Humanities Final Portfolio 2013

Final Portfolio

Jules James


Looking back throughout the year in history and in english the theme this year in history, to me was seeing things in different lens helps create a better understanding of the world. We learned about what happened in the past and also what is happening now. We didn’t just stick to one subject. We learned about about a lot of things that happened in different places. One thing I remember learning about in history was the Colonialism Project. In this project we had to search any place in the world that was colonized in the past and we as individuals prepared a proposal to make an exhibit. This project really showed me that there is a way of learning without just sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher talking our brains out and telling us to take notes. And some people, like me, consider this way to be the easiest and the fun way to learn. In some cases it’s nice to learn and find out new information on your own other than just getting a ton of facts thrown in your ear.

It wasn’t just the projects that helped me learn new things in different ways but it was also the daily journals we did. For example, one of the journals I thought was helping was History Journal #19. In this journal, the question was “What is your universe obligation?” I answered this question by stating the four people, things, or places that I that felt as though was extremely important in my life. I liked doing this journal because the answer for this question didn’t have a right or wrong answer. It was opinionated. At this time we were learning about the universal declaration of human rights. We learned about the different rights for humans such as being born free, no slavery, equality to law, privacy, and many other rights. We also learned about The Modern Day Sweatshops. It was interesting the way we gathered up all our information and used it on each other by having a trial. We performed the trial by playing in different groups such as U.S. consumers, the system of profit, the poor country workers, the poor country ruling elite, and the multinational corporation and we basically chose one group to put all the blame on for the sweatshops, that is all around the world, and we had evidence of how each other was involved in the sweatshops. “We don’t care about the employees. We just want a profit.” This is one quote that was said during the trial by the system of profit and I felt as though this was a good quote because they was really playing the role of the system.

In english there was a lot of feelings and description going on. This year was filled with emotion and I thought this was important to state because in english not everybody have the chance to learn about these things because they are either focused to read  books or they are learning about grammar. We had the opportunity to read books and work on our grammar also. So the theme in english was language has hidden meanings and influence. There’s multiple reasons why I feel like this was the theme. For example, language played a huge role in my english 2 classes. We learned about descriptive language and poetry throughout the year that really brought out people’s emotion and thoughts. “Love don't exist in the pool of me. But the pain from is its number one visitor. As the smiles that I call bodyguards of happiness try to keep the pain out, its too strong for the bodyguards who don't use weapons except the lies of a smile.” When you read these quotes you can see that they are not just a regular sentences that you say when talk to someone. Well these sentences and more sentences like this was written in my Descriptive Writing. During our process of writing this, we was told to write different description paragraphs about things we saw or a moment we remembered from before to help us write with a lot of description. I thought this was very helpful because not only did this help me write with more description but it also helped me with looking at every little details of things and using figurative language such simile and metaphors. After writing the descriptive writing we switched to the poetry lesson.

When I heard this I thought we was going to just read a lot of poems from popular poets, but we didn’t do that. We made our own Poems and we used different styles that I never heard of like riff, ode, and found poems. Writing these poems taught me that not all poems have to rhyme just for it to make sense or have significant meaning. “But throughout life these languages will never connect. They are strangers living in the same house.” (Language vs. Language) This quote to me was separating language and poetry. The theme of language also came into place in my English Journal #10 where I had to fill in the blank, I wish ___________, multiple times. “ I wish I had tattoos. I wish I could fall in love. I wish I cared.” These quotes show that the phrase “I wish...” can go as far as to want to take it. And this is the same with language and poetry. You determine how much of you you want people to hear in your language.

In conclusion, this year was filled with different lesson that in a way all connected. And as I look back at all my works that I did for this year I realize that when challenging yourself, you are bettering yourself.


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Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 10.33.38 AM

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