PORTFOLIO
Intro:
Welcome to the road that led me to become a good college writer. My name is Christian Ngiyulu. I’m from the Democratic Republic of Congo. I came to United States in January 2008; French is the official language in my country. I never wrote or spoke English till I came to the US. Writing has never been my favorite subject and I’ve never been good at it. Taking this class made me a better writer and made me admire the art of writing and putting our opinions on paper. I’ve improved my grammar, punctuation and writing techniques. With a lot of dedication and effort, I was able to turn myself into a B student rather than a C which is where I was before this semester..
When I first came into this class, I felt lost. I thought the class was too much for competence. But as the year was progressing, I made improvements in my writing. There were a lot of assignments that we did before we wrote the big essay to help us think about what we wanted to write about. The first project that we worked now is called text. I wrote my essay a book called “Persepolis” which was about a young girl that has to become rebellious because of the hostile environment around her. I also wrote about how she inspires everyone that reads her book. I developed the essay well and got a B on it which was the best grade I’ve ever got on an essay. The second project that we did is called space. We had to go to a place that we liked and talk about the ideologies that come with the place and some issues that are tied with it. I went to the SRC which is a gym that CSUN just built. I wrote about the unnecessary technology that has been placed at the SRC; I talked about the new purpose of gyms nowadays and the urgent necessity to get new professors at CSUN rather than spending it on it unnecessary I felt like I’ve developed the essay better than the first one even though I got a lower grade because I made a lot of technical errors and it affected the rhythm of the poem. The third project is called web. We had to explain what we learned throughout the whole semester in 133A and B. I wrote about the effect one of the poem that we read called “A woman’s world” had on me. I also mentioned the improvements I made in this class. Going through this experience in 113 made me realize that struggle is only part of life. We cannot let that affect our dedication and effort; nothing in this world is impossible to achieve if one’s mind and heart is focused and ready to overcome anything that comes in its way.
Project text
The Effect of the Environment
As human beings, depending on the person and circumstances, we all get inspirations from different places to be successful in our dreams or ambitions. In the book Persepolis, the author Marjane Satrapi tells the story of her childhood which portrays how she became rebellious to her parents and society due to the injustices being done to the people she once knew or loved. She feels like it’s her duty to rebel against everything standing in her way to get justice. Marjane’s story enhances one of the author’s themes of how some of the personalities have been forced on us based on our previous experience with life. Satrapi’s experience emphasizes social injustice, which is an issue that is still going on today. She gives us some directions on how to handle them, and inspires us to stand up for ourselves when injustice is being done.
Marjane was a little young sweet girl at the beginning of the story. As the story went along, things began to fall apart in Iran due to the reestablishment of a strong dictatorship and corruption in the government. At that point, a lot of people she knew were getting killed, beaten or arrested which is when Marjane began to change. She gets inspired by the painful memories form the past which lead her to decide to fire back at society and the government. Her motivations changed her personality and her views on religion. Marjane’s first thought of changing happens when her maid has to stop writing love letters their neighbor because they are not from the same social class. Marjane disagrees with this logic and confronts her dad, “but is it her fault that she was born where she was born.”(37) Marjane is frustrated by the standard society sets for people. People from the lower social classes can’t interact with people from the higher class. The poor people don’t have anything to say in how they want to live their lives or what they want to be. The decisions are made for them when they are born. The people from the higher classes can do anything with their lives even when they don’t deserve that privilege because of bad behavior or bed reputation. Marjane starts losing her innocence and realizes how unfair society is to people; she feels guilty that she can date anyone she want but her maid doesn’t have that option, yet no one is asked, or choses, or choses, or works to be in a social class they belong. As a response to the maid incident, her parents explain to Marjane the impossible love between the maid and their neighbor, “Because in this country you must stay within you own social class” (37). The author accentuates the deep ignorance running through Iranian’s minds. Even the educated people such as Marjane’s father support the separation of social classes. Marjane becomes hardheaded and realizes that even her parents have been brainwashed by the idea of social classes, and if she’s going to do anything to change it, she’s going to do it her way. Marjane becomes more curious and wants to learn more stories about injustice in Iran.
