I really enjoyed reading this book. I wanted to comment on how Betsey and the other children in the house had a lot of responsibilities to uphold. I can see how the children should be responsible for themselves and maybe taking on a few chores, but I felt Betsey had to many responsibilites only being 13. She was expected to wait on hand and foot for her mother, and take care of her siblings. In my eyes an adolescent should be just that. A child should be able to have fun, learn about boys the hard way, learn from their mistakes, and play outside after school and before bed. The children appeared to be sheltered from all that could go wrong. Teens learn from mistakes and will learn how to act the way they want to act from those mistakes and lessons learned.
One other thing about the book was that I don't think children should be involved with trying to make a stand for something, like how Greer took them to that demonstration. I have never been to a protest, but they seem very dangerous, and to bring a child to such a thing would be very irresponsable. If he wanted to take a stand, he could have done it with Jane or a friend who agrees. His children could have gotten hurt badly.
I believe this book was well written by the author and really showed how racism affected people. It was too bad that the children were even exposed to such a racist world that it made them afraid to go to school. It was also unfortunate that the children also became racist against whites because of what they heard, and saw.

Essay Outline

My Essay is going to deal with juvenile delinquency and the causes of teenagers to be rebels. I want to discuss what it meant for a teen to be "delinquent" decades ago and up until now. I would like to discuss the different decades to show the difference in what was considered delinquent in say the 1970's up until now, the 21st century. I was going to look at the different books and how the authors portray juvenile delinquency and what causes their characters to be rebellious. I would start the essay talking about delinquency and what it means to be delinquent or being a rebel in teenagers. Then I would use the different books as examples of the time periods and how they were portraying adolescent delinquency in each of the ones that we are reading. So far, Charlotte Temple, Huck Finn, and Betsey Brown are showing different ways teens act out and what society or families considered rebellious behavior. For my essay I would most likely start with the earliest time period I chose and then lastly I would discuss the 21st century. I will also reflect on my own adolescence and look at the ways I would act rebellious and compare it to other teens of my age and in the past. I would also compare my adolescence to the characters in the books that we have read.

Huck Finn #2

First off, I just really did not enjoy this book. It was too scattered and too much going on for me that it made me really confused. The ending of the book disapointed me too. I think that it would have been better to have let Tom, Huck and Jim get away and just start sailing down the river to be free again. That is just how I would have ended it.
A part about adolescence that did strike me as interesting was when they had to make it difficult and just like "other people" in books or movies to get Jim free. They had to use small spoons that would take them years, and write a letter to make it interesting. I think that is a good example of adolescence because young kids are always imitating others and trying to be so much like other people. For boys, it did seem common for them to want it to be difficult and not so easy to just do it a way that would be clean and unnoticeable. Boys always like a challenge and don't want to seem like a sissy. Just like how Tom said that Jim needed rats and snakes and spiders.