The Great Gatsby

  This year flew by so fast. I can remember the day I walked into AP Language class and Mrs. Kirkman started a lesson right away. In my mind I knew that AP Language class was going to be a long and hard year. Surprisingly this year flew by and every moment I stepped into room 403, I was ready to start the lesson. Mrs.Kirkman you made the class fun and entertaining. My favorite piece that we have read this year is The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was my favorite, because it was a book where it did not involve logical fallacies, grammar, and sentence structures. It was a time where us students got to sit down and enjoy a wonderful book, which involved money, love, and lots of drama. I loved this piece because it took place in the jazz era and we got to see what different types of clothes men and women wore. The blogs that you provided were interesting and the blogs we had to write about were fun. One blog post that we had to do pertaining to the book was where you gave us a list of 1920's attire, jazz music, eighteenth amendment, nineteenth amendment, stock market, or the rise of mafia/mob, was a fun and entertaining blog post to write. My all time favorite blog post that we have ever done was creating our own Gatsby themed party. That post was extremely fun to write because our budget was unlimited. It was also interesting to see what my friends had to write about that topic too. The Great Gatsby book was thrilling yet interesting to read. It had suspense, drama, and quite a few surprises. It was my favorite because those few weeks that we had a chance to read the book were fun, and the blogs that came with it were interesting topics to write about.

The Amazon Rainforest!

  Nature is a place where one goes for the beauty and to have an experience with the wildlife. If I had the chance to go into the wild, I would gladly go to the Amazon. Why the Amazon? Through pictures and stories that I have heard from Lily and read online, the Amazon seems like a place I would love to visit. Amazon has a beautiful forest and trees that reach high at 200 feet. The Amazon is a home to as many as 80,000 plant species from which than 40,000 species play a critical role in regulating the global climate and sustaining the local water cycle. The rare plants that grow in the Amazon rainforest are the orchid hunting, mangroves, Ecuadorian Rainforest Flower, and Rafflesia Flower. The Amazon rainforest has dangerous animals that humans should be careful of. During my trip to the rainforest I would love to see some exquisite animals that I can hold and analyze their behaviors in the rainforest. The animals that are in this rainforest are spider monkey, golden lion tamarin, sloth, giant anteater, giant river otter, capybara, Amazonian mantee, toucan, maca, Amazon pink river dolphin, electric eel, piranha, black caiman, anaconda, jaguar, poison arrow frog, and much more. Well of course some of these animals are extremely dangerous to be close to them, but that is why I will love to take many experts with me who have visited the Amazon rainforest and are familiar with their surroundings. I would like to go the Amazon around three weeks so I can grasp everything I see and learn how unique this rainforest is.

New Brain Disease

“For concussion sufferers, a brain scan may warn it’s time to call it quits”

By: Melissa Healy

Source: LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-concussion-test-encephalopathy-20150406-story.html

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is the constellation of cognitive and psychiatric symptoms that appear to result from repeated blows to the head. Not one person has the correct diagnosis of this disease.  The disease itself still needs a work in progress, and the abnormal protein tangles throughout the brain. The only people that have been diagnosed with this kind of disease are former athletes who have dies in various states of dementia, or by suicide. Research has been done, and disease can be diagnosed now if one is living. With early detection patients can take steps to protect their brains from further injuries. By going through many steps, and scanning doctors can see how far this disease has spread. This disease is abnormal proteins are deposited in the brain that is usually seen in Alzheimer’s disease and motor neuron disease. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans former fourteen football players and it reveals patterns in the brain that ranged from localized to extensive. The locations and extent of these abnormalities are seen to track with the severity of those retired athletes symptoms of depression, anxiety and intellectual impairment. The retired football players ranged in ages from forty to eighty-six. Protein clumps can be found in the brainstem and the amygdala, which is a walnut shaped structure deep in the brain that is key in processing strong emotions. There are more tests yet to be conducting on this new research that was found in the brain of football players, and what was the cause of it. The article is important for people to read because it shows what can happen to the brain if one cannot be careful, especially football players.