Speak Part Numero Uno!

Our first group discussion about our book, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson was great! Although we had a very small proportion of our book to read, I felt as if my group was able to break down the book to the very last subject.

In the first part to Speak, we are introduced to a girl named Melinda Sordino who holds on to a secret that we are not aware of yet.The only thing that we know is the Melinda's old best friends do not want to be around her anymore, leaving her isolated in high school.

At first, my group pulled apart the title. We think that, of course, it relates to Melinda, but we were unsure why. I responded by saying that the main theme of the book is to learn how to speak up for ourselves to be better understood. We said that Melinda is scared to speak up for herself when it comes down to what really happened to her. She is afraid of being judged and by not talking about her past is her mechanism for trying to forget although it is still always with her no matter what.

In art class, the students are given a word and they must draw that word throughout the entire year changing up the forms and giving an entire new meaning to the word. Melinda ended up choosing 'tree' and the most thought provoking question that was brought up was what does the tree represent? My group came up with the idea that the tree symbolizes Melinda. A tree has many branches and each one of the branches can represent Melinda's new chapters in her life. Melinda needs to branch out while she is in high school since she's just letting her life pass her by due to the fact that she's holding on to a secret that she doesn't dare mention to anyone.

In the end of the section, the author provides Melinda's report card. What stood out to all of us the most was that the only A that Melinda had in all of her classes was in art. We all wondered why this was and then we postulated that she gets a good grade in art since it isn't a class that requires speaking. People are able to express their feeling through art and instead of them speaking for their art, the art speaks for them.

Finally, we discussed how Melinda is afraid of mirrors. We had came up with the idea that she is afraid to look at herself in the mirror and see what has become of her. There was an incident before her secret in which Melinda was supposed to see herself in the mirror and picture her future, but when she did, she explained how she didn't see anything. This provides us with the idea that Melinda does not know where she is going with herself.