Response+to+unfamiliar+genre

//Winston High // //by // //Justin Bomia // //u can come ds to eat //, my mother texted me. “Hey guys I’ll be right back I have to go grab my food don’t go inside the cave without me” I told my friends. We like to play online video games together. I took off my head set; I put my character on stasis pushed in my keyboard and went downstairs to grab my food. My mother and father were sitting at the dinner table I saw my plate on the counter. I grabbed it and went back upstairs to my computer. “Hey guys I’m back” I said. I continued to play a multi-player video game with my friends for the rest of the afternoon before my mom finally texted me that it was time to go to bed because I had to get up for school the next morning. I don’t know why she feels the need to tell me. “Hey guys I need to get off for a while, I have school in the morning.” I woke up the next morning for school, all of my mornings start out the same, I always check my social networks: mylife.com, lookatme.com, im-not-this-person-in-real-life.com, facestory.com. Each site has its own purpose, mylife.com just highlights what’s going on in your life, you can highlight trips you take with your family, family reunions, and family holidays. However this site has hardly any traffic and I expect it to be gone by next year, I mean no one does things like this with families anymore. Lookatme.com I don’t like that much, but it’s where some of my friends go, it’s a social network that just focuses on the user, that persons lookatme only reflects themselves and no other aspect of their life. Usually people who are starving for attention go to this one the most. Facestory.com is this old network that only old people use like my parents, aunts and uncles. The only reason I use it is to make sure my parents don’t embarrass me by putting up personal updates that I’m afraid someone I know will see. Also it’s totally lame like people play these games and post their scores, no one cares. My parents aren’t as bad as other parents, this is one of the few things me and my father agree on. My father uses facestory.com, because he’s old, it’s the most popular website, well by default. Because of facestory’s big boom in the late 2000’s they were able to convince the government (my father says as a special interest group) that everyone who is born should be mandated to have a facestory, instead of giving them a social security number. So by default they are the most popular, but they are not the coolest one. im-not-this-person-in-real-life.com is by far my favorite social network. You can start off with a picture of yourself, then with this program you can modify your picture to make yourself look like you should if your body index was correct. This website is geared toward those who are not comfortable in their own skin, although this doesn’t apply to everyone. On this social network you can be anything you want, and experience lifestyles that are only portrayed on television. So instead of just watching The Music Channels reality show //The Real Students from Orange County// you can actually be, and look like them through an account with im-not-this-person-in-real-life.com. This also doubles and is similar to the other social networks, it’s just the best one, I have received the most friends request through this network, probably because I have worked harder than most on my pictures. I usually change my picture once a month. Social networks are amazing it’s a great way to meet a lot of people. My parents hate them; they think people spend too much time on them. They also feel like it’s been the cause of so many people being so socially awkward, but I think that’s why they are great without them no one would talk. I mean how are we going to communicate without them? My mom says “social networks have been used so much in the last 20 years that people in some ways have stopped communicating in person.” I don’t find this weird it’s the way it’s always been for me my whole life. I mean it’s like my grandparents, grandparents didn’t use phones to communicate that talked face to face. In some ways my parents are hypocrites, they’re the ones responsible for the cell phone industry being as big as it is. It’s weird they always talked about how hard times were yet everyone had 300$ //Blackberry’s// and 400$ //Iphones//. And how was it that the unemployment rate reached 25% but 90%of Americans had Cable? My father much like his father likes to use the phrase “When I was your age”, which is usually followed by “We actually asked girls out in person, and not through a social network site.” I don’t understand the purpose of asking them out in person when maybe they need to think about if they even want to go on a date with you. Not to mention I wouldn’t know where to start, and that’s what old people do. I’m a gentleman I always go to a girls’ parent’s Facestory to tell them where we are going and when I will bring her home. After I check my social networks I usually go downstairs, skip the oatmeal my mom has made, and leave for school. I’m not sure why she makes various breakfast foods; I don’t really have time to eat in the morning. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I walk to Winston high school every morning; it’s only a few blocks from my house. According to my father it was once an elementary school, in fact the best in Monroe a city in South Eastern Michigan. My father says they closed it down in 2008 due to so many people leaving the state, problems with the economy and cut backs from the state. Now it’s an alternative high school for students who are not wealthy enough to go to private schools. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Alternative high schools are the high schools that have replaced the traditional public high schools that my parents went to. When they were growing up you didn’t have to pay out of your own pocket to have a teacher teach you, back then all schools were like private schools are today, the money for the old public teachers came from local tax dollars. Now instead of teachers teaching me I work on a computer, for five different class periods, then meet with a teacher tech for one of those hours. A teacher tech now serves the purpose of the six other teachers they just make sure you are doing your work, help you with any hang ups you have with the programming and then report back your grades to you. But they are not there to teach you, that you do on your own. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">All of public school students work is now done online through a public school website. This is what public school has become; it’s very efficient for the government. Now instead of paying a bunch of teachers to teach, we just learn on our own at our own pace through computers at school, or as they refer to them “Education Stations”. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">My father hates it, but I think it’s because he was once a teacher, and now just writes lesson plans for the state, it’s a fairly simple job he just has to slightly improve what he has written year to year. He claims to be one of the lucky ones; he still has a job in the education field. Because all students can now take the same lessons in the state they only need one teacher writing the lesson. I hate the Inter books that my father assigns though, in his lesson he has assigned two readings for the year, M.T. Anderson’s //Feed,// and //1984.// Not sure why we have to read //1984// when it’s 2028; seems a little dated for our time. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">My father claims that the move toward online learning started when he was going to a community college. They introduced online classes as an option instead of taking the class with a teacher. Then he told me that it started to make its way into summer school, if high school students needed to make up a credit they could just take an online summer school class instead of going to actual summer school. This became successful in the eyes of the government and once the government realized that computers and online classes could do what a teacher does the shift began to switch teachers out for computers. