Essay 1

Ben'jamin Dameron
Mr. H Salsich
English
9/14/10

Back to School Entertainment
An Essay on Relating Songs to Going Back to School:

Déjà vu is a French saying that means that you feel like you have experienced something before and that something is reoccurring. This saying is used by people all over the world. Its variety of uses can change from being used to describe the reoccurrence of flies in soup to the reoccurrence of school starting at the end of every summer. However many people use the French phrase: Déjà vu to describe coming back to school, I will always find other ways to relate to the end of summer.

A song that really can relate to leaving summer and coming to school is The Beatles' "Hello Goodbye". I hate saying goodbye, so I am not going to say goodbye, but I will say hello. In my experiences, people are sad when they must say goodbye to summer, so I just put on a brave face and say hello to school and 9th grade, working constantly, and enjoying every minute of it. (Participle phrase) In the song "Hello Goodbye", The Beatles repeat this line very often; "I don't know why you say goodbye; I say hello!" The Beatles also talk a lot about being enthusiastic in their song. They use the line, "You say start, and I say go go go!" I feel that this line comes into school a lot because there is a huge difference between just doing work and doing it well and really caring about it. I feel that the smooth lyrics used by The Beatles can easily be compared to school.

I do not think that only songs can relate to school, for instance, I believe that the movie Gladiator has many connections to coming back to school. When Maximus goes to the slave camp, he has great skill as a fighter and a general, but this is not enough for him to survive. He has to learn from his owner, Proximo, about how to win the crowd to win the fight. When students go back to school, they have many skills (parallelism), but we still must learn from our teachers to get good grades and eventually succeed in life. Secondly, in the slaves’ first fight in the coliseum, the odds are stacked against them. Maximus rises above the crowd and shouts, "You can help me. No matter what comes out of those gates, we have a better chance of survival if we work together. Do you understand? If we work together, we survive...Come together! Come together!" In all group activities at school, you will do better if you work together; from sports to projects to proposals to painting to anything, it works better if you work together. It may not make sense at first, but the movie Gladiator can have a lot to do with school.

From French phrases, to movies, to books, to songs, to cars, to games, and really anything, there are many ways one can relate to one’s return to school. I find that the song “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles and the movie Gladiator can really relate to coming back to school. There are many other things that I can think of that me remind me of the end of summer, Master and Commander, Help, Teach Your Children, Colors of the Rainbow, Sound of Silence, but nothing can compare to being at school. School is here for the benefit of us all, so we must just stand together and say HELLO!




Self Assessment:

1. One writing issue I am continuing to work on?
One issue I am continuing to work on in my writing is making sure that I am following all the rules. Sometimes I forget one of the rules and my punctuation has gotten a little rusty over the summer
2. One strong point I see in this writing?
One strong point I see in this essay is my two topics. I feel like I picked very strong topics because I had a very easy time writing.
3. One possible weak spot I see in this writing?
I feel like one weak spot I have is my opening and closing paragraphs because I had a harder time working with those two paragraphs. I had trouble putting a beginning and an end to the story I had created
4. Grade
I feel like I did a very good job on this essay and I would have to give myself and A.