Thursday, September 15, 2011
Week 2 post
The novel Flowers For Algernon is a good story for high school because as a student I can begin to understand and empathizes with students dealing with a disability. Reading a story like this helps you focus on challenges the disabled deal with in their everyday life. In this story Charlie is disabled and just wanted to have friends and to be smart like other people. The novel is relevant to today because there are mentally challenged people who are looking for friends just like Charlie. Unfortunately there are people who appear to be laughing with a mentally challenged person but are actually laughing at them by their actions. A book that I read that has a similar theme to Flowers For Algernon was a short story I read in Mr. Lafay’s English 2 class called Harrison Bergeron. This short story is about the future United States that made everyone equal in every which way. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. This story explains what life would be like without mentally challenged people like Charlie Gordon. If I were to choose which one of these is better for high school I would have to pick both of them. I would choose both of them because of how similar and opposite they are to each other.
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I deffinetly agree on how this book and the other book you mentioned should be read in high school. Flowers for Algernon was deffinetly a book to learn about how we shouldn't treat people like charly differently. They deserve everything we deserve. Laughing at them was another good point. Because soon they will find out just like charly did that they are not laughing with you but laughing at you and that is not nice at all because i know any non mentally challenged person wouldn't like that. This book defiantly showed us that everyone needs a friend and like charly he really was in need of one like Alice. Reading the book in the begining was a little challenging because the words were not spelled right. But as the reading went on it was good to see charly was improving i found my self rooting for him :) He was doing so well.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is a good novel to be read in school. It gives students a lesson on how to handle acting with mentally handicapped people. Almost everybody will someday need to interact with a handicapped person, so it is extremely important to know how. Disabled people deserve to be treated like a normal person. They have a tough enough life already struggling to fit in and make friends. The last thing they need is to be picked on and harassed. I also agree with your opinion on whether this novel is relevant to modern times. There are many mentally disabled people that live the way Charlie Gordon does. A life in which there is nobody to lean on in hard times, and facing challenges in everyday activities.
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