Frazier's In Praise Of Margins: Chapter Summaries

Everything discussed in Chapter 2: Colonists on the Margins, “When is Thanksgiving? Colonizing America”, and “The Natives and the English” Crash Course video spans between 1550 and 1675. This was the period when the major countries formed settlements in America. The book starts by explaining the Spanish attempting to take control of Florida but, failed when their leader Pedro Menéndez ran out of money and left to govern Cuba. Lead by Juan de Oñate the Spanish then went to New Mexico to find wealth and glory. When the soldiers found nothing of value they killed and enslaved hundreds of Pueblos (Textbook). The Spanish’s attempt at draining valuable resource from the New World backfired. They encountered small quantities of gold and thought if more troops were sent they would find more gold. When they didn’t find want they wanted time and money had already been lost.

In Matt Taibbi’s book The Divide, the criminal justice system is revealed to have become a form of social control over the poor. Taibbi refers to this divide between rich and poor as “two systems in a vacuum,” where there are two separate systems depending on whether you’re rich or poor that people seem to accept. When looking at both systems in comparison, however, the system makes no sense. An example Taibbi uses throughout his book is the legal process of petty crimes, such as drug dealing or just sleeping on a park bench overnight, where, due to minimum sentencing laws, people have had to serve a minimum 20-year prison sentences. These are people that are poor and desperate enough to sleep on a cold park bench, but instead of giving them

In the twelfth chapter of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster provides various information on how to identify symbols throughout literature. The chapter stressed the individuality of identifying symbols, Foster mentions multiple times that “every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to different degrees” (110). After learning this and also having read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, one thing that stood out was that the main character, Oskar, only has and only wears white clothes. Not only does Oskar often reference his various white clothes, including the white scarf that Grandma knitted

Characters and Background: I just got in reading this book called variant by Robison wells with a total of 373 pages. This book is about a boy named Benson Fisher Who gets enrolled into a new school program called Maxfield Academy. This is a very suspicious school to Benson because it has a barbed wire fence that surrounds the entire school. There are no teachers or adults in the building at all, and There are three gangs called Variant, Havoc, and the Society, but the thing that makes suspense in the most suspicious, is the fact that everyone seems to be okay with this. Out of the three gangs that are at the school, Benson decided to be a Variant also known as the “V’s”. The V's are the smallest gang That consists of only 18 people. The largest gang is the Society. The Society are

Marginal places and activities have a great value to Frazier because the place he discovered as a child is now lost because as he entered adulthood he started seeing these places and activities as a waste of time. According to Frazier, “The margin is where you can try out odd ideas that you might be afraid to admit with people looking on.” (305) Marginal activities and locations allow an individual to discover one’s true passion without any other influences. This is an important idea because everyone occasionally needs to liberate from

As they told themselves a frequent activity was exploring and the reader understand this was marginal when he mentions they were all easily distracted from their exploration with the sight of the perfect ice to stomp on. Fraizer explains these distractions to extend the understanding of margins and that they don’t require uninterrupted focus because a person doesn’t have something to accomplish, a marginal activity could result in another marginal activity that could have an outcome. I consider watching movies a marginal activity for many, people go to the theater to simply relax and get their mind off of other things. Movies let a person engulf themselves in the lives of others, fall in love all over again with a romance, laugh away all problems with a comedy, or feel a rush of adrenaline with an action movie. Films similar to these can create inspiration in people to find love, to become a director, even to become a writer to create a script that will affect people as the film affected them. Margins being without any purpose unintentionally result with a person having a purpose “every purpose-filled activity we pursue in the woods began as just fooling around”.

“Annals of the Former World” puts four of John McPhee’s books on the geology and geological history of North America together. They bring up the scientists who found the information that explains the history of North America. McPhee had joined some of them on expeditions, and described the work they did, as well as recorded the ideas they had.

