Author: admin

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Ellen’s Choice: Are You Taking the SAT this Year?

Well, the new school year has started, and that means SAT test dates are fast approaching. In fact, the first one is this coming weekend. To anyone taking the SAT on Saturday, good luck! Remember to get a good night’s sleep on Friday!

If you are thinking about applying to college in the next few years, it might be time to schedule an SAT date! Remember, you can retake the test as many times as you need to, so don’t be afraid to schedule an early date.

Also, remember that the big SAT Redesign will be kicking into effect in the Spring of 2016, so if you are in the class of 2016 you may want to start your testing early, to make sure you have time to retake the current style of test and not have to relearn everything for a completely new test the following year.

This semester’s SAT test dates and registration deadlines are as follows:

October 11th – Registration ends September 12th
November 8th – Registration ends October 9th
December 6th – Registration ends November 6th

I still have tutoring openings available this season. The SAT is not a test of the material; it’s a test of how well you take the SAT, so I highly recommend that everyone get at least a few private sessions in to discuss strategies and develop an individual game plan. Feel free to contact me if you’re in need of some help this semester!

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Writing Rundown: Three Things Your Spell-Check Won’t Tell You

Computerized spell-check can be a handy time-saver when writing papers, and many students swear by it. However amazing it may be, though, spell-check is still just a computer program, and as such should not be considered a substitute for proofreading with human eyes. As evidence, here are three common mistakes that spell-check won’t catch.

Proper Nouns
Spell-check uses a dictionary to compare the words you type to existing words. Proper nouns, like names of people or places, usually won’t be in the computer’s dictionary, and so the spell-check will flag them as misspelled. This means that when you proofread, you’ll have to ignore the wavy underline under those names. But this can also backfire – what if you happened to misspell that name? The computer will underline it same as before, but your brain is already prepared to ignore underlining on that name so you run the risk of not catching it yourself. This is one reason I advocate actually printing out a hard copy of your paper and proofreading it old-school, with a red pen – you won’t have any spell-check markings to distract you, and you’ll be more likely to catch that misspelled name.

Homophones
Homophones are words that sound alike but are spelled differently. Common culprits for this category include assent versus ascent, affect versus effect, and which versus witch. The key here is that all of these words are spelled correctly, and your spell-check doesn’t have any way of knowing which one of them you meant. Some programs have a grammar check tool as well, but these programs can’t really catch context-based errors. Take the first example above. Do you mean assent (a statement of agreement) or ascent (a climb up a mountain)? Both are nouns, so their usage in the sentence would be similar. Your grammar check tool has no idea whether you are writing a legal document or a mountaineer’s biography, so as far as the computer is concerned, either one could be correct.

Typos that Convert One Word to Another
I recently read a book that was obviously proofread by a computer rather than a human, and the way I knew that was the presence of many errors of this type. Remember, a computer spell-check is only looking for words that aren’t in its dictionary – so if a typo causes one word to become another, your spell-check won’t catch it. An example from this book was the misspelling of “rib” as “rig.” Rig is a word, so the computer didn’t catch it. For that, you need a pair of human eyes.

The overall theme with these mistakes is the computer’s inability to discern context. Spell-check is there to make sure that you’ve spelled your words correctly, but it has no idea what you’re really trying to say and cannot fix things that don’t involve misspelled words. This is one of the reasons that I advocate students not rely on their spell-check – in much the same way that I encourage math students not to rely on their calculators. The computer doesn’t know the context – you do. Print out your paper, grab a red pen, and read through for errors without the computer around. Asking a friend to proofread your paper is also a good strategy – someone who hasn’t been staring at the same paragraphs for days will be more likely to notice the mistakes that your brain has learned to gloss over.

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WyzAnt Wants To Know: The 2 Sigma Problem

We recently passed the 30th anniversary of “the 2 Sigma Problem,” which is the problem of achieving the effectiveness of personalized, one-on-one instruction at a large scale. As a tutor, how do you help multiple students at the same time while retaining the benefits of personalized tutoring?

