Beautiful Creatures

In language arts class with Ms. Taynton, we had to choose a book to read. I chose Beautiful Creatures written by Garcia and Stohl. I read the beginning of the book, it is about a boy named Ethan, he has been dreaming for a few months about a girl that he does not know. When he comes back after the holidays, there is a new girl in the school and he immediately knows that she is the girl from the dreams. There is a strange connection between them. Ethan is trying to understand what is happening even if she is asking him to not try to understand and she wants to avoid all the strange things that happen. So far I like the book a lot, it is what I expected it to be and the story is captivating and interesting. It is the kind of stories I like to read so I am happy that I chose this book. I enjoyed reading the beginning and I think I will enjoy reading the rest of the book.

Freedom of expression

In language arts class with Ms. Taynton, we worked on the human rights and responsibilities. We learnt about the basic human rights by searching resources on Internet and doing a wikispace. I was working on the human right “freedom of expression” with Ian and Abdullah, we were sharing a page and we worked together to find information and opinions. I struggled with finding opinions of different people from different countries on Internet. I think I explained well what “freedom of expression” is and what is the principal debate about it that is still being discussed in some countries, which is “should we keep the freedom of expression or not?”. I did some research about this question and I found good and convenient opinions on both sides, now I understand why this question is very important and why it is very hard to answer it. I used to think the freedom of expression couldn’t be taken away because it is very important for me to express what I think and believe, but now I think the freedom of expression has negative sides too. Per example you can yell “bomb” in an airport because it’s your freedom of expression but it’s taking away other people’s rights, so you aren’t allowed to yell it. I thought there were no limits to the freedom of expression and most people in the world wanted to keep it. But after searching on Internet I saw that most people don’t want to keep it and there are also a lot of limits that not everyone agree with.

I think I learnt a lot about rights and it completely changed my opinions. I still think that the freedom of expression is important but I think there should be some limits that everyone should respect.

Next time I will have to research on the human rights I will try to find more personal opinions of people from all around the world.