My Year

As a student, I have to say I've grown into a stronger writer for sure. I love to write, writing is one thing that calms me and allows me to put my thoughts on paper. I'd have to say it's made me a harder worker because this class wasn't easy. I was never good at reading paragraphs and analyzing them and making them into ideas on paper, but this helped me learn that. It'll help me in the future by allowing me to write more thourough and clear essays for college! You've taught me many things when it came to life and skills in writing and reading. I can say I really enjoyed your class Mr. Thomas! Thank you :)

1. For me, I'd have to say the most difficult essay to write was the rhetorical essay because I was never good with detecting rhetorical devices inside of those speeches or letters. I was always so bored with them and it threw me off to be honest.

2. I believe the synthesis and argumentative essays were the easiest for me equally. The synthesis I had sources I could use to back up my thoughts regardless of how they positioned themselves it always helped. For the argumentative I think it was also my easiest because I loved to argue what I thought was right. I had all the information I needed in my head and didn't have to go back and forth.

3. I really enjoyed reading "The Things They Carried" because it really opened my eyes to the things we individually hold to ourselves and how much they can mean to myself or to someone. It showed the true meaning of believing or trusting in something tangible or not.

4. The book I had a hard time was reading was "In Cold Blood" simply because I didn't finish the whole book! Haha, it was really dull and I procrastinated with the book so it made it harder to follow the class and the essays and tests along with it.

5. All I have to finish off with saying is I really really enjoyed being in your class because you opened up my mind to many different ways of thinking and I love learning new things. I love knowledge and it makes me feel great to obtain something so special to me.


Thank you Mr. Thomas once again for letting me have a wonderful year in an English class I ACTUALLY liked!

What's Special To Christian.. 

Well one thing physical to me that's very special to me that I have always with me, is my beard. HAHA you never really see me without facial hair and I love having it. (except when I have to shave and edge it up) But overall it's something I feel naked without. Literally my face will look absolutely naked without it and I'll look uber weird. It's special to me because you usually don't see a lot of high school students with my kind of facial hair style! It makes me stand out which I love to do. I love being myself and just a different person from everyone else! I'd probably stay home if I didn't have my beard.. Trust me I'd like so different and bare without it! 

One dream that I have that sets my motivation and ambition is the dream of growing up and helping others in any way possible. I love making people smile. I live everyday to put a smile on someone's face or brighten up their day. I want to make a living out of that. If it be a doctor, a comedian, a volunteer at the soup kitchen, anything to throw a smile on someone's face. Being able to make someone smile or happy just motivates to try in life even more because when I make people smile it makes me smile and that's the best feeling ever in my opinion. My dream is to make people happy. 

I have a relationship with a very close friend of mine. Her name is Sami and her and I have been friends for a long long time. It's nothing more but a guy/girl friendship! We've been through a lot together and it's safe to say she's the one person that I can turn to for anything! She's been there like no other in all the bad times I've been through and I can call her my bestfriend who'll last till I die. She just makes me happy whenever we talk and hang out and we just always have the best of times and experiences. She literally brings the best out in me. She always brings a smile to my face and I'm very blessed to have her in my life! If you read this Sami I love ya! 

Three things that I think describe me well are, straight forward, unique, and understanding. I know for myself I want to be a better person when it comes to judging others. I try not to judge people but when you meet someone it's pretty much programmed to; it's a human thing to do. My friends like to think I'm very nice and understand. In which I am. I understand all their stuff and am very nice about it. I'm real about everything and if you want my opinion I will give it to you. This impacts my life by the people who I choose to be around or choose around to be around me. Some people see me as a role model, others as a leader, but I see myself as me, someone who just lives everyday to live. 

A memory that keeps me going and what will shape me through my life is how I never really had a father figure in my life. I want to grow up and have children and be the father mine never was. That's my motivation for everything. To be a better person than the person who was always supposed to be there. I know it sounds cheesy maybe even crazy to put something this personal on the internet but hey, it's the truth. This is so important to me because I don't want to be anything of what my past family was, I want to create a new  family structure. The experience helped me grow as a stronger person, someone who's independent and can take care of themselves. It helps me stay alive and keeps me strong. That is all for now. 

-Christian Anthony Leal

Biting at its finest. 


  I don't like biting off people (term used for copying in breakdancing)  but in this case I guess I have to. Edgar Allen Poe, one magnificent writer of his time in which I naturally respect. He has a freaking NFL football team named after him! Baltimore was pretty obsessed with his stuff and why wouldn't they be? He's freaking genius!

   As for myself, I like to write and most of the time I like to write poetry and fictional stories. Admiring Poe's use of many things within "Fall of the House of Usher," he creates a mysterious and eerie feel to his haunted house story. A few things that I would respectfully take from him is the way he uses personification, creating the setting,  someone coming back to life, the ability for the narrator to live and of course one scary ass house! All perfect elements for the concoction of evil and fear.