To me, one of the major benefits of personalized tutoring is that the tutor has the space, time, and flexibility to respond to the student’s needs. If I am tutoring a student in math, we can spend as many sessions as we need on a given topic to make sure the student understands it thoroughly. I can also try a lot of different methods to explain a topic, since not everyone learns the same way. If a spatial or visual learner is having trouble with division, I might bring in a bag of M&Ms and show them physically the process of dividing up a pile into smaller piles. If a student is having trouble understanding probability, I might bring in a set of polyhedral dice and discuss it practically. Those same polyhedral dice might also find a use during discussions of geometric solids, in situations where it is tough to accurately illustrate a 3-D figure on a flat piece of paper.

When working with more than one student at once, I take advantage of the fact that thoroughly understanding a topic often means that you can explain the topic to someone else. When I work with students in math, I focus a lot on the student being able to explain the concepts back to me – so if there are multiple students present, they can try explaining the concepts to each other! Maybe the student for whom the topic has just clicked will have a novel way of explaining it to the other student; a turn of phrase or an analogy that I may not have thought of myself. This is particularly effective when the students are friends outside of class, since they know each other far better than I do and are more likely to understand how the other one thinks or be able to connect the topic to a passion or interest.

Encouraging the students to help each other also helps them to feel as though they “get it,” which increases their confidence later on. I’ve found that a large part of math improvement is simply a question of confidence; if a student doesn’t quite understand the material, it’s going to be that much harder to be consistent. Once the student “gets it,” though, I often see a burst of happiness as they begin to complete problems with little or no help from me. Often when that happens that student will instinctively begin explaining the concept to the other student, subconsciously wanting their friend to feel that same burst of happiness and excitement.

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Mathematical Journeys: Zeno’s Paradox

Suppose I place you at one end of a long, empty room. Your task is to get to the door at the other end of the room. Simple, right? But what if I told you that this simple task is actually mathematically impossible?

Think about it – in order to traverse the whole room, you first have to get to the halfway point, right? You’ll have to travel one-half of the way there. And before you can get to that halfway point, you have to travel one-quarter of the way there (halfway to the halfway point). And before you can get to the one-quarter point, you have to travel one-eighth of the way there (halfway to the quarter-way point). Since you have to go half of each distance before you can go the full distance, you’ll never actually get anywhere. The task requires an infinite number of steps, and you can never complete an infinite number of steps since there will always be another one. Furthermore, in order to even start your journey you would need to travel a specific distance, and even the smallest of specific distances can be divided in half, giving you another step before that one. So you’d have to traverse infinity in order to go anywhere.

Make your brain hurt? Don’t be ashamed; it’s supposed to.

In fact, this is a very famous thought experiment called Zeno’s paradox. Zeno’s conclusion was that all motion must be an illusion, since travel over any finite distance can never be either completed or begun.

In practice, of course, this is not really a paradox – at some point your remaining distance will be so small that you cannot practically traverse half of it. Perhaps it would be down to a distance that is smaller than the length of your foot, so you are in effect already standing at both ends. The point of Zeno’s paradox, though, is to illustrate the elusive nature of mathematical infinity.

Infinity tends to cause problems for math students when they expect it to behave like a number. The truth is, infinity is a slippery concept, one that can only really be comprehended obliquely because if you ever try to stare directly at it it will squirm away. The way to understand infinity is to acknowledge that it is a concept that theoretically exists, but that you will never personally see or pin down. Very much like the imaginary number i, infinity has a definition but it cannot be evaluated as a number. This is why we can only talk about a series approaching infinity – we cannot say that it reaches infinity, because infinity cannot ever really be arrived at. Wherever you are on the number line, infinity is always out of your reach.

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WWTK: Starting the Year Strong!

WyzAnt Wants To Know: What advice would you give students going back to school so they start the year strong?

This is a great question, and one that I’ve answered before on this blog. In general, I’d say the most important thing for starting the new year strong is starting the new year ORGANIZED. Go back and look through your notebooks from the previous year, but not for content – look at them like a detective. What does your note-taking style say about you? Do you have spiral notebooks stuffed full of handouts with rumpled edges? Are your note pages just solid blocks of hurried scribbles that are all but impossible to read? Did you have to add extra notebooks halfway through the year? And most importantly, how easy is it to find a specific piece of information in one of your notebooks?

