One word that I looked up from Anderson’s essay was frazzled. When I looked up this word I saw that it was meant for showing effects of exhaustion or strain.

A line that made me smile was “That is the great virtue of chips: They are here for us to eat them. So that is what we will do.”

If I was assigned an essay like this I would write it to my favorite ice cream because it gives me a feeling of comfort, safety and as well sweetness. Which is something we all want and crave sometimes during this hard times that we are going through. 

• One word that I had to look up was frazzled. It means showing effects of exhaustion or strain. 
• One line that made me at least smile was “This will force us to stop looking, for a few minutes, at the bramble of tabs we’ve had open on our internet browsers for all these awful months: the articles we’ve been too frazzled to read about the TV shows we’ve been meaning to watch; the useless products we keep almost impulse-buying…” This made me smile because it is just so relatable to me like useless impulse buying.
• If I were assigned an essay like this, I would write about probably something related to fruits because I just really like fruit and I find myself eating some sort of fruit when I’m stressed or in need of a break. 

Over the next few days, you will be reading and giving feedback to your peers’ personal narrative drafts.  Each of you will be reviewing two of your classmates’ essays and working in groups of three to revise your essays.  Your groups are as follows:

Group #1:  Geselle, Kaylen, Abdu

Group #2: Samantha, Gianni, Nicole

Group #3: Melanie, Mokhitobon, Sydney

Group #4: Lorraine, Danna, Brian

Group #5: Destiny, Lelani, Mindy

You will be using this Peer Review Form to guide the process.  Please read the instructions carefully, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions.  The sooner you get your peer review done, the better.  To receive credit for this assignment, please complete your peer review by midnight on Friday, February 19th. This will give your classmates time to incorporate some of your feedback before we meet again on Monday, Feb. 22nd.

• One word from Hamilton’s essay that I had to look up was Chastising. Chastising means to rebuke or reprimand severely.
• “I’m not sure you should sit across from each other and eat the roasted bird in resentful silence, either, but we did that, too, and the meat was disagreeably tough.” The author shares a food memory in which she learned something very important about life. In this particular passage I like how the author uses her word choice to describe the Hard Truth that she learns throughout the article. After volunteering to kill a Chicken, the author struggles to kill the bird quickly and less painfully, so her Dad begins yelling at her aggressively without helping her out. When they ate in a very upset and tense manner, The author ends the passage with descriptions of having a very tough meal that night. Thus, the author learns that people are not always gonna be there for her or save her, so she must learn how to be tough on her own. One question that I have is if she applied what she learned quickly in life or did it take some time. 
• Why was the author very melancholy in the beginning? 

It’s the Summer before Summer break before our last year of Highschool. My Best friend and I are cooling off on probably one of the hottest days in July in her pool as we talk about wanting to have the most memorable and crazy Senior Year ever as we wait for our other friends to get here. We talk about summer parties, Homecoming games, parties that we want to throw, trips that were definitely going on because we rarely do anything without each other. We live about 1 hour away from the City in a suburban area of Staten Island, so we talk about planning city days with our friend group as well. Not only do we plan for the best Senior year, but we laugh about the greatest moments we have had at the most talked about party our Junior year and how everything would have been different if we hadn’t met our sophomore year in our Italian class. These are one of those moments where everything is just as it should be. When our two other friends make it we all jump into the pool again and play everything you can play in a pool. My friend’s Mom and Dad greet us and tell us they are preparing food. Her dad asks in a very thick Italian accent if we want “ Swiss and Mozz” on our burger. I never really have anything else than yellow cheese on my burger let alone 2 types because coming from a Mexican family that mostly eats Mexican food I never really knew the savor of having two very different cheeses together, but they insist on tasting it together, so I go for it being a natural cheese lover. When the food is ready her mom tells us to grab our side dish with our burger. My friend starts taking the side dish, I go in to grab some, but me and my other only Mexican friend ask what it is. They looked like small fried cylinders and I swear I’ve never had them before. “You’ve never had Tater Tots” our two Italian friends asked in complete shock. “No Never” me and my Mexican friend told them as we looked at each other laughing. My friend is now in a college very far way and I don’t really see her anymore, but I eat Tater Tots and put any cheese that I want on my burger because of her. 

