"The River" Update + Reading Skills

 "The River" Update + Reading Skills

Now, I have finished reading Chapters 1-5 altogether.

The whole story so far within these five chapters is that Derek has managed to convince Brian and his mother to let Brian and he head to the wilderness so that Brian can teach the modern-day society how to survive in the natural wilderness of Earth. So Brian and Derek prepare for two weeks for their trip. Chapters 1-3 cover this section of the story. Chapters 4-5 describe the time when Brian and Derek board the plane and they land in the wilderness on a river. 

Based on the content in Chapter 5, it says that Derek had brought all these emergency materials with him so they both could stay safe. But Brian refuses to let Derek have those materials. The reason is unknown and unrevealed now. But I am making a prediction here.

My prediction here is that I think that since Brian is doing this for the government and mostly, Derek, he doesn't want to change anything from his last experience in the wilderness, so that he can truly show the government and the society what he actually had to do in order to survive in this type of wilderness.

I would side with Brian if I were in his shoes.

A text-to-text connection I can make is that in this book's case, Brian doesn't want to change any aspect from his last wilderness experience to this wilderness experience. Another book that has this type of situation is the book, "The Report Card." In "The Report Card," the main character Nora Rose Rowley gets fed up with the importance that every adult attaches to school report cards. She also wants to find a way to hide the fact that she is extremely smart and gifted, so she purposely brings home a terrible report card full of Ds, and she does this because she wants to be just a normal student, and is worried that if she gets grades like Bs or As, she could get moved up into a honors or gifted program. She tells her best friend Stephen Curtis (who is also smart and gifted, but wants to be a normal student) everything that she did to do this. Now Stephen wants to do the same exact thing that Nora did (with Nora's help). Nora decides to do what she did before to teach Stephen how she got the terrible report card, and how she hid her intelligence all through the whole time. Stephen asks Nora if anything is going to be changed here in Nora's second time of making an attempt to get a terrible report card, but Nora says she wants to do the same thing over again with no changes so that she can truly teach Stephen how to trick teachers into thinking that they both are not gifted or highly intelligent, and that they are perfectly normal students. This is a text-to-text connection between "The River" and "The Report Card."

A text-to-self connection I have is that I remember writing my narrative on my school science fair and being optimistic, and I mentioned in there that I had done the science fair a total of two times in two years. I had done the same experiment for both the years, but I didn't keep every aspect of the experiment the same compared from the first year to the second year. I did this because I wanted to get a better score in my second year compared to my first year. In the second year, I remember changing some of the variables of the experiment slightly in order to give out more accurate results. So therefore, in my text-to-self connection, I did the exact opposite action of what Brian did in "The River." And that was choosing to change my second trial of doing my science fair experiment and not keeping the second trial the same as the first trial. But Brian wanted to keep both his wilderness experiences in the exact same format, so that he could truly teach Derek and the modern-day society what he really did in order to survive in the wilderness.  

A text-to-world connection I have in this case is that I remember almost at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, the USA Government was trying to reduce gun violence in the country, so they did experiments of gun violence reduction by doing two trials that differed in the amount of clamping down that they did in the country in an effort to reduce gun violence. The first trial failed to reduce gun violence significantly, because the government wasn't clamping down hard enough on which types of guns should be banned. In this first trial, the government banned a few types of guns that were hardly used. Then in the second trial, instead of keeping it the same as the first trial, they decided to clamp down even harder and ban more types of guns in a stronger effort to reduce gun violence. Sure enough, this trial worked well to reduce gun violence more significantly, and so what the government did in this trial is what they are still doing to reduce gun violence. So basically, they had two trials in order to reduce gun violence. The first trial didn't work, but in the second trial, instead of keeping all aspects of the trial the way they were in the first trial, they changed it up by a lot, in order to make a stronger attempt to reduce gun violence. Both trials had been done, and so the government decided that what they did in the second trial, is what they should do in order to reduce gun violence.

So overall, these three different types of connections make a final statement that says that in different cases of two trials, people may choose to keep the aspects of the second trial the same as they were in the first trial, or they may or may not choose to change some things in the second trial for any reason. These three connections clearly relate to Brian's situation in "The River" of choosing to keep all aspects of his second wilderness adventure the same as they were in the first experience (regardless of the fact that Derek is there with him in this second adventure).