2011-2012 English/World History Portfolio

​Introduction:

Over the 2011-2012-sophomore year at Science Leadership Academy, I have learned a lot of new things as well as encountered a lot of challenges in both English and my World History class. Coming into this class, I thought that the work was going to be easy with simple spelling test every other Friday or reading random books and having a test on them after the unit was over. However, I got the complete opposite of what I thought this class would be like. Before getting start on the work, I had an expectation of the classes being easy and not a struggle. As the year progressed, I found the work to be more of a challenge for me. The concepts of the work made my mind stretch and had me look at things from a different perspective. On the other hand, a lot of the work wasn’t easy at times. There was a lot that needed to be done and having good time management. Overall, I think this school year in English and World History has definitely helped me a lot with my writing and understanding things with comprehension. This blog will show you two general understandings of what I learned and how much effort it took to get to where I am now.

“Creativity comes from the heart of the person of how they feel.”

I thought of this quote because I do believe that whenever someone creates something, it comes from the heart and what they believe should be created. The piece that they create is theirs and they have ownership to it. One of the projects that we worked on was our poetry wiki. This was a project where we had to pick a poet and study them. Then we had to write poems that were similar to the flow of the poet that we studied. It was interesting because it made me think more and stretch my mind to further explore the art and creativity of poetry. The poems that I wrote came from my own experiences and how I felt at the time. I think that this project was fun and I enjoyed myself throughout the process of this project. In the later part of the year, we studied the world and cultures of Haiti. We read short stories that an author named Edwidge Danticat, who was from Haiti and her family that still lives there. In addition to reading her stories, we had to write about her stories and then write a letter to her explaining how much her stories meant to us and how they were interesting. In my letter I said, “I liked how you talked about your family and what the culture is like in Haiti.” Both of these projects required a lot of creativity and I think both of my projects were very well done.

“Challenges lead to trying new things.”

I think this quote meant a lot to me especially in the 2011-2012 year because there were a lot of challenges that I had to face in my English/World History class. The work wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. To an extent, I think it was good that I had a challenge because it allowed me to stretch my critical thinking more than usual. One of the projects that was really a challenge was the Art and the Open project. That’s when we had to create a dance that symbolized freedom and we had people come in from the Leah Stein Dance Company and they talked to us about the type of dance that we had to do. It was major challenge because the type of dance that we were taught was not the type of dance that I am used to. During this project, we were also put into groups to put in our ideas together to come up with a dance. It was totally out of my element because I wasn’t expecting to do anything like that. At the end of the project, we had to write a reflection on what we liked and didn't like about the project. I said that it was challenging because working with other people to create a dance was hard because not everyone knew how to dance and the location of our presentation was difficult to use because we were on public property and didn't want too mess it up. Another assignment that we had to do was write a letter of advice to one of the characters in a book called Passing. That was a challenge, because I had to use what I knew about the character and give her advice on what I thought she should have done. In order to do that, I had to read the book, as well as, reading it with comprehension. Along with the letter, we had to create a podcast and interview someone outside of school and talk to them about how they view different things and how they would react to certain things. To me, this was a fun and enjoyable project. I had working with my group and interviewing my cousin and here what she had to say and her view on certain things.