Take the opportunity while summer’s still going strong to head to an office supplies store and wander around. Really look at all the organization solutions, and try to imagine yourself using them. Organization is a very personal thing; what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. But once you find that workflow that clicks with you, you’ll be much better prepared for the classes ahead. Here are a few of my favorite tools and tricks concerning the monster of all organization debates: Spiral Notebooks versus Three-Ring Binders.

Ah, the age-old debate – spiral notebooks or three-ring binders? Once again, it all comes down to what you plan to do with them and how you personally take notes. When I was in high school, I liked to use three-ring binders to organize my notes, since I could carry around one large binder that had notes from all of my classes in it. When you’re walking around a high school with only 4 minutes between classes, not needing that extra trip to the locker can make a huge difference. Even more so if, like mine was, your locker is in a block in the basement that is kept locked whenever it’s not a lunch period.

There are down-sides to three-ring binders, though – in particular, my problem with them was always how loud opening and closing the rings was. I never wanted to open them during class, so I was forced to figure out ways to write on the back sides of paper with my wrist craned around the rings, which wasn’t exactly comfortable. I have since figured out a solution to this problem, though – bring a clipboard with your looseleaf paper on it, and write on that. Then transfer your notes to the binder at the end of each class. Oddly enough, looking back now, there was a classmate of mine who did exactly that – but I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember thinking it was a bit odd that she was carrying a clipboard around – but odd is fine if it keeps you organized!

Once I got to college, I realized that I didn’t need to carry all of my notes around with me all the time – I frequently only had one academic class per day, and was already carrying around enough as it was. So I switched to spiral notebooks because I could take only what I needed and lighten my load, plus it was easier to keep information from each class separate in my mind when it was separate in my bag. But I always hated having to rest my wrist on the spiral when writing on the back sides of the pages. During my junior year I solved that problem – I found full-size spiral notebooks with the spiral across the top rather than down the side – stenographer style binding but with regular ruling. It was perfect! I could write on both sides of the paper without discomfort.

The only downside to the steno-style spiral notebooks was that they didn’t have pockets. I had one class where the professor liked to load us down with handouts, sending us home each day with a new stack of paper. I never quite figured out how to handle that, and my perfect note-taking system became a bit unruly with a chunk of loose paper stuffed under the front cover of my notebook.

There is a happy medium between both of these methods, though it requires some specialized equipment. Some companies make a hybrid system that uses a series of specially-shaped rings to create a notebook with re-arrangeable pages. The most famous of these systems is Circa, designed by Levenger, but you can get knock-offs at some office supply stores as well. These systems are easy to use, and the pages come out and go in simply and quietly, removing the loud-snapping-rings issue. The only issue with these is that to really make them work, you have to invest in the hole punch that makes those special cutouts. Armed with one of these notebooks and the hole punch, you can punch your handouts and put them directly into the notebook exactly where they belong, but still have the feel of a spiral notebook.

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Literature Spotlight: Dystopian Novel vs. Dystopian Setting

ALERT: This week’s Literature Spotlight contains spoilers for The Hunger Games trilogy. Read at your own risk!

This week my Bring Your Own Book club met for tea, and our topic for the month was Dystopias. I had offered to host this month, because dystopia is one of my absolute favorite genres. As I sat listening to the others recount various dystopian tales, I was struck by a thought that had been niggling at me for weeks – there’s a significant difference between a dystopian setting and a true dystopian novel. With the increasing popularity of brilliant YA novels such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, it’s becoming more and more common to see stories set in corrupt dystopian societies – but are these stories true dystopias, in the classic sense of the word? There’s more to a dystopian novel than a corrupt society setting – classic dystopias also share certain plot and character elements. When viewed in this way works such as The Hunger Games seem to fit more as other genres of stories, such as adventure, mystery or thriller, that are set in dystopian-inspired worlds.

