The author of the book Ernest J. Gaines is an award winning author. Born and raised on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. He used his growing up as a premise and setting for a lot of his works in the future. He grew up the oldest of 12 children, raised by their aunt who was crippled. He was born after slavery had ended but he grew up on an old plantation and was impoverished.

He got his basic education at a plantation church, which in the book “A Lesson Before Dying”, the main character taught reading, writing and arithmetic at an old church for a few months out of the year. He later went to a catholic school to continue learning due to his previous school only going up to Eighth grade at the time. At age fifteen he moved to Vallejo, California to rejoin his parents who had moved during The second World War. At age 17 he wrote his first novel while babysitting his little brother. He sent it to a New York publisher who later rejected. Gaines burned the manuscript but later rewrote it, which became his 1st published novel, Catherine Carmier.

In 1956 he published his 1st short story titled “Turtles”. In 1957 he earned his degree in literature from SFSU. After he served two years in the army he then attended Stanford University on a two year writing fellowship. Since 1984, Gaines has spent one half of the year in San Francisco and the half in Lafayette leading a creative writing workshop in autumn at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines currently lives at the old plantation he grew up on with his wife and had the church he grew up in moved there.

Now in the book A lesson before dying, it is set in the 1940’s and a guy named Jefferson gets into a car with these two cars he knew while walking down the street. The guys decide they’re going go to the liquor store and the driver says that the old man that owns the store is going to let them pay him back because they have no money. When they proceed to the store they pick up a bottle and tell the man they have no money but they’ll pay him back. The old man says either you have money or you leave so the driver goes behind the counter and does something to the old man but the man grabs a gun and starts shooting and the other guy begins shooting. After it finishes, everyone is dead but Jefferson, who stands there in shock hears the old man calling him but Jefferson stands still.

The old man finally dies and Jefferson grabs a bottle of whiskey and begins drinking to calm his nerves. He finally realizes what happens and looks at the register and takes the cash since he figured no one would know. He grabs the whiskey and leaves as two white men walk in the shop. Now he is on trial and the public defender tries to free him but belittles him in the process calling him a little boy and nothing but a hog who is incapable of the planning a murder and robbery. The jury doesn’t move because it’s the 1940’s and during that time, two men word against one black man’s doesn’t help.

So he gets charged with a crime he didn’t commit and is sentenced to the chair. Jefferson’s god mom said she wants him to die a man, not a hog and asks her friends nephew who is a school teacher to help him become a man before dying. Hence the title “A Lesson Before Dying.” This story keeps you hooked and you may become attached to some of the characters, especially Jefferson. If you like books like “The Heart Of A Woman” by Maya Angelou then you will enjoy a book like “A Lesson Before Dying”.

This book uses very strong language and controversial language you may not feel comfortable with but that’s one of the things that makes this book so good. The structure of the book and the way it flows is very well done. Going into the book I expected to be entertained and enjoy the book based directly off the title of the book and because I heard the movie was good. All in all, this book met and exceeded my expectations and I have to say this is now one of my all time favorite books.

Author: Ernest J. Gaines

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

Publication Date: 1993

Pages: 256

Genre: Fiction

Over the course of the year I’ve learned a variety of things about the different time periods and people in those time periods. Those time periods and people in them were very significant to the shaping of the history in the world. I learned about two main ideas that stood out to me, The 1st main idea was “No one is really innocent, everyone is guilty of something” and the second main idea was “Revolutions cause the world to change in unexpected ways” .

These stood out to me because they are so true. When we were conducting the trials in World History, we learned that everyone in the cortes trial was partly guilty for why Cortes did what he did. Also in the multi-national elite trial, everyone was partly guilty of why poorer countries are taken advantage of. One quote from the trial is “We bow down to the system of profit, we’re brainwashed into taking as much money as possible, just as the leaders of rich countries like the United States would do, and their leaders are ridiculed too. We are no better, or no worse.” This is saying the the ruling elite in the poor countries are following the ways of the US and how we handle business here and they are just modeling our work Another quote is “Our country is not where it needs to be. No country is perfect, we have to work to move our way up.” I strongly agree with this quote. No matter what, every country has it’s problems.I’ve always believed this and after the trial, it furthered my beliefs in this.

The only country that came close to perfection was Atlantis and we aren’t even sure if it existed. I believe every country does need to build it’s way up. No country starts at the top. The United States started from the bottom and now they here at the top. Every country wants to get to the top so they can provide a better life for the people in their country. If they are struggling then no one there has the luxury to live a comfortable life.

