10 week

This week was a kind of busy week. Full of works and activities.

This Thursday, due to one of my class, we held a event for exchange students in NCCU.

At first, we planned our event as "soccer and beer". However, it seemed not attracting enough. At Wednesday noon, there were still no one signing up for our event. As a result, at the 2 hours meeting on Wednesday, we changed our event into ice skating in Taipei arena, and decided just to invite our foreign friends to come. Nevertheless, on Wednesday night, there are 2 people suddenly signing up for our soccer and beer event at night!!!! But at this moment, it's impossible for us to change back our plan!!!! The more tragic thing was that on Thursday morning, we found out 4 more people signed up at the website!!!!! It was a total mess, sending emails to all the participants was all we could do.

At first, we only expected few of our friends would come, but out of surprise, we got 14 people to join us. Although i had no idea how to ice skating and it really hurt when falling down on the ice, i still had a great time with my friends. Hopefully my ice skating skill has a "little" progress since i fall for twice and it was still hurt till now.  

movie summary and reflection

Last week, we finished the movie " Akeelah and the bee".

The second part start with Javier's birthday party. In the party, Akeelah and Dylan compete for the the scrabble game and Akeelah lost at the end. Accidentally, she saw Dylan was scolded by his father of almost losing the games. Akeelah started to work more harder in order to beat Dylan in the next contest. During the next competition, Akeelah's mom rushed into the contest and asked Akeelah to get down the stage. Akeelah's lied to her mom in order to participate in the game. Her mom was totally angry. But after promising to do three months chores and with Javier's help, Akeelah finally got to finish the game and was able to go to DC for finals.  However, Dr.Larabee suddenly didn't want to teach Akeelah anymore, and her best friend also ignored her. Akeelah felt really upset and wanted to quit. With her mom's encouragement, Akeelah started to work on memorizing the vocabularies again. Although Dr.Larabee didn't help her, this time, everyone in the village became her teacher to help her with the vocabularies.  Akeelah persuaded Dr. Larabee to come to DC with her, and encouraged him of getting out of the sadness of losing his own daughter. At the finals, Dylan and Akeelah became the last two competitors. Akeelah realized she still got the chance for next year; however, Dylan's dad would definitely got mad if Dylan lost the game. Therefore, she spelled the word wrongly on purpose, and intended to let Dylan win. Nevertheless, Dylan was not happy about it and asked Akeelah to do her best, or the prize was not worth it for him either. At the end, both of them got all the words correctly, and both became the winner of the game.

I think this is a good movies, very encouraging. Before the movie, I didn't know that spelling bee is such an important competition for children in U.S.A, since that we didn't have such games in Taiwan. This movie also shows different aspect of U.S society. For example, the different lifestyle between Akeelah and Javier's family or the bullying problem in the school. Akeelah is an encouraging character, she shows that no matter where are you from, by working hard, everyone has a chance to win the first prize. She also helps Dr. Larabee in her own warming way. She knew the feeling of losing the beloved one. She shared her feelings with  Dr. Larabee and encouraged  him to go to DC with her and go back to teaching at school. This is really touching.  The part of letting Dylan win at the finals is also out of expectation. In the real society, is really hard, more accurately "rare", to see people letting others win when they are so close to win. Children are often more innocent and just do what they think is right. The friendship (or love?) between Javier and Akeelah is also touching. When growing up, it's more harder to find a friend who truly cares about you in such a sincerely and simple way. 

 

Overall, I think this is a movie worth watching and I really enjoyed it a lot.