In a classic dystopia, the protagonist is an anomaly within the Society. He either starts out as the lone dissatisfied person in a world of good little worker bees – like Winston Smith in 1984 – or he is one of the good little worker bees himself. He may even be a somewhat celebrated member of the society; Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 has a respected job as a fireman, while D-503 in We is the builder of the spaceship Integral. Highlighting the protagonist in this way makes it easier for the reader to see why we will be following this person as opposed to anyone else; the majority of citizens are unaware of the flaws in the system, either because of relentless propaganda or status quo bias. Compare Winston’s colleagues in 1984 or the ciphers in We to the citizens of Panem in The Hunger Games; while the Party and the ciphers are sheep who follow the teachings of their government unfailingly, it seems that everyone in the outer districts of Panem is aware of the awful reality of the Games and refuses to swallow the Capitol’s propaganda. In a classic dystopia the protagonist’s journey is one of awareness, as he becomes more and more aware of the flaws and shortcomings of the Society, and simultaneously becomes less and less able to fit into the compartment the Society has given him. But in the Hunger Games, Katniss is already aware of the flaws in the Capitol’s rhetoric, and so is everyone she knows.

Most classic dystopias also contain a character of the archetype known as “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” In a dystopia, this character exists to show the protagonist the faults in the Society. She generally has her opinions already formulated, so that she can effortlessly denounce the Party or foretell the coming rebellion. In contrast to the protagonist, whose mental state tends to break down as he becomes more aware of the corruption, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has everything figured out already. She may end up as a love interest for the protagonist, and if so he will probably betray her at the climax. He is weak and indecisive compared to her strength and rhetoric. From Julia in 1984 to Clarice in Fahrenheit 451 to I-330 in We, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl enters the protagonist’s life to give him freedom within the structure of the Society. In The Hunger Games, however, this character doesn’t seem to be present, probably because there is no real need for her when the citizens are already aware and fighting back.

In a classic dystopia, the Society never loses. The protagonist may think he’s figured out a way to escape or to bring down the Party, but the Party is always three steps ahead. If the protagonist refuses to bend, the Society will break him, conforming him by force. Whether it’s the last scene in the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984 or the final Record in We, the Society always wins and the protagonist is once again a happy little worker bee. A classic dystopia ends on a note of hopelessness – the Society is too strong. The Hunger Games shows a brilliant subversion of this arc with the ending of Mockingjay. President Coin suggesting one final Hunger Games with Capitol children is a punch in the gut to the victors who have been through the arena – the reader can almost see the cycle of the Games beginning again. First one final Games, then another – and then it’s back to square one, but with roles reversed. Coin has become Snow, and the power will wield her just as it did him. Katniss sees this, and manages to break the cycle by assassinating Coin instead of Snow, realizing that the real enemy is the power of the office, not the broken, dying man presented to her. By breaking the cycle, Katniss allows a hopeful – and very un-dystopian – ending for her society.

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WWTK: Real-World Writing

I received this WyzAnt Wants To Know prompt this morning:

“Students often want to know how they’ll use a subject “in the real world.” Pick one of your subjects and tell us why it’s important outside of the classroom.”

As it happens I wrote an article on this very topic as it relates to Algebra a few months back. You can check out that article here. So since I’ve already answered this in relation to math, I’ll discuss another of my topics: writing.

It’s true that once you finish college you’ll probably never need to write another term paper. Unless your career path tends towards academics (or blog posting), regular paper-writing is probably not going to show up very much. But what will show up quite frequently is the need to clearly and concisely articulate your thoughts and opinions in writing. In today’s text-based world, first impressions are often written rather than spoken – whether that be a cover letter for a resume, a request for information about a position, or a proposal for a new project. If you plan on being self-employed, starting your own business or going into certain fields such as arts administration, you can expect to run into larger writing projects as well. Business plans, grant applications, and press releases all require skill in clear and concise writing. But even something as simple as an email introduction still deserves a careful and articulate hand.