Marjane is growing faster as she learning new information every time. Marjane learns about her mother’s best friend Siamak and how he was beaten in prison because he had different beliefs and the regime in power didn’t allow anyone to think outside the box. Marjane is starting to learn stories that kids of her age didn’t know. The fourth panel (chapter 5) describe Marjane telling her friends the story of her grandpa’s experience in Europe; her friend’ reaction separates Marjane from being a kid as they ignore her in a mean way, “too much” (61). Her friends find it weird that she knows all these painful stories about her grandpas’ experience in prison. They got freaked out by the story and cut Marjane off from finishing the story. The author highlights how she grew up faster than the kids around her. She wasn’t a kid anymore. Freedom of speech and thinking wasn’t allowed in Iran. Everyone had to believe what the government wanted them to believe, whether they liked it or not. Marjane’s curiosity makes Marjane grow up faster than she should have been because she has to adapt to everything that’s going on around her.
Marjane’s curiosity and ambition drives her to do what she thinks is right to her, whether people like It or not. Marjane becomes inspired by the events that happened to her in the past. Uncle Anoosh is Marjane’s uncle who fled to Russia because he was a communist and the government in power in Iran was killing all the communist. Uncle Anoosh is an idol to Marjane; she sees him as a hero because he was fighting against the government and wasn’t scared to stand up to them. They had a deeper relationship beyond the uncle and niece relationship. Sometime after Uncle Anoosh came back to Iran, he was arrested and killed. Marjane was hut and devastated by the news. She lost the hero of the family. She learns that her friend Ramin’s dad used to kill people in Russian and decides to take revenge on him. She wants to make Ramin’s dad feel the same pain his victims felt when he killed them. Marjane gets mad and decides to go through with his plan to have a revenge on Ramin’s dad, “in the name of dead million, we’ll teach Ramin a good lesson” (45). Marjane is forced to change because she feels like feeling bad and talking about issues is not solving the problem and applies the theory that actions speak louder than words. She doesn’t even care that she’s going to hurt one of her good friends. She just wants payback. Marjane gets inspire by the events that happened to her in the past and changes her attitude toward people in order to implement change.
Persepolis is a great novel that depicts the story of a young girl who changes her personality because she has to adapt to what’s going on around her. It exemplifies how horrible events can make someone go from a nice person to a bad person. The author suggest that the experience we go through when we are little kids help shape the kind of person we will be in the future just like Marjane learning the stories of her uncle and what happened to her maid changed her view on society; if her uncle wouldn’t have been killed, she would have never got the idea of nailing Ramin despite their relationship. Marjane’s loss of innocence and transformation suggest that if injustice is being done, we have to stand upu for ourselves and fight it even if it means changing who we are otherwise; things will always be the same. Marjane gets inspired by the events that happened to her in the past. Through Marjane’s story, The author upholds the issues that are going on today for example, if you live in Beverly Hills, Laguna Beach and other rich neighborhoods and you get really sick or robbed, the ambulance and the police show up at your door in a matter of seconds; if you live in Compton and some other poor places in LA. The police and the ambulance don’t care about you; they show up 20 minutes after they have been called; maybe the victim could have been saved if they showed up earlier but dies because he lives in the poor part of the city and therefore he’s close to being worthless. The author guides us through the same journey of social injustice she had to go through implying that we have to adapt to our environment just like Marjane did and fight our oppressor or nothing will change.
project space
Money is a Way of Life
A fantasy world is creative imagination that people developed in their minds to try to reach a certain physical look to be like a popular actress or doing something because everyone else is doing it. A lot of ideas in this world have a great deal of positivity in them when it starts off but most of the time, it always turns to something far away from the main purpose through society’s manipulation for money. A gym is a place where people work out to become fit which leads to a healthier lifestyle. It helps people isolate themselves from the real world and enjoy the activity they are doing. Despite all the good effects of the gym, the main purpose has been transformed to something else. Businessmen see it as another way of making money so CSUN decided to invest in the SRC rather than our education. they added more fancy accessories to it to attract more people. The excessive electronic devices directed the gym far away from being a place where people work out and have fun. Big cities such Los Angeles and New York where a lot of celebrities live destroyed the main purpose of the gym due to their popularity so everyone wants to be like them. The fantasy world that is created in people’s head is vividly portrayed at the SRC which is a gym in CSUN where people go for other reasons rather than to get fit.
