Author Archives: brilin22

Hypocrites in The Crucible

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Beliefs doesn’t only show the problem of witchcraft in the play but also are an important theme in the time period and in the city of Salem. As beliefs can represent a person’s value, people that value their reputation a lot will try to use the belief as a tool to make themselves look more noble and righteous.

In The Crucible by Arthur Miller, John Proctor is a hypocrite because he uses the belief that is popular to make his reputation look good. And to preserve and protect his reputation, he presented himself in the guise of others and often made basic violations in life. As Reverend Hale interviewed Proctor at late evening, to present his thought about religion, Proctor showed trouble in answering the basic 10 commandments. Moreover, describes this most important part of religion to be a small fault.

PROCTOR, counting on his fingers: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods … With some hesitation: Thou shalt remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy. He is stuck. He counts back on his fingers, knowing one is missing. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

HALE: You have said that twice, sir.

PROCTOR, lost: Aye. He is failing for it. (Miller, 63).

Image by Jondolar Schnurr from Pixabay

After deep considerations about what is being violated, I agree with Proctor, what he said. As for what he did, is obviously wrong.

PROCTOR, as though a secret arrow had pained his heart: Aye. Trying to grin it away—to Hale: You see, sir, between the two of us we do know them all. Hale only looks at proctor, deep in his attempt to define this man. Proctor grows more uneasy. I think it be a small fault. (Miller, 64).

I do not agree with what Proctor did here, in other words, he has great reputation, only because he is known religious, which is a betrayal of his person. However, compared to other hypocritical characters such as Reverend Hale, the spiritual leader of the community, he violates the commandments by his greedy and selfish trait. Compared to what Proctor said, “it be a small fault” is what I agree on. If religion is so important and righteous, these conflicts and arguments wouldn’t occur. It is because these people are too dependent on religion so that all actions will be connected with religion and conflicts would occur. I suppose these characters will get better along without religious belief, and if not, referring back to what Proctor mentioned, don’t depend too much on it.

Works Cited:
Miller, Arthur. “The Crucible.” New York, Penguin Classics, 2003.

Making Connections With The Crucible

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There is always blatant lies someone tells and everyone else believes, and even worse, it affects the other’s reputation in ways more than one.

In The Crucible, the most significant scene that played is that after Abigail led the witchcraft practice in the forest with the girls, she accuses Tibuta to be the head of all of it after being confronted by Reverend Hale. In Tibuta’s perspective, I can really notice her feelings from her tone and emotion, first having fun dancing in the woods, together doing the same thing, but when troubles come, one jumps out to blame the other as if first come first serve.

“Abigail: Don’t lie! To Hale: She comes to me while I sleep; she’s always making me dream corruptions!
Tibuta: Why you say that, Abby?” (Miller, 41).

It is significant that Abigail lies by telling Tibuta to not lie, and Abigail really took hold of this dialogue trying to convince Reverend Hale about his original accusation, knowing that he just wants someone, anyone to take blame in this trouble. The character traits are completely different and somehow opposite, in Abigail’s perspective, she basically wants Tibuta to die at this point, because the false accusation already gave it away and Abigail knows that it’ll never go backwards. Tibuta, still in shock of all of this sudden accuse, doesn’t know how to fight back as Abigail has taken hold on this conversation. Finally, with some physical support from Reverend Hale, Tibuta helplessly took the accusation.


“Believers”
Courtroom via Visual Hunt / CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication

“Hale: You have confessed yourself to witchcraft, and that speaks a wish to come to Heaven’s side. And we will bless you, Tibuta” (Miller, 43).

It is always frustrating to clean up after someone, or to be accused of something that I never did. As the one being blamed often, I always ask myself “how can people believe lies when the truth is so obvious?” and become so frustrated about why I have no one to blame if it seems so easy for others. In The Crucible, death penalties were everywhere, and that’s why the people in Salem are afraid that they have no one to blame because accusations and playacting will keep coming.

Persuasive Speech: Water Scarcity’s Invasion to the Population

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During this unit, a persuasive speech was written with the combination of rhetorical devices such as ethos, logos, and pathos, to effectively persuade the audience about my topic. My topic was the impact to the population from water scarcity and solutions to it. My research was conducted to provide credibility, evidence, and connection effectively between me and my audience. Below is my persuasive speech and outline, speech video, and reflection of this unit.

Persuasive Speech & Outline:

Speech Video:

Reflection:

¿Cómo Ser Saludable?

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Una vida sana es siempre importante, requiere mucho determinación, y es simple pero difícil. Comes bien, duermes bien, mantenerse hidratado, mueves tu cuerpo, y no necesitas recalcar.

