Humanities Final Portfolio 2013

Throughout this school year, Mr. Block had introduced us with various assignments and projects from both English and History. At the beginning of the English course, we began with descriptive writing. It was one of the first assignment that was started right after summer break. From all the assignments and projects that was given, my personal favorite is the poetry writing unit. We wrote poems on a website called WikiSpace that is shared with the entire class so that we can read each others. Here is a link to my WikiSpace poem. My WikiSpace tells various stories from the many different poems. This is one of my personal favorite project of the year because I enjoy writing poems and expressing my ideas. It expresses my emotions and how I feel towards certain things that can be interpret through poems. One of the poems that I wrote is called an ode poem. “Private speakers,/ Small and high quality/ moving me into a different state of mind./ A nice one/ A calm one.” That was a stanza from my ode poem. My ode poem expresses my emotions towards my headphones because I use it everyday.

In History class, we wrote monologues about the XL Keystone pipeline. This is a first major project of the school year. In this project, I worked with another student and as a result of this project, it came out really well. After the monologues were polished, we asked other students to perform at least 5 of the monologues. This following quote of mine is from an introduction of the monologue project “With this intention, I created several monologues expressing how many people feel about the pipeline, and how I feel personally as well.” When we were first taught about the XL Keystone pipeline, I didn’t understand it very well. or how to react towards it. However, when doing the monologue project, it helped me understand the harsh consequences of the XL Keystone pipeline. Working with another student, helped me even further because we worked and brainstormed together to get the highest quality monologue as possible. To do that, we had to make a lot of researches about the pipeline. For me personally, working with a partner or a small group really helps me understand things a lot better in the classroom. For example, the Sweatshop Trial. The trial consists of students having a role of either the prosecutor or a defender from each group of labor in a trial of a classroom. Working collaboratively with my group members, I came up with a very strong question for the defender during the trial. The question was “How do you plan to use the profit made by your workers? In which their salary is much lower than the cost of the products that they make.” This question was towards the defender of the Multinational Corporations.  I came up with this question from the things that was taught in class and from what my group members said during the trial. Here is a link to the Google Doc that was shared among my group members on the Sweatshop trials. I enjoy working in small groups or with a partner because it takes me further in learning. If I were to work by myself such as the WikiSpace poem, I would try to get the highest quality made and pushing myself beyond personal boundaries.

One of my project that I’m most proud is creating a podcast about the people I know on crossing boundaries. This was an individual project. I interviewed a friend and my two middle school teachers that I had a really good relationship with. The podcast was over 45 minutes long from the 3 people I interviewed. I felt really proud of my interview skills. At first, when I first heard about the assignment, I really thought that I couldn’t do a 45 minute interview because I had never interviewed anyone before and it has to be over 45 minutes. I felt accomplished after the 45 minute interview. I had never done anything like this before and I pushed myself into developing this podcast. As a result of pushing myself, my podcast was successful. For the final draft of the podcast, it had to be cut down to 8-10 minutes. From the 45 minute interview, I removed all the unnecessary points, keeping the important details to become an 8-10 minute interview. The link to my podcast can be found here. The main thing that my interviewees talked about were about violence. The things they said are very similar to what I wrote in my journal entry for history, which can be found here. Based on what I wrote in my journal entry, I was able to go in further details about their experiences with violence in the podcast.

One of my journal entries that stood out the most deals with human inequality. The main question of this journal entry is “Why do humans so often treat each other badly?” This question is really deep because it makes me think about the things that are going on in our world today and even in my neighborhood. My response to this question is stating that because of hatred of race, culture, or it could simply just be the attitude. My full response can be found here.

In conclusion, I have learn and discovered many new things throughout this year. I learned that working in groups can bring out a lot of new things that an individual cannot think of. Working in groups brings out the best in individuals. If I were to work alone, I would push myself to bring out my best effort. Out of all the work that I do, I would try to be original as I can and pushing myself beyond my personal boundaries.