A gym’s main purpose creates a positive effect on people’s lives and also helps with their overall well-being. Working out is an activity that helps to keep our physical fitness and overall health in a good condition. It is performed for various reasons including muscles making our muscles bigger and stronger, weight loss and for the purpose of enjoyment and fun. Frequent and regular physical exercise boosts the immune system which leads to living longer. A gym is also a peaceful place where people go and enjoy their workout. All stress presented in the real life is put aside for a moment. It provides activity such as basketball, rock climbing, pickle ball which are activities that not just help you burn cardio but help you relax because they are fun. We all have different places that are sacred to us. In the story “Minnie Riperton saved my life”, Luis Alfaro describes how the blues bars are a sacred place to him as he expresses his reaction from when he went to a blues bar for the first time, “I was free. I was a queer Mexican boy from the barrio but I was also one of the soul train dancers.” (18) The bar was sacred to him because it was a place where he was in peace; he could be himself and he could express himself in any way he liked. As for some people, the gym is their sacred place because it helps their minds recover a little bit as all the stress they carry with them every day disappears at that time. The gym‘s main purpose is beneficial to our health. It helps some people isolate themselves from the real world and nurture their mind into a peaceful state.
The peaceful state of gyms has impacted the gym‘s popularity in a positive way but it’s not the only method that boosted it up. Celebrities have a big impact on big cities that is detrimental to a society; they create a fantasy world inside people’s heads that they have to work out to look like celebrities. In major cities such as Los Angeles and New York, gyms have become so popular to the point where there is a gym every two blocks. One of the biggest reasons for the gym’s success in Los Angeles is credited to the number of stars that live in Hollywood and some other parts of LA. Everyone wants to be like the celebrity they see on TV. Kobe Bryant who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers is one of the best players and buffest basketball players right now. Young basketball players all want to be the Kobe Bryant of their generation, imitating him from how he plays to how he dresses and his physical appearance. It becomes a competition between teens for who is the buffest which leads more people to start going to the gym so they can be more muscular than their friends and look like Kobe. It takes the purpose of the gym to another direction. Celebrities, such as Chad Ochocinco, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots, are considered super-hot because they are muscular and have big abs. Guys nowadays feel like they are obliged to go to the gym because they have to look like Ochocinco so they can get the girl’s attention. Being fit for a guy is almost a social norm in our society which is why men spend more time in the gym to arrange their social status by being labeled muscular so girls could be more attracted. Celebrities are somehow in the driver’s seat of the car that is driving our society to the wrong direction.
As celebrities are making people want to go work out and look like them, businessmen decided to explore the gym idea to make more money. One of the reasons for the popularity of Los Angeles is businesses. Los Angeles is run by money; there is not limit when it comes down to money in LA. Sadly our whole world is controlled by money but it is emphasized more in big cities. Gyms are getting expensive as time goes on. More guys come in to work out so they can show off their bodies and girl also come in to check out what kind of bodies the guys have to offer. The rapid growth of gyms is seen as another way to make money by businessman. A new build has just been built at Cal State Northridge from our tuition called the Student Recreation Center. It’s a gym that’s opened for all CSUN students. The tuition went up in 2012 compared to the previous years to sustain everything that was being done to the SRC. A mandatory gym fee is included in our tuition even if you don’t work out at all. It offers a lot of activities such as dancing, yoga, basketball and volleyball. It has high definition TVs all over the place. To get in, you need to put in your ID number then scan your hand on the machine that recognizes all the CSUN students’ hand shape. It has a fancy touch screen computer on the wall. All the treadmills have TVs on them, separate from the big TVs all over the place. All of these fancy items cost CSUN 69 million. This semester there was a big reduction on the number of classes because CSUN supposedly didn’t have enough money to pay professors. Some students couldn’t even get a single unit because all the classes were full. There wasn’t enough money for education and yet CSUN spent 69 million on a gym that is not a necessity to a school. The purpose of creating the SRC was not to help SRC students become fit but the people in charge of distributing money to different departments at CSUN found that it was another way to take more money out of student’s pockets and attract other people to come to CSUN which is going to bring in more money despite the fact that professors are getting laid off or teaching fewer classes. SRC represents LA as everything is for money. History exemplifies how when humans start manipulating an idea; it only gets worse and worse such as the story of Hollywood. It was once a place full of crops and now it’s a place where all the celebrities live. They make kids that come in this world with money surrounding them. They don’t need to work hard because their parents have everybody. People in Hollywood live in a fantasy world because they think everything should come easy to them because they are rich. It upholds our guiltiness as a race because we always try to make everything around us better but in reality end up messing it up. As businessman are starting to manipulate the purpose of the gym turning it into a spa full of unnecessary technology. Who knows what they are going to do to it next?
