McConico's Blog

  William McConico 12/18/23 2nd Hour Last Reflection Why did I sign Up? To be honest, I definitely did not sign up for this class. I signed up for Shakespere with Mr. Hill, and I was really looking forward to that. That class was unfortunately canceled, and when presented with the other option for classes, I picked this one for several reasons. First of all, I really like reading, and I especially really like to read newer books. I don’t really ever have time to read, so I thought this class would give me a great excuse to read. I also liked Mr. Davidson was a teacher when I had him sophomore year, so I was excited to take his class again, as he was kind of the one who got me back into reading. My Favorite Novel? I really enjoyed Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore and Please Ignore Vera Dietz as well, but the novel that always comes back to me is The Art of Racing in the Rain . This novel is fantastic, from the plot, to the drama, to the characters, and even the dog narrator, but w...

  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...