English Goals

I am most proud of creating a theme statement and backing it up with evidence from the text. Something I found challenging during the assessment was making unique inferences. One of my inferences somewhat repeated a previous inference. My strongest inference was finding a part of the text that supported how strong George and Lennie's relationship was. My theme statement for my written response was that it is important to set goals in your life in order to move on/persevere through life and that life is much easier to get through when you are not alone. It was effective because they were not cliches, so the reader could understand it in a different view and not immediately dismiss it. My text integration techniques were not that good. I could improve on inserting them in the middle of a sentence instead of stating them before analyzing them. Something I want to work on to prepare for the summative before October break is making unique inferences. While I could also improve on text integration, I think that unique inferences that are not repetitive are more important.

Reflection on the Conclusion of "Of Mice and Men"

While I was surprised by how Steinbeck chose to end the story, in hindsight, there were many events foreshadowing Lennie's death. In chapter 1, Lennie had accidentally killed a mouse. Near the end of the book, he accidentally killed his new puppy and Curley's wife. This foreshadowed how Lennie would eventually get into trouble that he could not get out of. However, an event that more clearly foreshadowed Lennie's death was Carlson shooting Candy's dog. Candy raised his dog since he was a pup, so he formed a strong bond with him. However, Candy has to make a choice between letting his dog suffer for the rest of his life or just putting him out of his misery. This foreshadows Lennie's death because Lennie's mental disability made life very hard for him, and as shown with Candy's dog, those who were weak and needed to depend on another person to survive were most likely to be put down. These events support the theme of perseverance. Given the time period, the 1930s, or the Great Depression, perseverance was a very important trait, because, without it, a person could easily not survive the Great Depression. Overall, Lennie's death and the death of Candy's dog support the theme of perseverance in "Of Mice and Men."