Final Exam Project Part 1

1. a) Diagnosed with attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder in elementary school and placed on Ritalin, according to his mother, Billy more recently was identified as having bipolar disorder,a condition characterized by wide mood swings. b) She eventually left Billy's father. She met Marvin at their storefront church a few blocks away. Ruth moved from hersubsidized Oak Creek Village apartment to his Heights apartment. They were married two years ago this month.


2. a) Billy's mother says he began stealing at an age when many kids are learning to read. ODDITY: This is really odd for me because I find it hard to imagine 5-6 year olds stealing and usually I think of an innocent kid with a baby face, and it's wierd to imagine them stealing up to the extent that Billy did. When I read this, I was trying to imagine why Billy would be stealing at such a young age and thought it was really odd. b) "It's not the high; it's the thoughts that come to me when I'm high," Billy says. "My skill just intensifies, knowwhaimsayin'? You know how they say you don't use the left side of your brain? I do when I'm high. Things I never thought before come to me." CONFLICT: The writer shows conflict of person vs. idea. The conflict is Billy (person) and his thoughts (idea) that come to him when he's high. This is a conflict because the thoughts that come to Billy when he's high aren't good & are often usually violent thoughts and stuff that will get him in trouble. It made me interested that he says that none of these thought occur to him when he's normal but when he's high, these thought come to him and he feels the willpower to do them. I was thinking that he probably shoudn't get high then when he knows that he's going to thing/do bad things when he's high. c) Four years ago, bored senseless in one of his seventh-grade classes, Ric started cutting his pencil erasers into smaller pieces. Those pieces eventually became shapes. The shapes turned into buildings. As he became more skilled, the buildings became detailed, then ornate.
   They formed cities, which inspired epic tales of civic growth and decay. Ric chronicles them in a journal. "The slums got worse and expanded to the north with many immigrants coming in from Shangridoom," he wrote. "Uptown, with its newer beautiful buildings, was very dangerous."
   The stories contain a whiff of reality. "This neighborhood always had nice houses," Ric says on a sunny day driving around his neighborhood near Johnston High. Old Chevrolet vans selling ice cream glide up and down the streets. "But the people inside ..." HUMAN INTEREST: The author made this part interesting because he wrote about something that I had never heard of before and thought was really interesting: sculptures made out of erasers. He also made it interesting because he elaborated the sculptures and wrote a lot about how they look like and the idea/meaning behind these eraser sculptures. This part is also interesting because the person who created these sculptures was getting into a lot of trouble at school, and these sculptures kind of saved him and brought him to use his talent to be successful.


3. Liz says: "I want him to live up to his potential. I want him to stop hanging around here. Just get out. There's a whole world out there beyond these apartment complexes. These apartments have a way of owning you." and explain why the question is so good. This quote is so good because it's not a yes or no answer and it does a good job of really expressing her feelings and offers a solution to Billy's problem. It's insightful and I like how she personifies the apartment of 'owning' you. A question that might have led to this quote could have been 'What are your hopes & dreams for Billy in the future & how do you think he can achieve those things?' This question is good because it's not a yes or no question and can have many, many answers. It's asking something that a lot of people want to know about and is a question that kind of sums everything up, and it's kind of like an emotional question that you might have to think about, which shows that it's a good question.