Kayah's Comp Blog

When I was reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the line "You don't pass or fail at being a person." stood out to me. I remember agreeing with it instantly, and I still feel the same way after having had time to reflect more on the novel. I believe that all human beings have inherent worth and dignity simply by being alive. Human beings do bad things. There are people who may be inherently "bad", perhaps because they were born that way or perhaps due to their environment and circumstances. Even still, a person has worth. All people have the capability to do good. All people experience what it is to be human: to feel, to think, to love, to experience pain. The human experience is shared by all of us in some capacity, even people with personality disorders that we may consider "inhuman". Dehumanizing can be so incredibly painful because we are human. Black individuals have been dehumanized as part of the long history of colonization, slavery, and ra...

Pokemon types are usually quite obvious based on the creature's appearance. Butterfree, which obviously takes the form of a butterfly, is a bug type. The spoon-wielding Uri Geller inspired Alakazam is a psychic type. The flopping fish known as Magikarp is a water type. Sudowoodo was, of course, a grass type Pokemon. It's a tree for God's sake. It has to be a grass type. In my ongoing quest to catch 'em all and complete my Pokedex in Pokemon Shield, I needed to somehow acquire a Sudowoodo. Luckily, Sudowoodo evolves from Bonsly, another tree-shaped creature. I'd recently completed a max raid battle and been rewarded with a powerful Bonsly which made it the perfect candidate for evolution. To allow you to most effectively prepare for these often challenging battles, the game shows you the silhouette of the Pokemon as well as their type or types before the max raid battle begins. Puzzlingly, Bonsly was listed as a rock type. I thought nothing of it. Pokemon often ...

Hjortshoj defines predatory reading as "reading from the top of the food chain", a term that is purposefully aggressive to convey the attitude and approach needed to successfully handle large volumes of academic reading. Part of this style of reading is to read with intention and strategy. It is important to use this style of reading to fully understand and remember the text. It will also allow the reader to better answer questions about the reading and form their own interpretations and arguments about what was read. College can involve a lot of reading, and the text assigned can be dense. It's difficult to study for a test or find evidence for a paper when there is a lot of source material to cover. A good portion of the information in the assigned reading may not even be relevant to what a student is doing. It is essential that students know how to decide what to read, what the reading says, and be able to understand the reading in order to effectively use the informat...