During the trials I learned that in order to get significant funding from the bigger companies, countries have to decide if they want to please the companies or the residents. They can’t come to a decision to satisfy both parties because no matter how they try to balance the choices, it always favors one party more than the other. My group was faced with the challenge of trying to do so, as were 5 other groups and no one truly succeeded despite who was said to be the “winner”. Now some revolutions that changed the world would include the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. The American and French Revolution are the two best known revolutions but the Cuban Revolution is significant also.

The French Revolution was huge in changing the future of Europe as prior to this Great Britain ruled over the French. The French people were sick of the way they were being treated so they did something about it and they enlisted some of the biggest names, manly Napoleon Bonaparte. He was a big reason the French Revolution went the way it did. For the American Revolution the Americans wanted to break free of Great Britain’s control over them. They fought back and overthrew the government. They also enlisted a historic figure in George Washington and he helped get the now United States their freedom. Over the course of the year I learned why this was all important. Doing research on it helped because prior to this I would always hear little details here and there about it but never the full story.

I began to compare the two revolutions and see which one seemed more important but in the end, they both were important in shaping the future. If neither one occurred, I wouldn’t be writing about this. I might be working somewhere through forced labor by Great Britain.The history of these revolutions made sure the future was bright for it’s kin. In the present there have been other revolutions inspired by this two which helped their country gain independence and they aren’t ruled over by another country.

India, Malaya, Dutch Indies, Ceylon and the Philippines were rich in natural resources.

If you had enough land for your family and were told to grow crops for Europe then you would begin starving due to you losing crops.

When a colony was made they threw anyone in it forcing them to co-exist

Turned colonies against each other

Used bribes and small steps when taking over the colonies

Europe is getting most of the profit

Made the asians that if they had lighter skin then you were better and more beautiful.

Europe controlled over 84% of the world

Questions

Does colonialism still exist or is it over

How can you strive when your overseers have given up

The project was about the Keystone Pipeline and how it was going to carry oil from Canada to the Southern parts of the U.S.A. Some people were for it getting built and some were against it. In Class we brainstormed about monologue ideas and the people or objects we would portray. My partner and I chose between the ones we brainstormed our 5 best combined. We chose the following 5; A canadian hockey player, a bulldozer operator, a jobless man living near the construction site, a farmer whose land will be plowed through, and the a water droplet infected by the oils from the tar sands.

“Oh man that doesn’t feel good.” That’s what I was thinking after making a great catch where I reached out near my foot to make what’s called a “shoestring catch.” I came off the shady baseball field, overlooked by the many trees on that dark afternoon. “Why does my foot hurt so much? It’s mostly my toe.” I was thinking. I came in limping and wincing in pain as if someone just stabbed the side of my foot multiple times. 

As I went to sit down on the bench, my grandfather asked me what was wrong and I said “My toe hurts a lot. And part of my foot.”

  He said, “Don’t give into the pain.” 

I replied, “I’m not, but my foot hurts like a mug.” 

Afterwards, I just sat there rubbing my foot hoping it would nurse it back to normal but it didn’t work. I then went into the field limping and cursing my foot under my breath. I played the entire game limping and fighting through the pain, so I could try to help my team. After the game we had lost by 5 points and I was upset because it was a very winnable game. My mind was cluttered with thoughts of how we could have won and my thought process snapped with every step I took as the pain really set in. I could barely walk now as I headed to the truck to give my teammate a ride home. I went to sleep that night trying to get ready for a full day of pain and suffering. 

This was the stupidest thing I’ve done so far in my life. That kept going through my mind as I was constantly walking and stopping to rest and massage my throbbing foot. I thought I wasn’t going to be able to make it home if my foot didn’t stop hurting. I felt like there was a 1 ton weight just sitting on my entire foot. I had a playoff baseball game in 4 days and I was in no condition to play, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to miss my 1st high school playoff game. Even if we lost, at least I was there. My parents said, “Soak your foot in epsom salt and you will be just fine.” But I was thinking, “Put yourself in my place, then lets see if all I need is epsom salt.” When I got home that night I slowly limped over to the bathroom to fill the blue tub with water to soak my foot in epsom salt. As I lay down on my bed my head began to throb as I wondered whether or not I would be able to play come Monday afternoon