As gyms have become quite a popular place to go to today, businessmen are trying to figure out other ways to attract more people to come work out even when it’s spoiling the main focus of going to the gym. Unnecessary Technology is one of the tools that is been implemented in the SRC to attract students to come in more often as well as undecided high school seniors who are confused on what school they want to go next year. The SRC provide ten flat screen TVs in the weight room which have channels that show all the sports game that most people have to pay extra to watch on regular TVs. The gym is built for people to get healthier. TVs are distraction for people; some people come in to work out and realize that the basketball game that is being showed on TV is a good game; therefore, they stop working out and start watching the game. Some people only go to the gym because their favorite team is playing on TV and they can’t watch the game nowhere else but the gym. The TVs does more bad than good. They keep people from getting to the real goal for their visit at the gym. People get lazy on the actual workout they planned to do because they can watch a TV shows and sports games.
The gym is a place for solace, serenity, transcendence, or perhaps sheer isolation from the world. People go to the gym to play basketball, to run and do a variety of activities that provide nothing but fun and self-expression. It helps people forget about any stress from the real world and just focus on having fun. Despite the positive side of the gym, there is a big negative atmosphere in gyms nowadays. Celebrities with big muscles are considered to be sexy which suddenly get people in an urgent mode to go work out and be just like the celebrities on TV. For most people, the gym is no longer a place for solace but a place for competition for who is the buffest which start attracting more girls to come in so they can check out the buff guys. The muscle urgency boosts the gym’s popularity up. Our world history shows how human beings like to manipulate everything they see for the better or the worse. Businessmen see the gym’s popularity as another way to make money by implementing excessive technology even when it’s detrimental. Places such as the SRC where unnecessary TVs and computers are used while students don’t have enough classes because there aren’t a lot of classes available to them exemplifies our natural flaws that money is more important than anything even when it comes down to education. If we are willing to implement harmful changes to the gym to attract more people, how far are we willing to step over the line for money? Let’s not forget that money is a source of all evil acts.
project web
The Power of Education
A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated (Horace mane). Have you ever walked into a classroom for a new class and didn’t know anything that was going on? That’s how I felt at the beginning of last semester. Everything we were doing felt out of my reach. One of the first assignments was to read a poem about woman’s struggle. I didn’t understand the language. The meaning behind the poem was unknown and I felt like I should have been in a lower English class, but as the year went on, everything fell into place. Through different methods, assignments and exercise, 113A and 113B help me turned on the part of my brain that makes people think critically which I lacked in previous years. It introduced a new way of trying to understand a piece of art through different methods. It helped me think deeply about everything I see and read rather than the obvious context, and it helped me notice things that I didn’t notice before about society and the places that I frequently go to. I became a better person being able to understand the world around me through defamilirization.
