Communication isn’t always clear, often times people make assumptions due to their miscommunication. These assumptions can lead to people believing in having wrong intentions. Since people communicate in a variety of ways on a day to day basis, miscommunication is a natural thing to occur. Common ways of misunderstanding can vary from eye contact, actions, tone, language to the dialect but in my case, it was lack of information. After a day in school, I told my mom to pick me up at 5 but what I didn’t tell her was where to pick me up. So my mom assumed that I meant picking me up at school but I had class somewhere else and at 5 neither of us could find each other because we were in different locations. Leaving out crucial information was my miscommunication which leads to my mom’s misunderstanding.
In the book “The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks”, Hsu is Victor McKusick’s assistant and because he comes from China, english isn’t his native language. Day tries to communicate with her but because of the language barrier, Day couldn’t understand her. The lacks family couldn’t understand Hsu’s intentions until the blood draws.
“When Hsu got home from the conference, she called Day to ask if she could draw blood from his family. ‘They said they got my wife and she part alive,’ he told me years later. ‘They said they been doing experiments on her and they wanted to come test my children see if they got that cancer killed their mother.'” (Skloot,182)
The Lacks family got confused with how Henrietta’s cells are immortal and Henrietta isn’t. When Bobbette ran home yelling at Lawrence “Part of your mother, it’s alive!” Day misunderstood that Bobbette was referring to Henrietta’s cells and not Henrietta.
“Bobbette excused herself and ran home, bursting through the screen door into the kitchen, yelling for Lawrence, ‘Part of your mother, it’s alive!’ Lawrence called his father to tell him what Bobbette had heard, and Day didn’t know what to think. “Henrietta’s alive?!” he thought. It didn’t make any sense.” (Skloot,181)
The Lacks family suffered poverty and lack of education, so this became a disadvantage to their communication. The Lacks has grown to believe in religion instead of science. After Gary explained to Sklott their religious belief and how to make sense of Henrietta’s immortal cells.
“ At that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta’s cells makes perfect sense.” (Skloot,296)
In the Movie “Sierra Burgess Is A Loser“, Jamey asks Veronica for her number, but Veronica gives him Sierra’s number instead and because of this miscommunication, Sierra is misunderstood with her true identity. During this time Jamey is talking to Sierra, he thinks he is talking to Veronica since Veronica gave Jamey Sierra’s number instead of hers.
Work Cited
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Broadway Books, 2010.
In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, there were several times where the medical community ignored Henrietta’s privacy for the benefit of scientific research. Henrietta and the Lacks family is constantly taken advantage of and one of the main reason for this type of treatment is racism and how they are looked down upon in society. With this racism disadvantage, Henrietta’s cells are often used without consent.
“Everyone always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask.” (Skloot,169)
As Henrietta’s doctors phrased it, they made look like Henrietta voluntarily donated her cells so that they would look bad in public. The cells were taken without Henrietta or her families’ consent which shows an invasion of privacy for the benefit of a medical breakthrough.
“The only thing Day could figure was that maybe Howard Jones had asked Henrietta for a picture, then stuck it in her medical record. But as far as Day knew, no one had ever asked permission to publish it.” (Skloot,189)
In the book “Medical Genetics”, McKusick used Henrietta’s medical records and photographs that he didn’t have permission for. This was another time where Henrietta’s privacy has been ignored and used against her own free will.
“Research on inmates would come under scrutiny and start being heavily regulated about fifteen years later, because they’d be considered a vulnerable population unable to give informed consent. But at the time, prisoners nationwide were being used for research of all kinds—from testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles affected sperm count.”(Skloot, 129)
During the HeLa cell research, Henrietta was treated more like an experiment than a patient and other people that were being tested on during this research were prisoners or patients that already have cancer. This is showing a lot about how the doctors don’t respect Henrietta’s privacy and only focused on experimenting with it.
This reminded me of a TV series called “Greys Anatomy”. In the show, the surgeons often had tumor cases that were so severe it was inoperable but the doctors always come up with a plan that no other doctor as tried before and the doctors expect the patients to let them operate a risky surgery. Some patients don’t want to operate because they don’t want to be the “lab rat” that is experimented on, this is similar to Henrietta because she was experimented on like a “lab rat”.
In Act 1 of the crucible, Mary Warren is seen as a shy, anxious girl who is just a servant working for the Proctor family but as the play continues, she changes into a manipulative liar. When we were introduced to Mary in Act 1, she was an innocent girl that realized her mistake was a sin and wanted to confess.
MARY WARREN. What’ll we do? The village is out! I just come from the farms; the whole country’s talkin’ witchcraft! They’ll be callin’ us witches, Abby!
MERCY. She means to tell, I know it.