As a first generation American daughter to immigrant parents, any milestone is important and celebrated in our home. Especially graduation. My high school graduation just happened to fall in 2020, during a global pandemic which led the world to shut down. Since I was only going to have a virtual graduation, my mother decided that she was going to do the most she could in our home, she decorated our home so beautifully and cooked a feast with all of my favorite food. While she was planning she asked me to tell her all I wanted to eat at my graduation celebration and to be very honest, I’m a picky eater. I couldn’t really think of anything else but lasagna from my favorite restaurant FUMOS. Due to a worker having covid, the restaurant shut down during the whole month of June, leaving us without the option of ordering take out. Instead of my mom viewing this situation as an obstacle she took it as a challenge and told me she was about to make me the best lasagna I had ever had. 

The day of my graduation comes and I hear my mom up and early in the kitchen. The sweet smell of blueberry muffins woke me up. My mom had baked muffins as I was sleeping so I could wake up and have my favorite breakfast. That day my mother acted as a wonder woman, she cooked, and decorated our home so beautifully and made me feel like the most special girl in the world. Once it was time to eat, my mom served everyone and told me she hoped I liked what she made. I tried it and it was the most delicious lasagna I have ever had. It was amazing. It was so cheesy, so stuffed and well done I’ll choose my mother’s lasagna over FUMOS’ any day.

One word that I had to look up was “silhouette” which means a dark outline of something or someone with a bright background.

One sentence that stood out to me was “That fall, I spent a lot of time sitting outside on the log pile at dusk smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in my canvas jacket, watching the garden decay, and thinking about death and the inherent beauty of the cycle of life.”

One question I have is “what type of relationship she has with her father?”

1. The word I had to look up was pachysandra which is basically a plant shrub.
2. The passage I chose was “I spoke to it philosophically about death.” This quote surprised me because death is something that happens it is the process of life however it isn’t just about philosophy but it’s an emotional process as well. This quote shows the ignorance that the girl had because as people who get their meat packaged already we are saved from seeing the pain that animals go through and as this being her first time killing a chicken she isn’t thinking about how the chicken feels but more so as a it’s a process of life.
3. A question I would raise up for the class is why was the dad so resentful towards his daughter?

1.) One word that I looked up from Hamilton’s essay was silhouetted. The word silhouetted is defined as showing a dark shadow on contrast to a light background.

2.) A passage that struck out to me was, “From a remote spot on the back kitchen steps, he told me how to pull the chicken decisively out of the pen. I spoke to it philosophically about death, grasping it firmly yet calmly with what I hoped was a soothing authority.” This stood out to me because Hamilton uses descriptive language to state how chickens are not treated equally and suffer horrible deaths. Hamilton paints the chicken in a  positive way because it points out how the father wants his son to kill the chicken, yet had a bond with the chicken due to being an animal. Hamilton only does what his father tells him to do, if it were up to his own choice he would never bring himself to kill chickens at all.

3.) One question I have is, would the dad ever realize that killing chickens for meat is unjustified and cruel?

• One word from Hamilton’s essay that I had to look up was pachysandra. A pachysandra is a type of subshrubs evergreen that belongs to the boxwood family Buxaceae. It is native to eastern Asia and southeast North America.
• One passage from the essay that struck you as important or interesting was “my dad was animated with disgust at his dropout daughter- so morose and unfeminine, with the tips of her braids dyed aquamarine, and unable even to kill a chicken properly.” The author is describing her failed accomplishments. By dropping out of school and a common practice for them, killing a chicken. She realizes that she has disappointed her father. She uses imagery to vividly portray the killing of the chicken and create a visualization of her almost failed attempt. A question I have is what was her dad’s thoughts during this moment.
• One discussion question that I would like to raise about this essay is why did she choose this moment as a moment that impacted her?