Category: English Literacy

There are many people suffering from mental illness around the world. This is still a health problem that occurs in every family that they need to learn and understand about their health. This leads to a very big problem in Cambodia, my country. This problem not only about the medication, but also the discrimination that society yet need to understand. It’s also known as the stigma. In Cambodia, people don’t understand about the mental illness. They would call those people “crazy person”.  Also, when they see those people, it likes seeing a ghost, bacteria that they don’t want to stay near.

There are many people suffering from mental illness around the world. This is still a health problem that occurs in every family that they need to learn and understand about their health. This leads to a very big problem in Cambodia, my country. This problem not only about the medication, but also the discrimination that society yet need to understand. It’s also known as the stigma. In Cambodia, people don’t understand about the mental illness. They would call those people “crazy person”.  Also, when they see those people, it likes seeing a ghost, bacteria that they don’t want to stay near. In class, we read different stories related to mental illness that happen in the past, especially women who suffer from postpartum. In those years, when mental illness exists, many people think that they need to stay alone, take in the medication, and rest. Those stories also show how lock a person in the room can make them worse. In the yellow wallpaper, the character who suffered from mental illness became worst. She imagined that there are people on the wallpaper, she stressed herself out, and she can’t even stay with her baby. Another story, shows how mental illness affect the family by losing their beloved child, or how they can’t adapt to it.

This is why mental illness is a health problem that needs to be raised by people. People should learn, understand about it as much as they can. The stigma of people with mental illness should also stop. 

Being a grade 8 student is not that easy as you may think. I am a middle school student in the Leadership Academy and now in my English Literacy class is that the other classmates and I need to work independently and manage our time wisely like a University student. I need to schedule my own time and complete task on time without someone telling me to use this time for this or that so it is my priority to manage it and complete it. The How-to essay, How I change Cambodia, Vocabulary Log and Novel study are my and other students priority. Especially working on Novel and working it with a partner is more challenging as you need to keep this up daily. 

My partner(Reaksmey) and I are reading to Killed a Mocking Bird written by Harper Lee. It is a very educational novel with high vocabulary for the learner to learn. An interesting fact about this book is that during the time that this book was published, there is no other author who would write about the stereotype and different people view others. We also write about our book review to this.

 

For me, I highly recommend this book to other students who interest in society in the past and how American stereotype used to be. Even though it is a fictional story, but it based on society during that time.

How to be happy or how to keep a positive attitude when you have cancer? That is a very hard question to ask because you already know that you have cancer that is growing inside your body. It also very hard to stay happy or positive when you have a danger disease. Once the doctor said “You have cancer” and that when you start to feel negative about your health and start to think of the death that are coming to grab you out of this beautiful world that you have. People always said to you to stay positive, but it is hard because there isn’t a good evidence that tell when cancer patients are happy they can live longer life.

 

But let’s face the reality and show them you can do it. Your family and friends are your supporters and they are always beside you to encourage, bring energy and positive power to stand up to the cruel life that you have. It is time to be happy and enjoy your life not a time that you are sad and stay in the corner of the room getting more stress once you already have a cancer. No matter what will happen to you at end, but you still now have a chance to stay happy, live normal like other and also do somethings you want. So stay out of that emotion and start considering this following tips that are recommend from cancer.gov:

 

1. Don’t limit things you like you do when you have a cancer. Push yourself and keep a positive thought that you will be fine. You may have a feeling that you are not in mood to do what you like or what you want to do, but don’t let’s those feeling stop you. Like people said “Stay out of your comfort zone” so you should stay out of those uncomfortable feeling and start the things you want to do before it’s too late. Your family, your friends and other people around you always there and help you to succeed your goals. Try to use the energy and power to used to have to do things you like and make those moment memorable to you and people who always there to encourage you to stand up.
2. There are also different ways for different patients who had cancer to be happy so spending time in nature is a very unique ways to light up the mood of the day. Nature is a place where most people can enjoy with it easily because the environment that it already have and the new animals. You can bring a book, a journal, a sketch book or a camera to take a picture of it to share to the people you love to show that you are happy even though you are in a bad condition that make people pity you. Once you are in nature that means you are in a quiet space, but not in a lonely space because nature will help to light up you mood and create a very beautiful day.
3. Even though, you are having cancer that doesn’t mean that you are the only one on earth who have cancer so you can start to read or listen to the story of other people with cancer who are leading active live. Try to take hope from those people that will turn back to normal life. You will be happy when you  read their stories and there are many positive and inspire stories there waiting for you to read them. According to cancer.org published in 2016, there are many cancer survivors and one girl get to have cancer when she in grade 6. After many positive thought and happiness during the treatment, she successfully only need to heal her cancer not with the depression. Also she created a song about cancer that called “Strength is in the soul”. Listen and read to their stories to explore more about life when you have cancer.

 

You can use these strategies to overcome your fear and start gain more happiness during your treatment. Even though, this might not easy to adapt once you are in a complicated situation, but I still encourage you to try this tips as hard as you can. To that, I really wish that you as a cancer patients will have a success treat and enjoy your time.

English Literacy always has its own theme for each school term and for this term our theme is about “The Search for Identity”. We are having our assessment which is reading a fictional book to identify the characters and having a discussion with our team about the story every week with different roles such as Inferencer, Summarizer, Symbolizer, Words Detector and Visualizer. For me, I am reading a book by John Green, Looking for Alaska. Like a quote from John Green about looking for Alaska written: “An only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive”.  That is why identify characters and author meaning in a book is very important. The way story in Looking for Alaska tell is more like a romance novel, but it’s also about a friendship that suffers together in a boarding school. However, in this class, we also create our own poems that inspire by George Ella Lyon who is a girl from Kentucky, United State. I have my own poem which is about “I am from” that related to our theme. This is my poem:

I am from a tricycle,

from Dumex and gruel

I am from the Lumber smooth

I am from the jujube

The java apple whose long gone limbs I remember as if they were my own.

 

I’m from red pocket and Caishen,

from Grandmother and Father

I’m from gathering and sharing,

and from remembering.

 

I’m from spirit told and helping,

and “S’art Jea Nix” that sing along

I’m from Lunar New Year

I’m from the Red Cross sign and Cantonese spiderweb,

family recipe cookies and marine under the river

from a flow of the river from China,

Grandma ends up in Steung Treng

Bracelet of working hard

In my heart, the achieve after Bloodshed

 

Literacy has been increase in this past few year. I learnt different type of sentences until paragraphs and now essay. Last year, our class mostly written about descriptive essay and now we are writing argumentative essay. Before starting to write the argumentative essay, we learnt the SDGs goal which was Environmental Justice that were talking about the minority group in Connecticut. Also, we have been assign to have four team which had a different country that is talking about people who are staying in the landfill. Also, we got to know a little bit about the data of civil justice in Southeast Asia. To end the goal, we learnt more about social Justice and how the problems affect us. To come to conclusion of the term, now we are writing a argumentative about our past explorations that are solving problems or somethings related to SDGs goal.