MARY WARREN. Abby, we’ve got to tell. Witchery’s a hangin’ error, a hangin’ like they done in Boston two years ago! We must tell the truth, Abby! You’ll only be whipped for dancin’, and the other things! (Miller 18)
Mary Warren was acting out of fear and understood that if they don’t tell the truth, the consequences will worsen. Abigail and the girls didn’t agree with her and threatened her to not confess. With Mary Warren’s weak personality, she is fearfully persuaded by Abigail. Later in Act 3, Mary Warren testifies for Proctor and his wife, as she confesses it doesn’t seem believable for the judges because she couldn’t prove her confession was true.
HATHORNE. You say you never saw no spirits, Mary, were never threatened or afflicted by any manifest of the Devil or the Devil’s agents.
MARY WARREN. No, sir.
HATHORNE. And yet, when people accused of witchery confronted you in court, you would faint, saying their spirits came out of their bodies and choked you-
MARY WARREN. That were pretense, sir. (Miller 98)
Her confession didn’t seem believable because she was unable to fake a faint for the judges but after the confession, there was peer pressure from the girls to continue with their lies. During Mary Warren’s testimony, Abigail realizes that it would expose her lies so she pretended to see a yellow bird in the sky. Mary Warren begs her to stop but it caused the rest of the girls to start repeating her words this was the peer pressure that made Mary Warren join the lies with the girls.
MARY WARREN. Don’t touch me- don’t touch me!
PROCTOR. Mary!
MARY WARREN, pointing at Proctor. You’re the Devil’s man! (Miller 110)
In the movie “The last song”, there were 2 boys that were responsible for a fire but they kept it a secret and didn’t the victims of the fire. One of the boys wanted to take responsibility and apologize to the victim but the other boy wanted it to stay a secret, this is a lot like Abigail and Marry Warren’s situation. Which is when one character wants to confess and the other doesn’t.
Photo on Visual hunt
” Rose In Open Book Photo – Visual Hunt.” Visualhunt.com.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.
In the crucible, Abigail Williams claims to be a good religious girl but her actions towards others show that she is a hypocrite. In the play, there have been several moments where Abigail’s actions portray herself as a manipulative and compulsive liar.
When Abigail and the girls were caught in the forest dancing, instead of confessing to the authorities, she blamed it on others in the village especially the people she disliked or are an easy target due to their social status. In the play, Tituba is a slave which is an easy target for Abigail because of her social status. “Abigail: I never sold myself! I’m a good girl! I’m a proper girl! Mrs. Putnam enters with Tituba, and instantly Abigail points at Tituba. Abigail: She made me do it! She made Betty do it!” (40) Right after claiming to be a “good girl”, Abigail uses the opportunity to make Tituba seem like the only guilty one. “Abigail: She is blackening my name in the village! She is telling lies about me! She is a cold, sniveling woman, and you bend to her! Let her turn you like a-” (22) Abigail is a teenage that is attracted to an older grown man, her attraction to him made him desperate and eager for his attention. She is willing to go to great lengths to keep him only for himself. “Abigail, to the ceiling, in a genuine conversation with the “bird” as though trying to talk it out of attacking her: But God made my face; you cannot want to tear my face. Envy is a deadly sin, Mary.” (106) Abigail turns on the other girls just to save herself from punishment.
My personal connection to these hypocritical scenes is from the movie Frozen. In a scene where Anna met a boyfriend that she connected with and trusted but at the end of the movie he turns on her for his own benefit. He was a selfish and hypocritical character, similar to Abigail.
Work cited: Le masque by Photo credit: Aldor on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible: A Play In Four Acts, New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.
Image & Image TIEA
During this unit, we read a novel called “The Taste of Apples” containing a collection of short stories about tension between generations, urban and rural, modern and traditional and foreign and local. With each short story, we practice writing TIEAs and group discussions.
In “The Drowning of an old cat”, Huang Chun-ming uses the activity of choice to show tension between generations. In the train ride, both generations were given time to do anything they wanted and the younger generation chose to play with his phone. In “The Drowning of an old cat” the generations had the choice to keep the Dragon Eye Well or build a pool. “‘I’d like you to go back and tell the people in town that Uncle Ah-sheng of Clear Springs says, if they want to go swimming they can stay home and take a dip in their bathtubs!’” (23)In the story and in the image both generations clearly have different interests and support different choices. The image shows that the younger man was using his phone as entertainment and in the story, the people in town wanted to build a swimming pool, also for entertainment. Younger generations seem to only be interested in entertainment and having fun. In the image the older man sits on the train patiently waiting to arrive to his destination and in the story Uncle Ah-sheng goes against the swimming pool. The older generations are more traditional and patient. The tension in the image is between generations, since both sides show difference in interest and support different things.
Evelyn Chao, 2018. Tension between generations. (Evelyn Chao’s own private collection)
For this summative we needed to write and present a persuasive speech about a social issue. My topic was about gender inequality. During this unit we had practiced several skills to improve public speaking, we had formative assignments about reading, write, speaking and listening. For our final summative assignment we needed to make a 4-6 min speech using rhetorical devices. (Ethos, logos and pathos)
