Molly's art. This experience gave me a great opportunity to ask questions on Abolitionist Feminism. To put this all together we created a comparative essay to see how different countries are working on gender equality. Eyten, Ted. " Virginia Delegate Danica Roem speaking at the Victory F
Post a Comment
Read more

Buenos Aires Matching Game

           In this term of our Spanish 2 class we've been learning about how to use direct and indirect object pronouns in sentences.  We can use these types of pronouns to refer to something without directly using it's name.  With this new info we can now use sentences like: es el favorito de mi papá. él se lo comerá. which mean's 'That's my dad's favorite. He will eat it.'  This concept is important because it makes it so we don't have to keep saying the persons' name after it's already been established.  Aside from this, we also learned to use and conjugate -er, -ar, and -ir verbs in the present tense and present progressive.  We took these concepts and made it into a little matching game or 'Juego de Pareo'.  We made the matching game based on sights and activities from Buenos Aires, Argentina. On top of this we included vocabulary of common neighborhood spots such as churches, banks, schools, libraries, and bookstores. Lastly, we ne
Post a Comment
Read more