I experienced this myself when I first started tutoring; each time I wanted to respond to a job posting on WyzAnt I found myself sitting on the response screen deleting and rewriting for several minutes to get the phrasing just right. Realizing this, and also realizing that I generally ended up using the same specific phrasing for certain situations (such as finishing all introductions or requests for information with the sentence “Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you”), I finally decided one day to sit down and write up a template response, one that incorporated all of the best phrasings I’d come up with over the months of writing and rewriting. This way I can now save time on each response by simply tweaking any specific details, and still be sure that I’m putting my best foot forward and including all relevant information.

Writing papers and essays in high school and college provides you a valuable chance to develop and hone your written voice. As you complete assignments, you’ll begin to learn what a good sentence looks and sounds like. You’ll practice thinking ahead, going through each next point as you type the one before, and you’ll become more skilled at translating that inner monologue into a smoothly-flowing paragraph. Writing papers also teaches you to edit, whether that means drafting, proofreading and rewriting or simply stopping in the middle of a sentence to think through a few different ways of finishing it before continuing. You’ll learn to be straightforward and confident, whether that means stating your opinions as facts in persuasive pieces or citing just the right piece of research in history papers.

Speaking of research, the act of researching for a paper is an invaluable lesson for when you need to figure something out in the real world. Taking notes, highlighting and marking pages with post-its are valuable organizational skills, and they are usually learned first in the context of researching a history paper. In the real world you eventually realize that not everything can be found with a wikipedia search, and that sometimes you need to go old-school and hoof it to the library to find the book you need.

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Mathematical Journeys: Carl Gauss and the Sum of an Arithmetic Series

There’s a famous (and probably apocryphal) story about the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss that goes something like this:

Gauss was 9 years old, and sitting in his math class. He was a genius even at this young age, and as such was incredibly bored in his class and would always goof off and get into trouble. One day his teacher wanted to punish him for goofing off, and told him that if he was so smart, why didn’t he go sit in the corner and add up all the integers from 1 to 100? Gauss went and sat in the corner, but didn’t pick up his pencil. The teacher confronted him, saying “Carl! Why aren’t you working? I suppose you’ve figured it out already, have you?” Gauss responded with “Yes – it’s 5,050.” The teacher didn’t believe him and spent the next ten minutes or so adding everything up by hand, only to find that Gauss was right!

So how did Gauss find the answer so fast? What did he see that his teacher didn’t? The answer is simple, really – it’s all about pattern recognition. Let’s look at the problem more closely.

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 +…+ 95 + 96 + 97 + 98 + 99 + 100 = ?

Now it’s true that adding all that up by hand would take forever, but we don’t really need to add it all up by hand. Look at this series from each end simultaneously instead of just left to right. You’ll see that we can think of this series as a set of pairs of numbers, each of which adds up to 101:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 +…+ 95 + 96 + 97 + 98 + 99 + 100 = ?

1 + 100 = 101
2 + 99 = 101
3 + 98 = 101
4 + 97 = 101
5 + 96 = 101

and so on right through to the middle, where:

48 + 53 = 101
49 + 52 = 101
50 + 51 = 101

So we’ve got a total of 50 pairs, each of which adds up to 101. Since all our chunks are the same size, we can take a shortcut and simply multiply the size of the pair (101) by the number of pairs (50). Which is really easy to do in your head, since it’s just (100 x 50) plus (1 x 50), or 5000 + 50 = 5,050.

This reasoning can actually be extrapolated to work with any arithmetic series, and in fact is how we get the formula for the sum of an arithmetic series. Check it out:

Each pair added up to the same number, so we could actually use the mathematical expression for any one of those pairs in our formula. Since the first and last term are the ones most often known, let’s use those. Remember, the last term in the series is written as an, where n is the number of terms in the series. So that 101 will be represented by:

The first term (a1) + the last term (an), or (a1 + an)

Check out the first term in each of our pairs above. They range from 1 to 50, so there are 50 terms – exactly half the number of terms in the series. Which makes sense, since we’re pairing up the terms and that by definition gives us half as many pairs as terms.

So 50 in our example is represented by one-half of n, or n/2.