As a student enters the gym doors of Smith-Cotton they can see various trophies from our athletic teams, along with our JROTC National Championship banners that hang up from the walls. One can see by the quality of our gym that our sports are a main part of our school, but as one wonders on into the hallways of our school, they can see how dull they are. By the plainness of the walls, there seems to be no life, in the JROTC hallway you see the trophy cabinet full of multiple national trophies and as you venture on you get to see images of what these teams do, along with the bulletin board that shows newspaper articles of the success of the program. But as you continue to walk toward the other side of the classroom, one can only see some bulletin boards that do not have many things on them except for some advertising. Just by observing this, a new student can see that our school has a great deal to do with sports, but what they cannot see is how well this school performs academically. As we walk down the halls you rarely see a student’s work displayed. So one can assume what James Coleman thinks to be correct, that “altogether, the trophy case would suggest to the innocent visitor that he was entering an athletic club, not an educational institution." This is a dilemma among many schools that is sometime not dealt with adequately.

In the first few pages of Chapter Three, Kingsolver talks about heirloom vegetables and says “these titles stand for real stories.” What is meant by the title is heirloom plants give off seeds that end up being saved and used for many generations (112). Those seeds have history behind them; family stories that span over several years. For example, on page 144 Kingsolver talked about this heirloom seed exchange in Iowa where one of the founders’ grandfather left a pink tomato plant that his parents brought from Bavaria in the 1870s. The seeds are comparable to a family heirloom. Both get handed down from generation to generation and have a story of what the meaning of the object is and how it all got started.

Children through play and leisure, children and young people explore their physical and social environment, test out ideas and concepts.

Currently in my book "How We Decide" Lehrer still explains the concept of the Frontal Cortex. He goes and talks about how the frontal part of the brain affects the brain in lifesaving scenarios. Lehrer tells in the book that the more knowledge someone has on something the better. He calls forth upon a firefighter that goes on a helicopter and drops down onto the land that's on fire and puts it out. This veteran firefighter names Wage Dodge was caught in a mix up. The fire was getting worse and his young crew of kids and himself was trapped with no place to go. Dodge knew he wasn't going to make it so he used his skills. As the crew of young kids were running he had to think of a plan. Dodge made another fire and laid in the burnt grass. The original fire went around

In the essay “ Learning Responsibility on City Sidewalks”, the author Jane Jacobs shows us that it is important to let children interact with city sidewalks because they can learn lots of things there. On the other hand, the author also argues that it is necessary to select appropriate public areas because not all the public areas can give children advantage lessons. Based on author’s observations, some parents will allow their children play in parks so they are convenient to take care of children and save money for hiring daycare. However, it is not useful for children to learn in this environment. For example, children will not learn independent under parent’s supervision. Combing all the factors,

Extra Credit: In this chapter, Gladwell does address and disprove a counterargument that everyone came from hardworking hunter-gatherers. Gladwell disproves this by showing that hunter-gathers diet was largely “a rich assortment of fruits, berries, roots, and nuts” (Gladwell 233) which isn’t that difficult to find. They didn’t grow crops, nor raise animals, so they never had any hard work that needed to get done. This shows that not everyone has the same hard working background that the Asians do, and their ore each culture grows different individuals that show different

Craig Mullaney definitely made many challenges for himself and accepted challenges from others with no questions asked. Being the thriving Valedictorian of his high school class and earning other prestigious accolades he stood out from the other entire student. But at West Point, Mullaney would be intertwined with hundreds of other classmates with the same, if not more achievements, making it seemingly impossible to be any kind of a predominant student.

The young people in today’s society have open minds and base majority of what they see on the rest of the world. Their experience is directly influenced by the specifics of the still unknown world of nature (Christian & Corina, 2016). One particular group took some students on a camping trip where they taught students and focused on nature, and showed that there is more to life than just technology and video games. On the first day all children are involved in cleaning the area around the tents of broken and dry twigs, collect them and arrange for the needs of the remaining days of the camping trip. This and many other activities, helped the children expand their minds and also showed them that they could have just as much fun outside, as they do playing video games inside. By being outside they are getting some form of physical activity by moving around and being active (llieva, 2016).