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">“Computers and online learning experiences can’t do the same job that a teacher would be capable of; if students are struggling to learn something a computer can’t tell why. What this is really about is that the government can save a ton of money on public education. It’s the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on (education) and they both have it wrong, but what do they care, all of their children have teachers, they all go to private schools” is what my father always tells his friends, although I always get embarrassed when my friends can hear him over the microphone when I’m playing my MMO. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">My father is really old school, he still reads books, watches television, and has these things called “letters”. Prior to the shift of computer teachers, my father learned how to write in school, we don’t do this anymore now; it’s such a waste of time. My father says it usually took him thirty minutes to write a letter that had 200 words in it; I can type that in fifty seconds. It’s written in a language I don’t even understand, he calls it cursive, although no one writes in this form anymore, except government officials; it seems like a waste of time to me. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I went through the double doors and was starving so I headed towards the Five in One. This is just slang for our cafeteria, it has five restaurants in one, you can choose between Macdonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. All of these restaurants pay a lot towards education; my father says it started with Coke machines in schools. If you put a Coke machine in your school they offered you so much, I guess once these fast food restaurants started offering schools money to be there the government found it as an opportunity to take away more funding. So instead of getting more for schools, now schools got the same. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">After eating I went to my computer station to start my first subject. The government realized that the No Child Left Behind Act was no longer working, because they felt that it was instead holding back students that were waiting on other students to catch up to them. So now we work at our own pace, and choose what subject to start with. Only problem is we can’t leave until we are done, that is the only part I don’t like compared to my parents schooling. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I usually start with math, because it tends to be the hardest, but the subject that I can focus on the most. Usually our math consist of reading some pages that shows us how to do the problem then we have to do however much the writer of these lessons thinks is sufficient. Some days are worse than others. Today it took me four hours; every time I get stuck I check all of social networks, and then try to do the problem. If I understand it I reward by checking my pages again. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">After math I usually do English this is the stuff my father wrote or planned. Today all he had was a grammar test; I decided to wait until after lunch and checked my health class. We just have to read a pamphlet about portion control at the 5-1, I read through it in case there was a quiz on it the next day. The main point was instead of upsizing your meal, just by a medium sized meal, which my father says was the extra large meal when he was a teen. I was getting hungry so I checked my bag to see what my mom packed me; It was turkey on wheat, a orange, a small bag of Sun Chips, and a diet Coke. I took out the chips and coke consumed it then went down to the 5-1. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">After eating at the 5-1 I felt a lot better, this usually lasts 3-4 hours then I feel dead again. I sat down to take the test for English, it had 10 questions. Each question consisted of me correcting the sentence or choosing a correct version for that sentence. It was easy all you have to do is open a word document cut and paste the sentence and it will give you the correct sentence. I only miss maybe one or two during the entire year. My father always wonders how all of his students always ace his grammar test yet continually misspell words, and get the grammar wrong on their social network updates. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I was bored once 2:30 hit which is usually when the students who don’t use social networks leave to go home. For the rest of the day I worked on history, computer science, and government. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">It was 8:30 once I got home; I turned to my television to see what was on and started to scroll through the listings, KILI is the only channel I really watch, it has the shows from the 90’s. I prefer these shows because it’s what I grew up on, it’s what my parents always watch as well, I think it’s because they were high scholars’ in the 90’s. I wish we had new television shows, but with online pirating being so big during the 2000’s, it eventually took its toll and movies and television series stopped being produced, and production companies claimed bankruptcy. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">After watching television for fifteen minutes I was bored, I told my parents good night and went upstairs. I turned on my computer logged onto my MMO account. I looked for my friends and we started to play our characters together, this was better than anything we could do in real life.

**Response**
====<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">I very much enjoyed this experience, and this may be my most important piece of work since I started college. I have wanted to write something like this but wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. I wasn’t even sure where to start, I just knew that I had a lot to say and I wanted to say it by writing it in the form of a dystopian novel. Doing research helped some, but I realized the best advice that I received was to just read fiction, which up to this point I have read a handful of dystopian literature. ==== <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">This was a short story however, but potentially the makings of a young adult book, I have a lot more to say, but felt that eight pages are enough to demonstrate that I understand how to write a dystopian short fiction. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">I think I overlooked how long something can take to say or explain. In other words the paper can be a lot longer than what you expect if you just write it in your head first. For what I wanted to say I thought it would take about 4-5 pages but instead it took 8 and it could have been longer. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">I think the narration and description were the most demanding of dystopian literature. At least in this case it was, because all my short story is narration, which I didn’t mind because it made it easier to write. Description was important because it’s a story that happens in the future, but it was hard trying to not make this a story where cars are flying, and everyone has a robot; I wanted to keep it similar to today’s society, only with more technology. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">I think the computer language I used with some of the characters help distinguish that it’s young adult fiction, I should have used more but didn’t have time. Also the narration of the main character distinguishes that this is not only dystopian literature but also a young adult short story. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">I think the genre is designed for rules to be broken, for society’s sake. Sometimes doing what is right requires breaking the rules. Also it requires in most cases using a different language, because language and slang change over time. It helps to define that the story is happening during a different time.