The first poem we had to read in English 113A was called “A Woman’s World”. It was a poem that was written in the 1980’s about women’s issues. It points out the limited role of women in history and the stereotypical standards set by men and society that women are only good for cooking and doing household duties. The limited role that men give to women holds them back from progressing in politics and business. The assignments that we did that had to do with this poem helped me become a critical thinker and made me think for myself. When I first read the poem, I didn’t understand the theme of the whole essay and I couldn’t understand the specificity of her arguments. Sentences such as “whetted a knife” didn’t make sense to me, as I was wondering in my head why would she talk about a knife when the essay is about women? The theme of the poem started becoming clear after applying a few techniques. We annotated the poem and looked up the definition of every word we had trouble comprehending and all the sentences began making sense. We had to come up with questions about what we didn’t understand from the poem and write it to the author. I had to read the poem over and over and think deeply about the poem; as I was doing that, my understanding of the poem increased little by little. Through different techniques such as annotating the poem and coming up with questions by rereading the poem, I became a better critical thinker and grew to realize that nothing is out of my reach.
Understanding “A Woman’s World” poem made me guilty as it points out the expectations women have to deal with every day and helped me realize an aspect of my personality that I never noticed before. The poem emphasizes the absence of women in world history and the lack of equality between men and women. Women are expected to stay home to cook, make babies and take care of the house while the men get to go out and chase their dreams. Women are limited to household duties and men have the choice to do whatever they want. It ties to me personally because, I feel like I am one of those people that set those standards and I contribute to the limited roles of women. Every time I think about the woman I am going to marry, the first ideas that come to my mind are: is she going to be able to cook? Does she know to do laundry and take care of kids? I never think about if she’s going to be ambitious or if I have a preference in what profession I want my wife to be in. This poem made me aware of how I view women and in result I feel some guilt. It’s not fair for us men to dictate women’s lives. We have the freedom to chase our dreams and do whatever we want with our lives and yet we try to limit women to only do certain things. This poem makes me a better person because it makes me realize that we are not god to conclude what women should do or shouldn’t do. We are all equal.
Sometimes, things are not what they seem like from far away until we get closer, take our time and look at it from a different perspective. Defamilirization is the art of looking at things with different eyes or a different perspective. In our project space, we did different defamilirization exercises that enabled me to be able to notice things I never noticed before, and it gave me a boost in my decision making as I can see things that I couldn’t see before. We had to visualize our rooms in our head, draw it and determine what the drawing said about our room. I had to look at my room with eyes of a stranger that walked into my room accidently. I noticed that it upheld my prejudice on every other color besides red and blue. Almost everything I have in my room is red or blue. It brought up a side of me that I never knew before. The next exercise we had to do was to go to a place of our own choosing and look at it with different eyes and a different perspective in mind and analyze what we found different about the place. I went to the SRC which is the gym at CSUN. I go there almost every single day and always assumed that everyone always goes to the gym to actually work out or do some kind of exercise like me. Looking at the SRC more closely helped me see a lot of things that I never saw before. Not all people were there to workout. Some people watch T.V. and some are just mingling around. It is a great tool to have to one’s arsenal. Teens usually have the same beliefs as their parents. As we grow up and become more responsible, we start thinking for ourselves and we make decisions on how we want to live. Such as if we agree with abortion, gay people’s rights or what political view we believe in. Defamiliarization could be a great tool in understanding how our society functions because we get to look at things more closely with a different perspective and eventually it will help us you make a better decision on how we want to live.
As a kid who never spoke English in his life until high school, I didn’t know a lot about writing or reading in English. Throughout the whole semester in 113, I learned different ways to comprehend a piece of art through methods such as annotation and writing my concerns about the poem to the author. It opened up a new door to my brain on how to think deeply and coherently. The message of “A Woman’s World” made me a better person as I can see the natural flaws that society implemented in me about what makes a good wife. I can see things that I never saw through my natural eyes because my thinking used to be based on my feelings rather than logic. Defamiliarization is a tool that gives me the ability to think outside the box about issues going on in our lives and society such as prochoice and religion. All these methods made me go from a C student to a B student in English because I can think critically. Life is full of obstacles. “A man does what he must in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures and that is the basis of all human morality” (Churchill), those obstacles are not impossible. I never spoke English a single day in my life until high school. If I can improve my English writing in two semesters then I can improve anything in life. Learning how to think critically made me realize that nothing is impossible if you put your mind and you heart into it.
