IB (writing) Lit Blogs: Luke White

Dear Mrs. Genesky, Coming into high school, or this year even, English was never my strong suit.  I'm a math guy, a practical, application-based guy.  I like business, economics, and sports, and I was never the kid that sat in his room and read the entire Harry Potter series in one week (that's my sister).  Coming into this year, I couldn't really say I liked English. When I brought the reading list for this year home after the first day of class, I thought it was kinda weird that my parents were so happy about the books I would be reading this year.  "Finally, some classics," they said, but if this meant no more Woman at Point Zero and The God of Small Things , then I wasn't complaining. Then the year got underway, and after bit of a bumpy start with The Handmaid's Tale , I think I started to understand the purpose of this course (for me, at least) towards the middle of year.  After reading Macbeth, Jekyll and Hyde , and even The Old Man and the Se...

I actually thought it was really interesting to look at Walt Whitman's notebook and his imaginary conversation with Lincoln, which seems to represent how Whitman's notebook is both the outline of several of his poems and his relation with the time he lives in, regarding primarily political contexts with Lincoln and the Civil War.  First, when observing his actual "documents" without the notes, the first thing that jumped out at me were how brief the notes seemed.  When I think of famous, historical notebooks, for some reason I think of James Madison's notes of the First Constitutional Convention.  What I mean by this is that I expected notes that were much more elaborate and complex rather than simple and metaphorical.  However, upon further inspection and reading the transcriptions and "notes" tab about Whitman's notebook, I came to realize that Whitman was simply writing in a way that would mirror the writing style of his future poems (I'll get...