Jacob Fox, Period 1, 3/11/2020 (LATE)

Write about what you learned in your online English lessons.

Over the past month, we’ve been reading World War Z by Max Brooks. It’s about a zombie apocalypse, but it’s not told from a narrow point of view like most dramatic zombie stories. It’s written in the style of an informational report, documenting the history of the worldwide zombie war. However, the story is not just about the zombies themselves. It’s about the worldwide effect of fear, panic, and ignorance, which causes more destruction than the zombies themselves. It is rich with real life lessons about our nature as humans. We’ve also been working on our final project, which is to create our own monster. Our monster has to be a metaphor of something that happens in real life. This ties in well to the themes of World War Z, and the curriculum as a whole, which reinforces the idea of monsters being a reflection of humanity. Monsters have to be relatable on some level in order to make an interesting and compelling story. Even mindless monsters like zombies, that seem completely disjointed from humanity, Humans fear death and decay, and we fear not being remembered. That fear is personified in the form of a mindless walking corpse that has lost all sense of what it used to be. Still roaming the world as only a shadow of its former self.


How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

For our final project in macroeconomics, we are playing the stock market game again. We get five thousand dollars which we can invest however we want to try to make as much money as possible over the course of a few weeks. It’s becoming increasing apparent to me that stock prices, especially those of the big name companies are mostly influenced by human psychology and bandwagon mentality. News media headlines play a much bigger role than actual data. This is especially apparent during the volatile situation we currently find ourselves in. With new stories breaking every day, it’s hard to guess what will happen to stocks. Mrs. Fink says it’s all about who gets the information first, because the people who spend the time (or have inside connections) to get information before everyone else can act before the market reacts and make a profit. As we’ve learned from reading World War Z, fear is a powerful motivator, and there are always people waiting to take advantage of it. I’d encourage everyone reading this to look up publicly available statistics about U.S senators selling stocks back in February.


What is it like working from home?

Working from home has been difficult. It’s hard to stay focused with all the distractions. Being able to come to school put me in a certain mindset, and I took for granted the fact that I could talk to any of my teachers in person basically any time I wanted. At first it seemed that completing my last semester of high school from home would be much easier than going to school. Purely in terms of workload, it’s definitely been less. However, actually showing up to a school building makes it much easier to coast by, because you’re always reminded of the work that needs to be done. At home, it’s hard to keep up, with senioritis being in full kick. I can close my computer whenever I want, I can’t just walk out of the school building or skip classes. I’ve had to work very hard recently to get things back on track, and it’s been much more difficult than usual to communicate with my teachers. Still, I’m hopeful that I can close out the year well, and be prepared for college next year.