Humanities Portfolio 2012: Briana Hicks

C r e a t i v i t y helps mold your simple thoughts into an explosion of splattered art that runs from your mouth or your hands. When I first found out that Mr.Block was going to be my History/English teacher I didn’t know what to think. I’ve never really knew him, but I would see him teach classes when I used to walk by the class room as a freshman. He first wanted to get to know us better so the first thing he told us to do was to take down bullet points of a successful descriptive writing in our journals. I knew this was going somewhere, I just didn’t know where. I was determined to impress my new teacher even if my writing wasn’t good, I was going to not try my best, but do my best as well. 

How was I going to do my best? Easy! I was going to focus on work all day everyday! But that did not turn out well. I had friends that I barely saw all summer so it was kind of a hard start but I pulled through. 

My descriptive essay was surprisingly amazing! I didn’t think I could describe something in so much depth so that other people would get an understanding of it. I guess it was the C r e a t i v i t y I put into the whole paper. Though at first it wasn’t that good. I had to get help from my teacher’s assistant, Mr. Zelnick.

He was very nice and he explained everything that I did not understand in so much description, it was almost like he was telling me a story so that I had to pay attention.It would have been impossible for me not to get it after he talked with me. My descriptive  essay was my first starting point of having a creative flow in the way I wrote my papers. Being creative was, I guess in a way, one of the reasons for me to keep going and to aim for more success pieces of writing. Not only in Mr.Blocks class, but in every other one of my classes too.

Even with my play that I created. You at least needed some type of C r e a t i v i t y in order to have a successful Play. In the end, all of the plays from my class were going to be read by the highest people of the young playwrights organization.Therefore it was important to put a lot of your C r e a t i v i t y into not only your plays, but your mind as well. You had to open your mind up to different possibilities. And for me it wasn’t really hard. I already knew how to draw, and at that time I was learning how to play an instrument. My play was called Broken Idiotic Memories, and at the end of turning it in and all I would say,“It had to have been one of the creative things I’ve ever done”.  

Hard work makes one person preserve enough to not only reach for the sky, but touch the stars as well. Though I finally found a place to start at, things were still hard. You had to kind of struggle for “greatness” I would say. It takes hard work to persevere. A perfect example of persevering is when we had to write several different poems different things. It was labeled Poetry Wikispace  and everyone in my classes including my teacher had poems that were on there. Matter of fact it’s still on there now. For me that was probably the hardest thing to work on because I knew I wasn’t good at poems at all. 

I always had to have them rhyme and I knew that wasn’t a good thing to do. Though I did it all the time. I was scared to go out of my comfort zone. I didn’t want to stop, but I knew I had to. So on my 5th poem I just didn’t care anymore and I didn’t rhyme. Even on my 4th poem called All in a day it stated,“Okay, be that way / I learned something cool something cool today / 96, and you late / I cannot fit any more stuff on my plate / This is one boss library jawn / Marker holder jawn / And he just hits it off / So, are we all game characters or something / I’m gonna go home and write a song about you / Cause, you know he don’t care”.

I somehow started to make the founded words in my poem rhyme because I was too scared that my poem wouldn’t be as good as it was without rhyming. Though I put all of my attention into the poem wiki to be sure I could make an efficient poem that still sounded good without the rhyming scheme. It was hard, actually very hard to come up with something non-rhyming. I was even behind on about 2 poems because I was having such a problem with the poems. But I somehow got through it and I received an awesome score on it in the end too.

I was proud of myself that I could put all my hard work into something that I needed improvement on. It was a challenge, but I got it done like an overachiever would. 

Even with AiO (Art in the Open) I had a hard time really enjoying it. I hated it! When I say I hated it, I mean with a capital ‘H’. I disliked trying to make up my own dance. Though I’d challenge anyone in a game of Dance Dance Revolution or so Just Dance too, I just really did not like AiO at first. But because I got to see it more and more in the 2 weeks and because I was working with people that I knew and could sort of chat things over with, I started to get used to the silly movements and such. 

It was pretty cool and fun and I was happy that my group got done in time and that we actually pulled off some solid quality. At first it was difficult to play the stupid weird game but they taught me how to relax. Not only that but that there are a lot of things around that make sound and art in its own special way. The things we later turn out to notice always seem to be the best part that makes us unique.