Your thoughts on Axis and Allies?

Hey Excel! Here are my thoughts about the game "Axis and Allies." I really liked how we got to take a break from the norm, and play a game! at first i tought it was going to be a fun quick game.. SOOO WRONG! on the box it said it was for ages 8+!!! if i was playing this and i was 8, i would kill myself! i am still confused! I think if we play it a second time it will be easier. Even though i cuoldnt tell you the first thing about how to play this game, i still learned some stuff. I learned that there is a lot of stratagie involved in war.. even if it is just a game. If you make one little mistake, that can open the playing field for many attacks! I also learned that the BRITISH KICKED BUTT!

Aside from that...here is my question. What courntry do you think played the best and should be crowned the winner of the game? You cant say your country unless you REALLy think they played better then everyone else. I am putting my chips on the Soviet Union because they played very smart and with a great deal of intellegence.

Much love for EXCEL 10 '05/'06,

Joslyn on Being Black in America Back in the Day

Thoughts on Black Boy

On page 313, Wright talks about how he feels being black in the society
he is living in. It explains how blacks and whites, although have
different skin color, still have the same dreams, same thoughts, same
hopes and goals. He says that just because he his black, he has to hold
back his dreams, and hopes for something better. He says," Like any
other American, I dreamed of going to business and making money; I
dreamed of working for a firm that would allow me to advance until I
reached an important position;....Yet I knew-with the part of my mind
that whites had given me-that none of my dreams were possible."

When reading that, I had to stop for a second and try to imagine what he was
trying to say. I came to a final thought that made me upset, that just
because he was a different color he had to give up everything. To have
people put down people to the point where they cannot even believe in
themselves anymore is injustice. I will never know what he had to go
through, and how hurt he was by the fact, that he felt he could never
amount up to anything, but I tried to see the message he wanted to get
across, and it made me upset that people could be like that.

These are my thoughts on the topic, maybe you guys can tell me what you think?
Joslyn

What did FDR know? What did Bush know?

Hey Excelers...
I've got something for us to talk about.
As we enter the exciting world of World War II, there are some questions that seem to stand out to me. We threw around the thought that FDR might have known about Pearl Harbor before it happened. It is possible that he was waiting for something like this to happen for America to enter the World War. Before the date of December 7th, 1941 FDR had meetings with other Allied leaders and America was assisting them with war supplies.

We also talked about the similarities and differences to Pearl Harbor and September 11th. I have heard rumors that President Bush first found out about September 11th sometime in August. This is a similarity to Pearl Harbor, because maybe he was looking for a reason to start a war or terror. Do you think that there are other similarites and differences that maybe we missed in class? Let me know that your thinking....~Alyssa

Editor's note: President Bush received a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001 entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S." while at the Crawford ranch. He was briefed that Osama wanted to strike somewhere inside America but nothing specific was given. Bin Ladin has attempted to strike the U.S. in response to our missile attacks on his Afghani bases in 1998 (which were retaliatory strikes for two bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). The foiled millenium bombing plot was Bin Ladin's first major attempt to strike inside the U.S.

Here's a link to the declassified PDB from 8-6-01. http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/80601pdb.pdf
Hopefully this will dispell any rumors.

Paris on Pearl Harbor

After watching the movie, Pearl Harbor, I thought that I would share mythoughts on it. I have never seen the movie Pearl Harbor before and I didn't really know what specifically happened at Pearl Harbor. I thought that the movie showed how organized the Japanese were and how hard itwas for the army to fight back. We talked about how America was in shock because we were playing defense instead of offense. Another factor that made it worse was that all of the ships and everything was in the same area. The movie did a good job in showing how many men were being killed and how crazy it was when they were being attacked.

Do you think that the war would have been different if the army hadn't put all of the ships and everything in the same place? Or if the American government had planned an attack before the bombing? For the first time watching this movie, I thought that it had a big impact on me and it helped me understand how horrible it was.
-Paris

Racism in Black Boy

We havent really talked about Black Boy that much in class so i thought i would give some of my opinions on the theme that Wright is trying toportray. I think the obvious theme that is talked about a lot is racism.The book is called Black Boy for a reason. The book just dosn't talk about racism as a belief but also as a problem in the community as well. Wright wrote this because he wanted to write about the world of blacks that was around him and make it into a character such as Richard to live through the effects of racism. Whites shut Richard down in the book because he's black, so it prevents him from acting normally around the whites that do treat him well. I think this is a huge resemblence of how our society is today in some ways. This is a very hard topic to talk about for some people but i think i does need to be thought out more of how racism was viewed in the book. So, these are some of my thoughts on the major theme that is expressed through Black Boy. Let me know what you guys think about this, or even how racism has had an effect similiar to what it was in Black Boy.

thanks-emily

Which would be worse in Night?

I thought that we brought up some really interesting topics about Night in class, but I was really interested to hear more. I really liked hearing your insight about how you guys thought you would have fared at Auschwitz. I know that I would not have survived very long. Seeing my family taken away from me would be so incredibly hard for me, that I would probably lose any will to live. Without my family, I wouldn't have anything to live for, and in a place like Auschwitz, one will die unless they have a clear goal to keep them going. What about you guys?
That ties in to another conversation we had: Which would be the worst: separation from family, lack of comfort, seeing death every day, or endless brutality/beatings? A lot of people were split between separation from family and seeing death every day. I was interested to hear what more people thought about it. I know that separation from family would be the worst for me, as I could cope with the other issues as long as I had a family to comfort me and to live for. However, being entirely alone in such a scary place would be far worse for me than seeing strangers die: I think I would become numb/indifferent to the death and the beatings after a period of time. What do you guys think???

-Ellie