McConico's Blog

  William McConico 12/18/23 2nd Hour Ted Talk Reflection What I Knew I knew going into this topic that listening is a skill, and that muscle memory is how we as humans get better at the various tasks that we do. In knowing this, I believed that these two things would be fairly simple to connect back to the overall idea of repetition. While brainstorming, I also thought of the relationship aspect of repetition, and knew that I had a topic that I could talk about for a while. Why I Selected This Topic I selected this topic as repetition, and more importantly the listening and memory parts, are things that I struggle with and have been struggling with greatly for most of my life. I believed that if I did research on it and did a presentation on a topic that is pretty close to  my heart, I could not only better the audience, but also myself. I also selected this topic as I wanted to talk about the story with my sister, and I wanted to talk about fighting games. It is a weird conne...

  William McConico  Mr. Davidson 12/15/23 2nd Hour AMDG  Vera Dietz Book Review Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an amazing contemporary novel that has a complex narrative and mystery. The story follows the titular Vera Dietz throughout her whole life, but most of the narrative takes place during her senior year. The main conflict is over the mysterious death of her former best friend and love intrest Charlie, as she is being urged by his ghost to “clear his name”. The novel goes into excruciating detail of every single impactful interaction that Vera and Charlie have, from when the first meet as small children and all the way up until their split. The novel also delves deep into many of Vera’s other complex relationships; to list a few these include her seemingly overbearing dad, her mother who ran away when Vera was just thirteen years old, and her twenty three year old boyfriend.  The relationship between Vera and Ken was very relatable and resolved in a very real way....

  William McConico 12/8/23 https://vocaroo.com/embed/1kqAvrWcTQ4R?autoplay=0 I believe in failure. I know this sounds overly negative and pessimistic but it is true. My core philosophy and the idea that drives me to be better is failure. I have naturally been good at everything I have done in life. This is not a brag, but most things, especially when I was younger just came easier to me then my peers around me. The first time that this really changed was sophomore year when I began to run Cross Country. I have never been very athletic, and I decided to go out and run Cross Country the first day after skipping summer workouts, twenty pounds overweight, and in ninety degree weather. Obviously in five minutes I was absolutely dying, and as I was running I was calculating how much it would take to pay my parents back for the shoes and cross country gear in order to let me quit. I decided not to quit, and it is very fair to say that I was beyond awful for the rest of the year. There wer...

William McConico Mr. Davidson 2nd Period Contemporay Liteature 10-20-2023 AMDG Art of Racing in the Rain Book Report The Art of Racing in the Rain follows the story of Enzo, a dog with thoughts very similar to a human. He is adopted from a dog farm by his owner Denny, who is a car enthusiast and aspiring race car driver. Denny finds a girl named Eve, who quickly moves in and marries him. Not too long after this, she has Denny’s kid, a daughter named Zoë. This story follows the family’s whole life, but through the lens of Enzo, who is the novel’s narrator. He fills the gaps with what he has seen from TV, and compels the reader in a way that many humans could not. The stroy which is part racing novel, part drama, part romance, part court drama, and many many more keeps the audeince engaged in many different ways throughout. This compelling story takes many twists and turns that would be a shame to spoil here, but the drama is definitely worth it, especially with the small and very manag...

I absolutely love science fiction. To be honest, reading has never really been something that interested me much. What did always interest me alot, though, was watching science fiction/fantasy tv shows and movies. Being placed in these fantasy worlds has always been fascinating to me, which is why I have always loved worlds like Star Wars, Marvel, Steven Universe, and many other fanticiing stories. I haven’t really read many science fiction stories, but the ones that I have read have been manga. I love these as well, as again you are placing yourself in another fun world. My favorite would by far have to be Star Wars. This is of course the most boring chice I could have gone with, but when asked the question, this was the franchise I kept thinking of. I have been consuming Star Wars media literally my entire life. Whether it was reading books, watching The Clone Wars show (which I have done 3 times), watching the movies, having the toys, or even playing Star Wars games, I always retu...

  I picked this topic, because as this is a topic that I feel decently strongly about, I knew it would be very easy to argue either side. I feel much more strongly that weed should be legal, so thi smade the choice fairly easy for me. The only concern I had was that there might not be enough research on my side. This wasn’t much of a problem though. It actually wasn’t very hard to only research one side, as I felt very strongly about my side. I feel like if it was a topic that I was in the middle of, it would be hard to shut out the other side. Also, I feel like my side would have been the easier of the two sides to find information and statistics on. I made my infographic brief and easy to read over loding it with tons and tons of statictics/information. I feel like this style is more captivating and makes it hader for people to tune it out. I made it green, as that is obviously the color of weed. I used icons from piktochart, as it was very hard to add pictures from the internet....