Final Blog Post

I was interested in joining IB because my sister did it her year. To be honest I didn't really care about IB it just seemed to me that I was in an "IB family" and so I joined. I'm glad that I did because I have really enjoyed my time in the program. I think that suffering through all the same things really does build a bonds. I think that also it helped me to talk to people that I would never have talked to. Class debates showed me a lot of new viewpoints that I never thought of. I don't really have any problems with the program as a whole. I know a lot of people hate IB but I think that the way we learned about History is really cool. The idea of questioning what happened  in history leads to really cool discussion and ideas. I think that English was incredibly beneficial for us but its hard to really understand how much it is. One day in LOV we had to analyse a poem and all the other kids had trouble with it but I knew so many different terms and had done this in much more depth than they had. So i think that English class really has made us all more critical readers but it has done such a good job of it that we see many literary things as just common sense. For me, I regret taking Biology and wish that I took Physics. I took Bio because I thought it would be easy but I realize now that I have no interest in Bio and while physics is probably harder than Bio, since I'm interested It would have been a better class for me. I really hate Languages so I didn't get a lot out of Spanish. I am never going to take another Spanish class and i'm so excited about that. The same is true for me about TOK. I just never really felt like it resonated with me. Everything we talked about was just like cool ted talks and like random science experiments about human behavior. I know some people really liked the debates but they just never felt relevant to me. And thats all the IB classes I have!

Step 1:

When I first saw the prompt I thought that the journal would be more like drafts of poetry and more focused on creating poetry and it is but not in the way I thought it would be. His poems don't seem to come out of "Work Time". They seem to just be a list of everything that he thought about throughout his life and this is reflected in the journal. He doesn't have drafts of poems he just has observations about the world that he puts together. He has lists of things, I don't know what because I cant read it, that are put on the side of a page. This makes me think that he comes up with an idea and then comes back to it throughout the rest of his life to add to the list when he sees new things. Another thing i noticed is the "?". A lot of things have question marks next to them like he is asking the Cosmos what it thinks. This shows how his poems are created and how they are really just a stream of thought.

Step 2:

A lot of what i said is confirmed by the notes. Where he says "I shall see the crash" and later adds perhaps shows how he is just writing his thoughts down. To me, Walt Whitman is really more of a philosopher than he is a poet. He is just writing down his thoughts about the things he sees in free verse. If his free verse had a little less flourish it would just be philosophic writing. Then again a lot of poetry about thoughts and people is just philosophy with some flare.