Final Portfolio

Throughout this year, we have learned many different, interesting things in World History. We were taught to have our own opinions during different units and stand by it. During the third marking period, each student had to make a revolution guidebook digital story benchmark and the goal was to choose a key issue, investigate that issue, then using examples and quotes from different revolutions, explain your point of view about that specific idea and support it. My project evolved around the question, “which method makes a revolution more effective or successful, violence or non violence?”Here is my project.. Coming into this year, I used to think that violence is always more successful than non violence because the message doesn’t really get across and people don’t really take it seriously unless they are forced to. However, I decided that my point of view during this project is that the non violence method is the most effective one. Now I believe that non violence is the answer to every situation that is presented, violence is never a good idea no matter it is. Why? Let’s explore.

The second quarter highlighted some of the exciting things that we did. One of them was a mock trial that we did as a class. We were divided into groups and each group had to take turns prosecuting other groups and defending their own groups. The goal was for each group to convince everyone else that they are the most innocent one. This trial was for the Cortes invasion of the Aztec empire. During this trial, we saw that Cortes and his men to take control of the land and be forceful rulers. One would argue that this was a successful invasion except for the side issues since he accomplished his goal but I would argue otherwise. For the trial, we had used different characters of the invasion and my groups was the king. One of the statements that we used was, “Cortes’s group wiped out a country nearly completely. Cortes’ group set their own ship on fire so they could continue the violence when his group wanted to stop, but he wanted his men to continue the carnage making him a guilty person.This document can be found by clicking this. If you click here, you can see my group's document for another mock trial that we did as a class. We used this statement in an attempt to prove that the invasion was not out fault but indeed theirs. It is clear that there was massive murder while Cortes and his men were there and that led to nothing. They were not pleased with the way that the Aztecs were living their life while they were there but they did not realize that killing them was not the answer. This killing was unnecessary and they ended up turning on each other as time went by. This brought to my attention that maybe my conception of violence was wrong and that maybe I should find another way to perceive it.

Another unit that we did meant that we had to make a wiki document informing the public about a specific issue relating to religion. We were expected to use multiple religions for the one issue in order to go more in depth.This is the link to mine. During my project, which I used Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism as the religions that'll help me prove my point. I learned that homosexuals were being tortured, and even killed in certain religions because of their sexuality. They thought that that would help but instead that only created more protests and more violence. Violence only leads to more violence and that is never a helpful thing.

During my digital story, I used quotes from the famous Ghandi and Martin Luther King to emphasize my point. Non violence may take more time but it is worth it because of the lack of death and injuries. Human life should be more valued than an idea, no matter how brilliant it may sound. I used the Egyptian revolution and the French revolution to emphasize my point. During the Egyptian, there were peaceful protests while during the French revolution consisted of one too may deaths. While both revolutions seem to be successful since they both achieved their goal, a revolution should be judged by how little human lives were lost while the point was getting across. If this calculator is being used, the Egyptian revolution was many times better. This year’s learning helped me understand this important, key fact about violence and I am grateful for that. I never thought that violence was like an okay, normal thing but I always thought of it as an option. Now I know that I was wrong.

Journal Entries were another part of our learning in World History, below some of mine can be found:

1) Journal #40

2) Journal #50

Another piece of work that I created for this class is here.