Stuck In Neutral by Terry Trueman: Finished Book Response

At first I did not think that this book would interest me. It was really small and the synopsis did not intrigue me. I was pleasantly surprised after finishing this book though. It was a quick read, but a very powerful one. (SPOILER ALERT) At the end of the book Shawn's dad seems to be preparing to murder his son. Shawn is completely handicapped. He has hardly any motor functions, he can not speak, and he has constant seizures. Everyone thinks that he has the mindset of a 3 year old, but in reality he is actually really smart and even has a photographic memory. His father thinks that he is suffering and he can not even bear to watch his son suffer anymore, so he thinks that the best thing to do is kill him. This book goes along with my single story because Shawn is physically impaired, and I think this will be one of the most useful books when talking about the single story I chose. People who are physically disabled face more challenges than someone who is not, but that does not mean that their quality of life is any less. The book is written from the point of view of Shawn, and when reading you could tell that at the end of the day he was pretty content with his life. He loved his family, and the fact that he could remember everything. He faced many struggles, but he still wanted to be alive. I think that it is very important to realize that just because from the outside it may seem as though people with disabilities have a "lesser" quality of life, but we don't truly know how they feel. We all need to take a step back sometimes and instead of judging people with disabilities based on what they can't do, we should celebrate all of the things that they can do.

Visual Poetry Project

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oUDV2t92g1wWEEsNWH-5bmEJTKJiRAr5/view?usp=sharing



This process started off difficult for me because I usually am not good with technology but once I started really working on it I knew what I had to do and everything became more organized and came together. At first I had absolutely no idea what my vision was for this poem, then after reading it a few more times as well as getting feedback from my peers the ideas started to flow in. My family means the world to me and I just knew that I wanted them to be apart of this. After re-reading the poem multiple times it became clear which family members I wanted to read each of the different parts. As for the media, the story board really helped me come up with different ideas for that and it made it a lot easier to get all of my ideas down on paper. I changed the background music a lot when I was working on this project. Nothing seemed to fit and flow the way I envisioned it, so I kept searching and I finally found a song that I liked. Then I had some trouble with some of the videos I uploaded. Every time I would upload a video that I had previously recorded off of Snapchat, they would stretch vertically and look so weird so I had to record new videos which I ended up liking a lot better. At first I really did not like doing this. I am not good with technology, but then once I started doing it, it made me appreciate and really look to see what the poem is saying. I felt that this project really made me engage with the poem more than I would have by just reading it. I feel fairly confident in my project. It is in no way perfect and it is pretty amateur but I know that I did my best and I am really proud of what I accomplished when I didn't think I would be able to do much of anything with this project. This project in a way made me see that technology (even in literature) can be a really useful tool in the classroom and I am glad that I have been given so many tools to use in my future classroom!

Stuck In Neutral by Terry Trueman, Blog Post 1

At first glace, this book seems like one that I would have a really hard time staying interested in but after the first 60 pages I really enjoy this book. The premise of the story makes me really sad, and I find myself having to suppress tears. I don't want to give too much away but basically a boy named Shawn is extremely disabled by cerebral palsy and seizures that have left him brain dead, or so everyone thinks. He is completely unable to speak, feed himself, go to the bathroom by himself, etc. His father who is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for a poem he wrote about Shawn, left the family because he could not take seeing his son in pain everyday. The part that I am on right now is where his father is on a talk show, defending a man who murdered his disabled son. This is leading Shawn to believe that his father wants to murder him, but nobody has any idea that he understands what is going on. Shawn is actually really intelligent and has a photographic memory, but since he is unable to speak, doctors have ruled that his mental age is about 2-3 years old. I am curious to see what happens with his father and if Shawn is able to ever let anyone know that he actually knows exactly what is going on all the time. This book fits really well into the single story that I am exploring, because this shows a lot of instances where people (especially Shawn's father) have passed severe judgement onto him, and just assumed that his quality of life is so horrible, that he might be better off dead. I am looking forward to seeing what else I discover throughout the rest of this book!