Welcome to my Cyber English website. Cyber English is a class offered by Danbury High School with twenty students currently enrolled this year. These twenty students are separated into four groups--groups that independently pave their own paths to discover America by answering essential questions that they pose themselves.
I am happily a part of Group 3 which consists of the following members: Caitlin E., Sally R., Grace S., and Catherine T.. During the first quarter, our first unit concentrated on the essential question: How do individuals respond to the different pressures of the community? We thought it was vital to find a question that we could connect back to with future essential questions. Thus, we found this question on individual versus community general enough to lead us in any direction we might wish to go. So far, our first unit is working well with our second unit that we are working on now which focuses on the topic of obsession. We have discovered through our readings that our original essential question for the second unit is not suitable to the books we have read, so we need to revise the question. On a positive note, we can see obsession rooting from our first essential question on individual versus community. To see the desired effects from a shaky initial start of this long-term project gives us a sense of accomplishment. With that having been said, I will leave you with this passage from Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief:
"This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual--how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness. The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and then the other tipping the balance back. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something--your town or your profession or your hobby--then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are a part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind. It is the fundamental contradictoriness of the United States of America--the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which every man is king. I envied the orchid people all around me in the Convention Center, and all the orchid people who were going to swarm in here tomorrow, and I envied the Seminole tribe members for the same reason, for having found and fitted themselves into a small and crowded circle, and if any of them had moments when they had to step outside it and vouch for their independence from it, they seemed to be able to do it and then step happily back in" (256-57).
