Maddy's Blog

When reading “Words Don’t Mean What They Mean” this week, the one thing I could just not get out of my head was the show, Friends . In the piece, Pinker mentions the episode of Seinfeld where George is asked up by his date for coffee and later finds out that coffee doesn’t really mean coffee. This allusion led directly to the infamous episode of Friends where Rachel breaks up with Ross and he cheats on her. What is his excuse for cheating on her? “We were on a break!” Ross’s excuse is far from accepted by Rachel and thus begins the seasons-long game of will they or won’t they. I saw two perspectives from this episode. First, Rachel would very much agree with Pinker’s assertion that words don’t really mean what they mean. Rachel may have said she didn’t want to be with Ross anymore but that was because in the moment, she was upset and wanted nothing to do with the jealous monster he had become. Despite this, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, just as soon as she ...

This week, when we got back our essays from before break, I was shocked to find that I had gotten a 7.5 on the Last Child in the Woods rhetorical analysis. Looking back on how I started the year, and even the semester, I realized how much my skills had improved. Seniors who took 11 AP and teachers who teach it always tell us how our writing will improve tremendously throughout the year, but I didn’t really believe it until now. The first essay I wrote this semester was the rhetorical analysis of Clare Boothe Luce’s speech to journalists at the Women’s National Press Club. I garnered a whopping 4.5 on this essay with “moments of nice analysis” but the analysis led to “incorrect or clunky interpretations of the purpose” according to the comments I received. While rereading the essay for this post, I thought back to how disappointed I was in myself because I genuinely thought it was an OK essay. Now, I see that it was not my best work. The 4.5 was deserving and although I was dis...