How Families Are Portrayed In Film

In my group we talked about the different ways that families can be portrayed in film. We came to the consensus that family can be portrayed in two ways, one being a "healthy" family and the other being "unhealthy" families. Healthy families have good relationships between all of the members, for example , a child could come to the parents to talk about a problem and feel comfortable doing so. Unhealthy families do not have this, the children either do not have good relationships with their parents or the parents do not have a good relationship with each other making a bad situation for the child. Both of these types of families can be seen in the TV show "Friday Night Lights" it can be seen in this show because the main family is an example of healthy relationships and the "perfect" relationship between parents and their children. Whereas the unhealthy relationships can be seen by almost every other family in the show, whether its an abusive relationship between father and son or an unfaithful marriage, it is seen on this show. In sum, on modern day TV we can see all sorts of examples of family. We see good examples and bad examples of how families should function and we can potentially learn from them and apply things we learn to our everyday lives.

The Believing Game Response

What I got from the "Believing Game" is that it is good to go back and analyze your work. Doing so can help you find your identity as a writer and allow you to shape that identity into whatever you want it to be. Analyzing your past writings will allow you to identify your weak points and knowing your weak points is good because it will allow you to work on them and improve them. In sum, everyone should go back and read a few of their old writings and try to identify things that they would like to change. Changing these things will allow you to form your desired identity as a writer.

Beer Based Learning

I chose to read the section on peer based learning for our reading assignment. I agree with most everything that the author said in this section, although I'd like to call it "Beer Based Learning", I call it this because I think that the best way to learn in life is through experience. For example, If you go drink all night with your friends and get sick and pass out, you will quickly learn that 1. You should not drink or 2. You need to do a better job of controlling your drinking. Having this life experience teaches one to learn from their mistakes, this is a valuable skill to have in life. If you have the ability to learn from your past mistakes you will rarely make the same mistake twice. This is what the author is saying in the section I read, he is saying that we all need life experiences to draw from so that we can make an educated decision on things later in life.

Response to Video Games Article

I agree with most of what was said in the video games article because I think playing video games does give someone a new "identity" like Gee suggested. It allows people to become whatever they can think of and definitely allows people to learn from the game and use it in everyday life. Although I agree with most of what Gee says in this article, I think he is thinking a little to deep. What I mean is that most people play video games to relieve stress or to get away from school or work. This is why people enjoy them and if we integrate video games into schooling I think people will start associating games with school and not have as much fun playing them. I think video games can teach people a lot of things that traditional schooling cannot, but to utilize video games in the right way we need to keep them away from the schools and out of schooling curriculums.