The Road

The Road is a book written by Cormac McCarthy. The book has received the Pulitzer Prize and is soon to be a cinema movie, February the 19th to be correct. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting where the world has gone trough a crisis and is completely destroyed. We never get to know exactly what has happened. Only a tiny percentage of mankind have managed to survive. The book follows a father and a son on their journey throughout nothingness and ruins of the former American continent. As in the way they manage to survive, it seems to me like they have lived under these circumstances for many years. At the beginning of the book they are located in the northern part of the United States, and their goal is to get to the Southern part before the winter arrives. The country is completely lawless and they have to stay low due to other survivors, amongst them criminals and murderers. At first I thought that maybe the world had gone through a massive pandemic illness which caused all of the human population to turn mean on each other, but as I read further I understood that it is the disastrous conditions that have made the surviving human beings to kill each other. Imagine living under those circumstances. I believe most of us would have changed our behaviour dramatically. The basic instincts would have overshadowed everything else.

However, the boy and the father meet a fellow survivor in their path down south. The boy wants to help the man, but the father knows that they can't let a stranger's needs come in front of their own. The father's son whose name is unmentioned in the book seems to understand that they don't have much time left on the surface of the destroyed earth. He also says to his father that he wants to stay with his mom, which is dead. This basically means that he would rather die than living under such circumstances. There are flashbacks in the book which indicates that his mom gave birth to him and later took her own life.
In my opinion, I quite don't see how this book has received that vast amount of prizes and acclaims yet. I hope it reaches up to my expectations as the story goes further on.

A new method of working

Right now in class, all of the classmates are collaborating together as a group. Our teacher has splitted us up in groups of five and given us various tasks. One of the groups is the front desk. Their responsibility is to divide material, prioritize, approve material and give the other groups time limits. My group is called the research group. Our job is to find and gather relevant material and send it to the other groups. Then we have the journalists, whose jobs are to write blogs and send them to the teachers, designers and the front desk. The fourth group consists of the teachers. They make criteria rubrics in terms of the test we are having next week. They also write the test questions. At last we have the designers. They create so-called Glogs and Photostories with the gathered material.

I liked this varation of working. Some got more to do than others, but at the same time I believe that everybody learned something new today.