Comes bien y equilibrada así que tu cuerpo puedes recibir vitamina C suficiente en las verduras, proteínas en la carne. Algo de verduras o frutas ayudarte a mantenerse hidratado, por ejemplo la sandía, la naranja (también recibes vitamina C), la lechuga, y el tomate.

Indonesia, Woman, Working, Carrying Fruit, Baskets

Es importante que tengas hábitos buenos de descansar. Tu cuerpo necesitas descansar todos los días por al menos ocho horas por la noche. Para tienes dormir suficiente, control tu tiempo bien. Recibes la mayoría de energía de dormir, que también vas a estar menos perezoso y más activo en la escuela, tu casa, afuera, y el resto del día. Recomiendo que tú duermas a las doce y dejes tu tarea para completar en la mañana porque descansar es más importante que trabajar.

Beber mucha del agua a mantenerse hidratado y mantenerse activo en tu día. Y es necesario que tú necesites agua para vivir. Bebes agua para ayudarte a enfocar en la escuela y no bebes demasiado refrescos porque tienen muchas azúcar y no es saludable por tu cuerpo si bebes demasiado. 

En conclusión, es importante que mantengas una vida sana. Cuando yo era joven, yo estaba dormir hasta tarde en la noche antes, entonces yo estaba muy perezoso durante el día. Ahora, estoy productivo y recomiendo que hagas el mismo.

3 Ultimate Tips to Block a Volleyball

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Volleyball requires skill, technique, communication, a little bit of extra tip if you want to stand out easily from every player that works hard. Let’s start with the basics, blocking posture: start in the center of the net, knees slightly bent in a ready position so you can explode up, and forearms 45 degrees away from your torso muscles in front. Common mistakes players make is that they start standing straight up or they start too close to the net and end up netting.

Tip#1: It is more important to reach over the net versus high.


“Block”
Volleyball by EYOF Utrecht 2013 via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There are two types of mental blocks in volleyball:
Reaction Block
Commit Block

Stating that they’re mental, they actually is! Not actual mechanics or techniques, they are for how you should act upon your mind in the game. The reaction block is when you wait until the set is given to quickly react to the block. The mechanic for this type of block is just to get your hands up as quickly as possible, hoping to get a touch on the ball to slow it down.

The second type of block, the commit block is executed when you read the offense well. For example, seeing a trend or pattern going on the opponents offense, then you can prepare for your maximum jump by bending lower because then can commit to the block.

Tip#2: It’s always better to go for the commit block
As it can bring about more pressure and threat to your opponent’s offense. However, it is not simple, as the wrong commitment would be worse than having just a reaction block. It’s basically a free spike for the other team, or in other words a free point.


“Leaning back cue”
Set by DanDee Shots via Creative Commons / CC BY 2.0

Tip#3: Train your eyes to recognize cues that opponents can’t hide.
Setters usually straighten their legs when they are aiming for the middle, lean forward when aiming for 4 (your right), and tend to lean back when aiming 5 (your left). These simple tips of blocking a volleyball can be easily trained after understanding the entire breakdown of it.

Championship Productions. “Train Middles to Read the Opponent’s Setter! – Volleyball 2016 #18.” Youtube, 2 May 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQBF6t8bwwU.

Where Innovation and Modern Technology Collide… What Else is More Important?

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This collaborative project is where innovation and modern technology come together. James and I worked together in this movie project along with John and Izaiah from BMSA at Ohio, United States. Where our tasks are to create a screenplay based on our chosen book and a storyboard that follows. While the screenplay and storyboard are created for our BMSA partners, they will take our ideas and combine their skills to create a visual movie trailer. What is a screenplay? A screenplay basically covers everything that actors follow to act out a screenplay—text, action, setting, props, emotion(?), etc…. A storyboard conveys the factors in the screenplay into a more visual and reliable tool for the filmer, approaches for a better product.

Group vs. Individual

Personally, I prefer working within a group more than individual work; however, some people might be vice versa and it’s reasonable! A thought advances me in the characteristic to collaborate better with others than to communicate within myself in an individual work—a skill I would develop so the same ability protrudes for the better when working independently. The same characteristic is actually easy to improvise into working individually. By thinking that in group work, the amount of work is usually divided upon the group, and assuming that the group is receiving independent grades for each, how will you feel if your work is delayed by others and that contributes to affect your grade? Well, I was able to hold that thought throughout group working, not allowing myself to fail others because they don’t deserve whatever the negative outcomes I poured on them. Now that I have analyzed why I have higher efficiency in group working, which I prefer, I conclude the reason that I was allowing myself to delay myself, resulting in lower efficiency, valuing others more than myself, and teaching myself to accept the decision I made. And how does it encourage me to apply this skill while working individually? Simple! but hard: conquer the indulgence.

Communication over 12,000+ Km… Wasn’t Too Bad!

