Quarter One: Debrief

Overall for quarter one I felt that the class was not hard but still challenging. It was not a "slacker" class, you had to still earn your grade. I missed some small things here and there and so it brought me down to the A- B+ range. I thought as though my writing skills on making a more structured paper. The whole five paragraph paper is a bit more do-able for me now. I have trouble thinking of ideas to put into a paper, I don't like putting things down unless I feel they fit. They class environment is more inviting because there will be music playing and people talking. Even though the school is a dungeon... I am going to try to stay more on top of my homework and do what is needed to get good grades. For quarter two I want to get a solid A, not to be missing homework assignments here and there. Things in first quarter felt as though you were working in groups quite a bit of the time, and I knew that if one of us tanked, all of us were affected. I know that I won't do that to my classmates, I will continue to try and make sure that if I go down, that I won't drag anybody else down with me.

Outside Reading Post 5

There are no new main characters. The main 3 remain as Bill Nagle, John Chatterton, and Richie Kohler. Though the three of them are evolving, they are learning from each other and respecting each other. John is still trying to find records of the mystery U-Boat from all sorts of different sources. John is hoping that in all of the information out there he will be able to find one sliver of information that will help his investigation. John talks about some of the places he asks for information from, John explains, "The NHC was the Fort Knox of naval war records, and it was from the archivist's expertise that Chatterton hoped to mine hidden nuggets" (Kuson, 142). Richie is also trying to find out as much as he can. Richie comes across some valuable information, Richie is told to search the crews boots. They explain it in the book when they quote one of Richie's informers, "The guy says they all wrote their names inside their boots so no one else would wear them... And they put their watches and jewelry in their boots, too, and some of that stuff also had their names" (142-143).They both have a few leads, but neither of them talk once on what they have found. Bill Nagle is still trying to quit his drinking problem so that he could dive like the old days. John has a new sort of respect for Richie because he knows that Richie is not a complete jerk. But they still refuse to work together in order to somehow identify the mystery U-Boat. I believe that they are going to work together to find the identity of the sub.

John and Richie both are have conflicts with trying to learn more about the sub and U-Boats in general. John decided to do a press release on the sub, so that anybody who had any information could contact them. Unfortunately for John along with the few sources he received that were credible, he also got his fair share of people that had no credible and were just a nuisance. Richie also got calls from people wanting to buy bones from him that he may have recovered from the boat, he simply told them he didn't do that kind of thing. Richie was not going to put up with some people that called, he says, "So-called collecters, Kohler found, got angry fast. He learned to hang up on them even faster" (148). Nagle had accidentally given away the coordinates for the wreck while he was drunk. Surely Bielenda would try to dive the wreck soon, and indeed he did, Bielenda even called Chatterton asking if he wanted to go on the dive. Supposedly the dive was solely for the recovery of the body of Steve Feldman, Chatterton turned him down but then later heard that some of the divers indeed searched for the body, and others just dived the wreck. The Seeker made one more dive to the wreck, this time Kohler was a bit angered by the fact that Chatterton always splashed first and made "the viz" horrible for everybody following him. Nagle told Kohler he would have to live with it, and on that dive, Chatterton recovered a set of silverware with The eagle and swastika imprinted on them. John began to then carefully clean a knife, and as he slowly removed the debris using his thumb, he felt the imprint of letters beneath his thumb. Finally the letters were visible, it read "HORENBURG". Chatterton had recovered the artifact of his life, and had finally secured some solid evidence.