And what are we doing with these two bits of information? Multiplying them together. So our final formula would be:

Σ = (n/2)(a1 + an)

Now, sometimes you see this formula written as n[(a1 + an)/2],

or the number of terms times the average of the first and last terms. Practically that is exactly the same thing as the way we wrote it first, it’s just written a little differently. But they both have the same value, so if it’s easier for you to remember it as the average times the number of terms, do so.

This formula works for any arithmetic series, so the next time you come up against one, remember Gauss and his pairs of terms!

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Literature Spotlight: A First-Person Ensemble

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a novel told in epistolary form – meaning the story is told entirely through documents, in this case journal entries and newspaper clippings. Epistolary is a very effective technique for writing certain types of stories, and one that I feel is generally under-appreciated. In Dracula the epistolary form is used brilliantly to enhance the sense of mystery and suspense in the novel, and to add to the overall chilling effect of the story.

One of the ways in which epistolary form enhances the suspense is through the use of first person narration – from multiple sources. In a traditional first-person narration the reader follows a single protagonist, knowing only what they know and seeing only what they see. This can be a welcome insight into a character’s psyche, but can also be restrictive to the author since they cannot add outside information to the story. In epistolary form many characters can contribute first-person narratives to the novel at once, allowing the reader to get inside the heads of many people simultaneously and lending the novel a sense of a truly ensemble story.

In Dracula we are told the story primarily through journal entries from three of the main characters, each of whom have their own opinions and relationship to the central mystery of the novel. When all three characters are in the same place or participating in the same plan, the author’s choice of which journal to show us reveals subtle layers within the story itself. Near the midpoint of the novel, Mina Harker begins to fall victim to the same strange wasting effects that she had noticed in Lucy earlier on. While the Lucy chapters are narrated almost exclusively by Mina, now that the affliction has struck Mina the reader suddenly stops hearing from her and the narration switches to Dr. Seward. In this way Stoker manages to never quite tell us what’s really happening from the perspective of someone who is directly experiencing it. Like the characters themselves, we as readers can only see the effects of the mysterious ailment and theorize about its source.

When the characters are in separate locations or participating in separate activities, the choice of when and how to switch narrators is carefully designed to throw the reader off-guard. The novel begins with a sizable chunk told from the perspective of Jonathan Harker, as he travels to Castle Dracula and meets its namesake Count. Just when the reader has been lulled into thinking that the whole story will be told from this perspective, Jonathan decides to attempt a daring escape from the castle. He ends his journal entry with the phrase “Goodbye all. Mina!” (P.86) – and then the narrative abruptly switches to a happy-go-lucky letter sent by Mina to her best friend about her plans to come visit. We do not hear from Johnathan again for quite some time. The reader to begins to worry – how did his escape attempt go? Did he get captured – or worse? We are shown that Mina suspects nothing, and that the letters which Dracula forced Jonathan to write ahead of time and future-date are arriving on schedule, which just makes us worry more. Telling the story through multiple first-person accounts allows the reader to begin to piece the puzzle together ahead of the characters, increasing the sense of anticipation, or even dread, at what will happen when the characters finally figure it out.

Telling the story through diary entries also creates a unique and intriguing sense of time. Rather than a typical past-tense narrative, each diary entry begins in past tense as the character recounts the events of the previous day or so, and ends by bringing the narrative up to the present, often discussing their feelings or worries in present tense before ending the entry. The next entry jumps forward another day and again recounts the previous day up to the current moment, then stops. This jerky back-and-forward style of narration, oddly enough, places the reader firmly in the present by reminding them that the character who is narrating does not know any more about what will happen tomorrow than the reader does. In a standard narrative form, the reader can generally assume that the narrator already knows how the story ends, and is simply retelling it. By telling the story through diary entries, Stoker heightens the sense of dread and anticipation by reminding the reader constantly that the characters know no more than the reader – and sometimes much less. This technique is particularly effective for horror stories or mysteries – of which Dracula is both – because it maintains the suspense and uncertainty right through to the end.