Over that weekend I tried to stay off my foot as much as I could, but of course I couldn’t since neither my family nor I realized the excruciating pain I was going through. My parents had me doing work over the weekend; I helped clean the house and the front lawn. As I was getting the push broom out of the shed a shovel fell over and landed on my toe. I thought it was over for me. I hopped around the yard yelling and stopping myself from cursing the shovel for what it just did to me. I sat down and felt my foot which was throbbing very fast. The amount of pain I feeling was equal to someone cutting of my toe. Afterwards I hopped as fast as I could up the steps and into the house so I could ice my foot and rest up to finish cleaning the yard. I finished cleaning the yard 2 hours later with ice on my foot. I shivered the whole time and I couldn’t feel my foot after 15 min. of having it on. Later that night, I soaked my foot in epsom salt again, which didn’t help but my parents insisted. I went to bed that night ready to just give up on playing in the playoff game, but in my mind I would have seemed like a punk. So hurt foot and all, I wasn’t going to give up.

Monday finally came and I woke up. I had a slight headache and my eyes were kinda blurry. I got out of bed and stopped myself from yelling and waking everyone up as I put pressure on my foot. I tried my best to walk to the bathroom supporting myself on the walls. I thought to myself hopefully I will be able to make it through the day. I told myself that after the season I would go to the doctor to see what was wrong with me. I never complained about my injury as much as most people would think. I never even asked to stay home from school or miss a baseball game. When I got to school, I was greeted by the warm welcoming of walking up the stairs to the 3rd floor. In a few hours we would be leaving for the bus to take us to the baseball field. When 1:30 finally hit and it was time for us to leave, the moment of truth awaited me.

As we slowly walked off of the bus to see what the field was like, I sighed with relief because I noticed my limp wasn’t as bad as before. We started our routine warm ups, stretching our bodies, doing push ups, jogging and getting our throwing arms loosened by playing catch with each other. We had to do one exercise called “Frogs,” where we act like frogs without the jumping part. I still couldn’t bend my toes and when I did, a quick jolt of pain made me cringe to the point that I didn’t want to play the game at all. I knew that wasn’t an option though, and I fought through the pain. The game was starting in 5 minutes and people were trying to hype themselves up in their own way. Some people listened to music, others kept warming up or talked to teammates. I just sat on the bench by myself and prayed. The umpire then let the coaches and captains know that it was time.

Throughout the course of the game my foot felt fine, but it could have been better. I still felt the occasional shock of pain, but not as much. I had a very big hit that started a rally for us. They only gave me a double. I hit the ball so far they thought they couldn’t find it because it went into the woods. Although, soon as the umpire said go back to 2nd the kid on the other team found the ball so I got robbed of what could have been a home run. You can’t imagine the amount of disappointment I felt when the ump told me to go back to 2nd base. I think my face looked like I just lost my best friend. We hung in the game for few more innings, then the other team started to score run after run and we lost. I was happy that we had made it that far and that the captains got to go to the playoffs. After the game my toe felt like it was very overworked. I just chose to put my slides on, hop in the car and deal with the rest later.

Hey everyone it’s Raekwon again and I’m bring you my final blog post called post for change. Thanks for reading my blog posts and I hope they touched you in someway or form. If you are ready my post for the 1st time I will summarize my last two blog posts but here are the links to them 1 and 2 if you missed them. Ok so my first post was info on my topic Government Spending on Prisoners vs. Students. Some things I covered were the spending and alternatives we could do to prevent how much the Gov. spends on prisoners costing taxpayers more money. I talked on the statistics and other graphs on the topic. In my second post I talked about my opinion on how I feel about the spending.

I also touched on some info I find on private prisons. I talked about my ideas and how I think we can fix this problem that is going on. All right now that that is out the way, I want to talk about this post for change. I’m going to tell you what I’ve done to make something happen. So far I’ve asked some adults if they could address the town hall when they have those meetings and bring this topic up or if they could talk to government officials for me. What’s left to do is see if change will happen. If they consider making a change then that’s a huge step forward that they even considered the idea. 

 Now we were suppose to make our own piece of original content which I chose on make to make a poster with prisoners and students on it telling people to make the choice on who they would rather support which I’m hoping people support kids who could create a better future for us and help the economy. I also made little cards with facts on it about the topic to help raise awareness. Now I would like to take this time to acknowledge everyone that helped me in this process, which includes the following people: Mrs. Dunn, Julia Boyer, My Dad, My Mom and Science Leadership Academy school.