  Personification, ah so many things just having life to it no matter what object or thing it is. The way Poe uses this in this short story is simply the house. As he's in the house he discretely describes the furniture as if they were people. In the part of the story when he's in his room and cannot sleep because of the "unexplained" noises and movement of his bed which shows the bringing of life of the objects in his room. The way he creates the setting is with no doubt just freaky. As he approaches the house he feels that some gloomy feeling pervaded his spirit automatically giving you the weird feeling of, "how can a house do that?" Everything he describes in the house has some kind of dark twisted thing about it and makes the setting just full of horror and "what the heck is this?!" Also bringing someone back to life. Oh man when does that ever happen? OH YEAH WHEN THERE'S A HORROR STORY WITH A ZOMBIE, GHOST, GHOUL, ETC. That's always creepy. How would you feel if someone you put in a coffin YOURSELF and later find out they're back to life? HAH I'd be pretty scared or maybe happy if it was someone I loved, but more scared. It's all perfect things to add to this concoction. *devil emoji*

  So, a house that's pretty big just falls down out of no where because the scary sister/wife/lover/what ever the heck she is comes back to life and haunts them. But OF COURSE the narrator gets out alive. The hope of the person we've been following to live is one thing that makes a horror story. We want them to live because we've made a "connection" to them and have seen what they have. We want them to live, unless you just like illogical people and reading them die then that's you. It gives a sense of hope and sympathy for how naive he is. Lastly the house, what doesn't make a haunted house story with a nice house with a picket fence and green lively grass? Not a good one for sure. It has to be dirty, run down, scary trees with "no branches" (haha), the dark feeling with the moon behind the clouds and wolves howling in the distance. That makes an awesome haunted house.

The Occult in the United States. 

The occult is something that is part of everything in the U.S. today. Movies, TV shows, books, anything you can think of, there will be something to do with supernatural things. I think that America is so fascinated by it because it's just simply awesome and unexplained that it quenches the curiosity of people in the U.S. Supernatural instances has been part of America since America was even started. We've grown accustomed to it and it's just part of out everyday lives and culture. Of course to many people it might be fake or real but it's the entertainment that comes along with it. America lives to be entertained. We have football to keep us entertained, zombie apocalypses to keep us entertained, why not make a zombie football movie so we can just be overwhelmed with entertainment?

We use movies for instance to show the fascination of the occult. One movie that shows a good view of how people love the occult and just crazy scary things is A Nightmare on Elm Street where Freddy Kruegar, the guy who kills everyone, is just simply an act of supernatural tendencies. I find him super cool because he can just enter people's dreams and scare them to the point where he kills them in the dream and in the real world. To many people he's just an awesome bad guy who has awesome powers but in the real world he's just as vulnerable as anyone else. I find him to be a supernatural piece of work because, who can just jump in a dream and kill people? Even though he's a bad guy people still love to see him in movies. If a movie came out today in 2014 with him starring people would go see it because they're so obsessed with the supernatural work on a madman. 

I think America is lives with the fact of supernatural occurrences and is so obsessed with it because no matter how much fear there is to these things, Americans know that it isn't real one bit. We live in an age where science solves everything and if science can solve it, it's fake. Science hasn't proven anything to do with the occult to be real, so why should we believe that it is? Our eyes haven't ACTUALLY seen it but on the screen or books we have. It's all in our heads so who's to say that everything we see isn't just made up, or real? *inserts devil emoji* 

This shows that American culture has grown accustomed to the occult. Everything that goes on in America has something scary to go along with it. Teenagers love scary and weird things that's why there are so many things that have to do with vampires and werewolves out there to watch on TV and watch in movie theaters. But the truth behind it all is because we all know, it really isn't real, we just like to pretend that is for the entertainment of ourselves.  

-C.Leal

Is doing wrong things for good, right?

One anti-hero that I've been watching since I was a kid is known as Dominic Torreto, one of the main characters in the popular film Fast and Furious. The 6 movies that have been made about this one man along with others is all about cars, money, family, racing and did I mention the best part? Cars. Every move he makes when it comes to getting out of a sticky situation to accomplishing something he needs or wants tends to be in an illegal way.

The first movie created was revolved around a young agent, Brian O'Conner, who goes undercover as a street racer to bust the big case of "who's been stealing all the cargo from 18-wheelers." In the movie he meets Dominic Torreto and befriends him to later find out (spoiler alert) that he is the one who has a team who hijacks 18-wheelers for the cargo. Later it comes to surface that Torreto uses the money for the good of his crew or "family" who has close to nothing. 

Ichabod and Torreto have things in common when it comes to getting what they want in anyway possible. Their greed for wealth is similar in how Ichabod wants the money for himself although Torreto wants the money for himself and his "family." Both are also similar in being very sneaky and convincing to get out of sticky situations. 

Although Ichabod Crane is a self-centered greedy man, Torreto is the same as him when it comes to greed and being very convincing in sticky situations along with thinking on their toes when it comes to quick problems. Torreto comes to be one of those anti-heroes who do things for the better of people and we are quick to love him. I remember growing up wanting to be a cool bad guy like Dominic Torreto. 

-C.Leal