10th grade Humanities Portfolio that describes and reflects upon learning from the year in both History and English

Stuff

IBA
04/01/08

el horas sueno por noche:

soy dormi 5 horas.

Desayuno: tipo de panecillo y mantequilla

Almuerzo: nada

Cena: pollo y patata

IBA

04/02/08

el Horas de noche: soy dormi 7 horas

Desayuno: tipo de panecillo y mantequilla

Almeurzo: tipo de panecillo y mantequilla, gatorade

Cena: pizza y patata

IBA

04/03/08

El horas de noche: soy dormi 6 horas

Desayuno: tipo de panecillo y mantequilla

Almuerzo: nada

Cena: Pollo y patata

IBA

04/04/08

El horas de noche: 7 horas

Desayuno:  tipo de panecillo y mantequilla

Almuerzo: sopa

Cena: pizza

IBA

04/05/08

El horas de noche: 5 horas

Desayuno: Gofre (waffles)

Almuerzo: hoagie

Cena: pollo

IBA

04/06/08 

El horas de noche: 8 horas

Desayuno: nada

Almuerzo:Gofre (waffles)

Cena: pizza

Itamar Ben-Amos
Iron Stream
English
Mr. Block
                     Language Autobiography

    While most people believe that their language dictates how they would act or how they would grow up, I did not. I believe that my language, although it helped to shape the way I grew up, had not as much significance as many people would have thought. But as much as I say that it didn’t have a big effect on my growing up experience, it still had an effect on how people viewed me and considered me to be.

 Growing up, I lived in the household of two languages, English and Hebrew. Now my parents, not wanting that I be shut off from the world around me and the world of the Americans, surrounded me in my early years in English, so that I would be able to communicate with the world outside and not be seen as an outsider. As I entered my elementary school, chosen because it taught Hebrew along with English, and kept various Jewish practices, they began to take away my little foundation of English, and began to talk to me more and more in Hebrew rather than English. This helped in a way, since I was struggling a bit in my Hebrew class, and it helped me grasp the grammar rules of the language, but it also did something else, that I did not notice until later. Years went on, until my parents started to talk to me completely in Hebrew, with me responding sometimes in Hebrew back, but only when I was in company of friends, to wow them with my ability to speak a language they couldn’t.

Entering High school however, gave me a new revelation. My parents, had woven a web very tightly around me, giving me problems with my 3rd language, Spanish, and separating me from the rest. Just even in the way I addressed my parents, Ima and Aba, mother and father. So already I’m marked as different. Coming to this school, where most of the other people had already taken at least a year of Spanish, putting them ahead of myself and making it harder for me to grasp the basics. I found whenever I would try to conjugate a verb or think of the definition of a word, poof, gone would be the word and in its place the word, but in Hebrew. Now good as that may be for my learning Hebrew, it wreaked havoc on my Spanish grades, not to mention my differentiation between my two and a half languages. Sometimes I would find myself talking to a friend and midway changing to another language, whereupon I would have to backtrack and repeat what I had just said. Most commonly this sentence would be, “Nu? Mah koreh itcha?” gibberish right? Well that’s Hebrew in a nutshell, and that sentence meant, “Well? What’s happening with you?”

However, knowing Hebrew is a blessing, as well, and I like to think more than an impediment. Since I know Hebrew, I am able to talk somewhat like an Israeli, and speak with other people who know the language pretty well. Several times, this language was the main reason why I had such an easier time getting along with the locals in Israel and having a better time then all of my classmates on our class trip to Israel, landing me the unofficial job of being translator for some of the kids. Since I know another language that out of most of my friends and my family, my family and I are the only ones who really know this language, giving us an advantage over my friends, and giving us a language to converse in and to say things to each other so they won’t understand. It’s funny anyway. Seeing people being exposed to a language that they don’t understand may give me a bigger ego, but it is still worth it to show that just because I have problems with one language, doesn’t mean that I can’t know something that they don’t.