This is my Bibliography

 Hello everyone again I come to you with my 2^nd post on government spending on prisoners vs. students. One of my main issues is the fact that the government gives convicted killers, rapists, kidnappers, etc. health care that a lot of kids in America don’t have and food housing and more opportunities that most kids don’t get. Some new info I picked up is about private prisons. Although they are beneficial to saving money it also has its faults. For starters the security is very bad in some places as it said 3 murderers had escaped before. Also with private prisons they put high profile prisoners in low security places.

This added to my knowledge because although it’s good to use private prisons for financial reasons it is not for safety purposes. It costs less if the government pays a private prison rather than run it themselves. In my opinion safety comes 1^st cause if we aren’t safe than having money means nothing. After we get our security up to protect the people then we can worry about money. Although we can solve the safety issue by just putting low profile prisoners in the private prisons with medium security and leaving the high profile prisoners in the max security prisons. I have an idea that could work but it would take a lot of work and maybe money but the results will benefit us in the long run. 

  What if we built an island like Alcatraz and put all the high profile prisoners and low profile prisoners there with no resources to help them escape and a high wall around the perimeter with sharks swimming around so they wouldn’t try to escape that way. In the long run we would save billions because they wouldn’t have to keep building new prisons and prison cells and also having to pay guards to watch over them. I think this could work if we perfect what my main idea is and if we put the time and effort into it. I wonder if any other people care about this topic as much as I do. I am going to ask teachers and principals if they can help me get in touch with government officials to help this problem get fixed. My bibliography 

My name is Raekwon Smith and I’m doing a post on a world topic that interests me for school. It’s called You and The World and you pick a problem going on in the world that you want to talk about and then do a series of blog posts on it. My topic is about how the government and individual states spend more money on prisoners than kids and education. This topic is important to me because this could affect our education in the future because all the money we have is going towards funding prisons and prisoners that don’t deserve the care they receive. Prisons cost taxpayers more than $32 billion a year. Every year that an inmate spends in prison costs $22,000. An individual sentenced to five years for a $300 theft costs the public more than $100,000. The cost of a life term averages $1.5 million.One year at New Jersey State Prison cost more than one year at Princeton university.

According to heartsandminds.org, States are spending more money on prisons than education. Over the course of the last 20 years, the amount of money spent on prisons was increased by 570% while that spent on elementary and secondary education was increased by only 21%. They provide prisoners with free health care, internet access, weight room, cable television, access to libraries, free sports programs, computer lab, laundry services, funding to earn a degree, free housing, three square meals a day, clothing, and free dental care. Not all kids are provided with that type of care and attention that they give to prisoners. Our state of Pennsylvania is second on the list of most prisons.

Pennsylvania cut the budget for education to spend it on the growing rate of criminals in 2007. There are 46,000 inmates in Pennsylvania and $90 is spent on each inmate per day—which covers food, health care recreation, etc. The national average is only $63. $3.3 billion was spent last year on prison health care services.  Every inmate is guaranteed access to health care when they require it. It is stated in articlebase.com that if 30% of the prison population went to private facilities then it would save $100 million dollars annually but only 28 states allow that.

Private places could provide better care for prisoners while saving money (which would cost tax payers less) and preparing them for when they are released into the real world again to get along with everyone else. Every day 200 new cells are built. There could be private places instead to have a better outcome in the future. Her is picture of a prison cell in a Pennsylvania prison http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/prison-5.jpg. Here is my bibliography.

Querido Eduardo Romero,

         Saludes desede filadelphia. Me llamo Raekwon Smith. Yo tengo catorce anos. ¿Cuando anos tienes? Mi cumpleanos es dos de abril. ¿Que tiempo hace hoy.

Me gusta deporte el baloncesto. No me gusta futbol. Me gusta comida Americano. No me gusta musica Chinese. Me gusta musica el rap. No me gusta classica. Me gusta video juego. ¿Que te interesta?

Yo soy alto y grande. Yo soy guapo, Africano Americano y Moreno. Yo soy inteligente, interesante, comico, simpatico, y divertido. Yo soy meso menos serra. ¿Como eras tu? Bueno, me voy porque tengo que hacer tarea y jugar baloncesto. Mucho Gusto, adios

                                                               Con carino,

                                                                                                  Raekwon Smith