Blog #15

What are the most important concepts that you took away from reading Hamlet?

While reading the play "Hamlet," I noticed how William Shakespeare used many layers in his play. For example, how he has a play within a play. Also, how he has different layers of conflict. The main conflict in the play was Claudius killing Hamlet's dad, the king, and Hamlet wanting to get revenge but then we have other conflict in the play like Hamlet killing Polonius and then Laertes wanting to get revenge against Hamlet. Also, Ophelia going crazy and dying and then Claudius and Laertes planning how to kill Hamlet. Shakespeare does a good job of connecting all the little conflicts to the major conflict so that they all make sense and so that the overall play makes sense and flows together.

Another thing I noticed was how every character was very different from each other. Each character had their own way of being and they all had at least a little significance in the play. For example, if we compare Ophelia to Hamlet we can say they are very different and while Ophelia is not so important in the play, Hamlet is the main character but Ophelia still connects to Hamlet and she is somewhat important to Hamlet. All the characters somewhat relate to each other and form a part of the play. In "Hamlet" we can see a lot about the difficulties of being part of this world and how not everything is perfect, not even for a prince. There are a lot of problems out there in the world and we will all at some time pay for the bad things we did like how Claudius dies at the end for killing the king and how Hamlet dies for killing Polonius and how Laertes dies for trying to kill Hamlet. By reading Hamlet I learned a lot about what a good play is and how it is not just suppose to be one problem through out the entire story but many things and conflicts going on and even things going on outside of the play to make it even more interesting.

What are the most significant concepts that you learned from creating your digital essay?

I really learned about time management during the creation of my digital essay and how important it is to have a back-up plan. In the digital essay, it was really important for my group and I to manage our time and have back-up plans because sometimes we would plan to record during a certain period but then we would see that someone was using what we needed and that we couldn't record so then we had to work on something else so that we weren't wasting time and so that we were being productive. Also a problem we had was that we had reserved the "nice" mic for a period but then we didn't get time to work on the digital essays because we had a class discussion and then we weren't able to use it any other days because it was already reserved so then we had to use garageband. If we hadn't decided to use garageband and would have decided to wait for the "nice" mic we would have lost a lot of time and probably wouldn't have finished. I felt like I learned a little about how to use garageband by creating my digital essay because, before, I didn't really know about it and the things you can do in garageband. In the creation of my digital essay I also learned that it is really important to communicate with your group members and split up the work so that not just one person is doing all the work. I felt like my group and I did a really good job doing this because we always communicated with each other and we all worked together to get the digital essay done.