Before writing our screenplay, James and I brainstormed and pictured ideas for their benefits and made sure what we expected them to film is achievable. Unfortunately, we didn’t exchange other social media(s) for more convenient communication. However, we still managed to sent emails back and forth to whatever questions holding us back.

After a few days over our BMSA partners’ due date—feedback for both screenplay and storyboard received nothing… yet, just to make sure our partners have previewed it and acknowledged that they could and should give us feedback, I sent an email to check in. And they’ve responded! replied that they didn’t find anything that they would like us to change.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse


“Siddhartha”
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse via Amazon

Why this book? Well, James chose this book and I agreed after actually read half of the book online, finding the story content to possibly blend in a screenplay really well. Here’s a short summary of the book we’ve chosen, which we also have sent to our BMSA partners to give them a short heads up(!):

Hesse uses religious characters to construct the story structure of Siddhartha, which we easily broke down and wrote the screenplay into (5) acts. Siddhartha, more than a book title, appears to be the main character that would appear in every scene. Luckily we have 2 partners from BMSA, having one partner to play the role of Siddhartha and the other in the play of different characters that he would also play in every act. While formatting the screenplay, I researched some examples in both English and Mandarin, where I saw behind many movie scenes. After research, we decided to simply format our screenplay, but made everything very clear at the same time (partners’ feedback) with good use of screenplay terminologies. Here’s our screenplay:

Already have the skills and experience of creating a storyboard, I directly followed up created a storyboard using Canva‘s template. For each act (from our screenplay), I included 4~6 shots from a camera angles shot list that I’ve archived in the past, as well as movements, expressions, and scene transitions. Although my opinion on my storyboard is pretty boring… repetitive angle shots are used, I have to say it is much more beautiful than my hand drawn. Moreover, it would be much easier for my partners to understand. The storyboard is available below.

Even though I personally think it is unnecessary for our partners to create an independent shot list document because it basically replicates the storyboard. However, in another point of view, it enhances their understanding while spending more time paying attention to details. Here is the shot list, created by our partners:

Challenges I Found… and Faced

“Which direction are you going?”
Raindrops by NeeZhom Photomalaya via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When good ideas start going in different directions, they would never end up making sense. As different ideas know their main direction, they could have a wider range of messages and end up in one piece.

Who says that miscommunication could only occur between us and BMSA? During the process of writing the screenplay, I realized some factors that contributed to confusing the audience. First, I would like to point out the different abilities we have: work efficiency, habits, and point of view. While both of us were working on the screenplay, there would be some concepts that are misleading to each other, such as emotions and messages one is trying to convey. By work efficiency, James would misplace my point of view and to his and complete the rest of the screenplay before I have time to check again. This would end up being confusing to the audience, where two points of views are displayed in one. Despite the problem, we immediately have plans to the issue by communicating, which we discussed the main direction of where each act is going before any of us starts writing. By the end of completing act 5, I feel like our ideas and perspective blends smoothly together no matter who starts the writing.

Conclusion

The last time I had this kind of experience was in 3rd grade when we were assigned pen pals from the US. Since then, I’ve always wanted another opportunity to have a connection with other students from the US during our school days. This time, this opportunity was even better, being able to collaborate creativity and process into making a product.

I’ve gained a lot of experiences and thoughts throughout this collaborative project. Being a communicator is so much more important than being all out productive, a communicator can revise, revise, revise… while being only productive could cause inconvenience to the other side. Being initiative when a problem occurs, ask them, send an email! waiting doesn’t get the problem solved, according to my current experience discussed above. Starting from the decision of our book, creating the screenplay, and finally the storyboard, communication lies in between all. Without communication, I am 90% sure that I’m not receiving the final video, the remaining 10% is that it’ll probably be nonsense. Overall, communication would anyway remain a great experience regardless of the outcome of the final product, whether I get it or not. Finally, shoutout to John and Izaiah and all the students from BMSA for giving us such a wonderful experience!

                             
“Bio-Med Academy” ……………                               .  “Kaohsiung American School”
Bio-Med Academy by BMSA via Twitter                 Kaohsiung American School by KAS via kas.tw

Ejercicio

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El ejercicio es importante para su salud, El ejercicio puede ayudarlo a concentrar más y entrenar para tener más energía, es muy importante que eliges un deporte que disfrutas porque puede disfrutar y hacerlo más fuerte. Jugar deportes con tus amigos puede ayudar con relaciones saludable con tu amigos y mantenerse saludable al mismo tiempo. Hay muchos tipos de ejercicios, sobre todo deportes, pero hay corriendo, caminado, yoga, etc. Hay otros ejercicios que ayudan a sus órganos a trabajar mejor. Después de hacer ejercicio, es importante comer saludable tambien! A veces fuimos al mercado a comprar pescado, carne, fruta, tiene muchos nutrientes.

