Unit 5
1- College is the latest part of my journey. This year, I am getting adjusted to life as a college student. As a college student, I have a lot more freedom with my time which wasn’t always a good thing for me. In the first semester, I did not face many challenges and got good grades in my classes. However, this semester has been a real challenge. At the beginning of the semester, I was in the middle of moving. This, however, was not as challenging as later when my cousin who I was close with, died. This wasn’t just challenging to me but the whole family. I couldn’t help but constantly think about my cousin’s family and how were they going to get by that now he was gone.
2- For unit 1, we had to write about freedom after reading the story of Malcolm X. This made  me think about what freedom really is. Does the first amendment really give me the freedom or is just an illusion? Are we free in our own homes? Most kids are restricted by their parents from going certain places or being out after a certain time. Do they still feel free? My thought on this was that freedom is more mental than physical. As in the case of Malcolm X, he was sentenced to prison. This forced him to do something with his free time, he chose to read books and eventually fell in love with them. This made him feel more free than ever, even before he was in prison. He felt free because he was allowed to read whatever book he wanted from the library.
3- Unit 2 was about genre, we started out by writing a recipe about something we liked to do or were good at. At first, I chose to write about basketball, but later changed to video games because I felt like I had more to write about it. After the recipe, we were assigned to write about the same thing but in a different genre. I made a comic strip about a boy getting a new game on the release date. I liked this assignment because it forced us to think about different ways to show our writing then the way we are used to since school.
4- We had to do research about something we care about in unit 3. I chose to do research on video games. After doing some research, I realized a lot of people think playing violent video games leads to people becoming violent in real life. Me being me, who has been playing video games from an early age thought this was outrageous. However, after doing some research, my perspective changed. I think video games can cause a person to become violent sometimes if they are not mentally stable. However, I think people who are mentally unstable can also become violent watching movies. I think this is not the fault of the game designers but the consumers. Parents should take responsibility and only buy video games for their children that are rated for their age group. There is no research to backup video games cause violence argument. Most people saying that video games cause violence have never played a video game.
5- For unit 4, we had to change the way we present the things we found in unit 3. It had to be digital so I chose to make a website. I made a website using weebly.
www.videogamesd439.weebly.com
