Inquiry Post for “What Do You Remember of the Evacuation?”

What are the effects of racism/discrimination?

In “What Do You Remember of the Evacuation?” by Joy Kogawa, the author recounts her experience of being exiled of the community. She is “abandoning everything, leaving pets and possessions at gunpoint”(line 12), to be forced to live with other Japanese people. The community is scared of Japanese people after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The Japanese people are shunned out of the community, even though the Japanese people of North America are mostly sided with England during the war. Only two women, who are assumed to be author’s teachers, are caring and sympathetic towards her. Everyone else is hostile towards her, because she is a Japanese person. At the end of the poem, the author expresses her shame of being a Japanese person, due to the discrimination, and a desire “that I might be white”(line 39). When there is discrimination against a certain race(the Japanese), it could result in segregation out of the community, shame, and insecurity(like how the author feels insecure for being Japanese). With racism and discrimination, people may lose their possessions and even their pride.

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Something I’ve Learned in Math This Week

This week in Math, I learned how to find the measure of an angle of a right triangle with two side lengths. First you need to need to label the triangle sides relative to the angle you are trying to find. The hypotenuse is the longest side. The adjacent is the side next to the angle that isn’t the hypotenuse. The opposite is the side opposite of the angle. Next, with the two side lengths you are given, you need to find the trigonometric function that works with the side lengths you are given. sin=opposite/hypotenuse, cos=adjacent/hypotenuse, and tan=opposite/adjacent.

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As you can see in this example, we are given the side lengths of opposite and adjacent, therefore, we use tan=opposite/adjacent. We know that in this example, opposite=9.7 and adjacent=5.2. So in our calculator we would type in \tan^{-1}(\frac{9.7}{5.2}) then press “=”. The answer we get should be something like 61.80502… which would round to 62, so our answer would be x=62^\circ, and that is how you find the measure of an angle of a right triangle with only two side lengths.