3 Systems of Sports Explained

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Transfer Infer

“If I’d had a gun, I would’ve shot him” (Gregory, 1998). The most memorable transfer quotes in football history, like it or hate it. Transferring star players can be heartbreaking, but is it love or hate former teammates show? Some fans show great respect in players transferring, but some call players a “money grabber” or a “snake” for acknowledging the player transfer in reason of the money paid. Neymar Jr., a Brazilian football player was signed by the French football club Paris Saint-Germain with the doubled world record fee, €222! Many said that Neymar was attracted by money, and himself gave clear explanations, going further without Lionel Messi being the boss.

 

“The €222 Transfer”

Neymar in PSG by Antonie Dellenbach via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

LeBron James, a former NBA Cleveland Cavaliers team transferred to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018 after the defeat in the championship game. In 2010 Cavaliers fans burn his jersey to show hate, to him transferring to Heat. LeBron won titles back in Cleveland, numerous of them, after the unveiling of transfer to Lakers, people start burning LeBron’s jerseys again. This time, it was a symbol of respect for his decision, a “let him go” symbolism.

“King James”

Lebron by Rated R Superstar! via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Winning Bid

Perseverance, effort despite difficulty or challenge that stand upon players. Adversity, when the team strikes rock-bottom, and have no idea how to make a return. Triumph, winning an award in the achievement of yourself as one, or for the whole team. Defeat, here’s the thing, “If you can accept losing, you can’t win” (Lombardi). TAKE it home, don’t bring it, I’m not trying to motivate you, encourage you, I’m telling you to DO it. Take what you did, take what you earn, take your defeat “by the way.” You bid, you take, you bid for the winning, you put full effort into the game. Take anything after that, victory? defeat? it doesn’t matter anymore, the matter is, do you take it or not? Everything or nothing? take the nothing because it is something, take it so you don’t take “nothing” again next time.

“Decision Making”

Contract by Dan Macy via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

It is one thing to score, and another to win, players decide for themselves to score themselves or pass the ball to let their teammates score, it’s the step to take pride in one’s own dignity or the step to prejudice the team to lose of the goal that could be scored on easily with your teammate. “It doesn’t matter who scores the ball because we are on the same team” (Messi).

Co-ownership Ends

Co-ownership is a system that two clubs each purchase 50% of the rights of a player’s contract they are bidding for, and by the end of the year, the auction of the highest bid wins. In May 2014, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) brought back Serie A in line with the other European leagues and ended co-ownership, “The transfer system fails 99% of players around the world, it fails football as an industry and it fails the world’s most beloved game” (Piat, FIFPro President). Is it right to end co-ownership? In my opinion, it is not right to have co-ownership because it will be clubs choosing players with money which is unloyal to players who wants to stay but couldn’t. However, this system can be improved in another way of making the football association better with respect.

How about you create a system that could benefit players, clubs, and fans?

Comiendo Bien

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¿Estás comiendo bien? Escoger comidas ricas por ejemplo verduras, frutas, huevos, y muchos nutrientes es muy importante. No debes comer comida basura porque es muy mal para tu cuerpo y puede enfermarse fácilmente. A veces usted puede comer alimentos con azúcares porque te ayuda a estar enfocado durante el día. Balance entre comidas es importante, es importante que tienes suficientes proteínas y grasas. Mantienes su cuerpo saludable, el hospital está sufriendo. Yo como comida saludable para el desayuno y la cena pero el almuerzo es de la escuela y es terrible.

Academic Honesty

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Academic dishonesty or academic misconduct is any type of cheating that occurs in relation to a formal academic exercise. However, there are many rules you should follow, but there might be different ones in different occasions.

Plagiarism → A work represent another person’s idea without citing
Cheating → Students attempts to misrepresent academic skills or knowledge through use of unauthorized materials on exams /assignments
Fabrication → Misrepresentation or invention of any work, intentional
Duplication → Copy and Paste of original work into your own work
Collusion → Aid and abet another student to be dishonest

Into the 3 student handbook I’ve researched about, including Kaohsiung American School as one, it is based on Transparency, Appropriateness, Formal Submission
Consequences: Academic Probation (no after school and extracurricular activities and referral to Student Services Team), Formal Conference with parents, 0 credit for course or marked incomplete, report to a university (affect your college application after graduation), withdrawal from KAS, or other consequences at superintendent’s decision.

In Basis Charter School, comparing to KAS, it is less severe consequences than KAS, its consequences are 0 credit for assignment or quiz only. Collusion, fabrication, and duplication not included. Adding to more, no other consequences applied, it is withdrawal for other disciplinary violations.

The Lawrenceville School is pretty much similar with the student handbook of KAS, and the violations are taken very seriously. A violation can be put on a student’s permanent record or transcript and can impact on how their college application will succeed or not.

Presentation made by: Eric, Yujinia, and author