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Ellen’s Choice: From Page to Screen

This past weekend I went to see the long-awaited movie adaptation of John Green’s bestselling novel “The Fault in Our Stars.” I’m a big fan of alternate-medium depictions of various art forms (movies based on books, theater, or games, books that expand upon a movie or TV show, etc.) and I love to think about the ways in which a story is adapted for a new medium. Movies, TV, books, and live theater all have their own distinct methods of storytelling, and it’s an enlightening exercise to think about how the source material has to change to fit the new style. The Fault in Our Stars movie is one of the most faithful, and I think successful, adaptations I’ve seen in a long time. I’d like to take a moment to discuss a few of the ways in which I felt they most successfully navigated the transition from book to movie. I’ll refrain from spoilers in case any readers have not read the book or seen the movie yet.

Visual Effects

The Fault in Our Stars, in book form, contains a lot of virtual and text-based communication. Emails and texts play a major role in progressing the plot, reflecting the realism of modern-day communication. Going into the movie I had anticipated that this would be changed, possibly converting the texts to phone calls or some other form of spoken conversation. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the movie-makers had a better idea up their sleeves. During texting conversations the actors simply looked at their phones and reacted realistically, while little cartoon text bubbles popped up near their heads. The art style was cartoony and line-drawn, using minimal effect work to convey the content remarkably well. Similarly, email conversations were depicted with a hazy overlay of the email itself projected on top of the film, to let you in on what the characters were reading as they read it. Occasionally the longer emails were also voiced over by the reading character, as though they were reading it in their head. Throughout the movie these effects never felt forced or out-of-place, and I felt they accurately portrayed what it is like to have a silent conversation about something truly exciting.

Narration

Narration in a book is a very different communication method than in a movie. I went into the movie expecting a lot of voice-over narration from Hazel, both based on her narration in the trailer and based on the difficulty I foresaw in trying to maintain John Green’s distinctive voice in a visual medium. And while there is some narration from Hazel in the movie, it’s used surprisingly sparingly, and always in appropriate spots. The movie begins with Hazel’s voice-over narrating about how there are different ways to tell sad stories, and how she didn’t want to sugar-coat it because “that’s not the truth.” I began to notice that Hazel’s narration would take over whenever she got to a point in the story that was difficult for her to relive; specifically because what happened next was painful or didn’t fit into that “sugar-coated” mold. It was the truth, and so she had to tell it, but she couldn’t bear to actually relive it with dialogue and sound effects, so we get her narration over the visuals of the event, usually with musical accompaniment or blurred and muffled sounds.

Visual Storytelling – Direction

I was also struck by the subtlety of a lot of the visual storytelling and direction in the movie. Without spoilers, here are a couple of examples. Early in the story, mutual friend Isaac is slighted and gets really, really angry. Augustus tells him he needs to break something, and offers up his wall of basketball trophies. What follows, in the book, is a relatively serious conversation between Hazel and Augustus peppered with the occasional moment of Isaac breaking something thrown in. The whole sequence is very funny in the book, and I was eager to see how it would play out in the movie. I was not disappointed – the sequence is made even funnier in the movie via a classic case of upstaging. The director chose to shoot this sequence with Hazel and Augustus in the foreground, in focus, and Isaac blurry in the background, yelling and smashing things and just generally drawing focus away from the actual plot progression – in the funniest way possible. The visual nature of the movie medium allowed both occurrences to happen simultaneously, which just enhanced the comedy of the moment.

A second, more serious example, occurs later in the movie. As the story progresses, Hazel’s character arc is one of acceptance; learning that she doesn’t have to be afraid of getting close to others, and that even though she knows her days are numbered, she should still go out and live them. The movie depicts this beautifully, and so subtly that I almost didn’t notice it. Hazel carries her oxygen tank in a little rolling backpack, which she habitually drags behind her everywhere she goes. Beginning at a very important point in the story, however (no spoilers!), we start to see Hazel carrying her oxygen tank more often as a backpack, literally shouldering her burden rather than dragging it behind her. Carrying her tank on her back leaves her hands free and allows her more mobility, signifying her newfound resolve to deal with her situation practically and live her life fully. This beautiful bit of symbolism is a great example of how well the movie portrays the thoughts and philosophies of the book through its own particular medium.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I highly recommend it. But read the book first!