Humanities Final Portfolio 2013

This year in History and English has been a very fun and challenging learning experience for me. In the beginning of this school year, I was very solid in writing. I walked in to Mr. Block’s class with the mindset of I will not succeed in this class, in fact I will slack and not even really try. Even though I didn't really mean what I was saying, but I was just finding a way to stay comfortable in my own skin. “Originality is pushing yourself beyond personal boundaries.”

 English is where I grew the most as a writer. I improved by verifying the words that I use for description. I also learned that being descriptive precise does a lot to how writing sounds. In the beginning of this year my descriptive writing level was okay, but now I’m able to write in a different perspective. From Multiple projects in this class has helped me learn how to use dialogue and write in my own voice, and express my own opinions through proof or by supporting my statements. This is a paragraph from that Project “Wait let me try myself, Heart beating faster the sound of family laughter and conversations. I can barely pedal, trying my hardest not to make a fool out of myself, but in my mind that was the only thing I knew was going to happen. Teenagers disparaging me. Sounds of whispers, bubble gum, and the feeling of humiliation. I always knew that I could do whatever I put my mind to so I kept trying. Every Time I fell off I pretend I was doing it all of on purpose.” Check out the actual Project by clinking here for this assignment we had to write a descriptive essay about a moment in our childhood.

“Language is a common barrier to relationships”. Over the course of English we ran across a project and we had to write a language biography, It was very challenging. You got to write about our experiences with language. That’s also what makes learning fun and challenging in Mr. block’s class, because we took the challenge to write about something that was important to us and had fun doing it. “ Language can make your identity glow or make it look trashy” This is a quote from my Language biography. here is my language bio.

The poetry unit was my favorite unit. I took the descriptive writing and all the other awesome writing style I learned this year to come up with incredible poems. We wrote our own creative pieces. This is my poetry Wikispaces. The best part was studying a famous poet. I studied Amiri Baraka. I got to learn so much about his writing style and his life in general. He was almost a politic, and he stood up for his voice. Click here to learn more about this famous poet.

In history we learned a lot about Humans/ environmental, Religion, Age of Exploration, Renaissance, Playwright, Revolution, and Industrial Revolution/ Modern day capitalism. I had an amazing time doing every single one of these assignments. One of my favorite projects was when we had to write three monologues about the Keystone Pipeline and the effects it was going to have on people. I wrote as the soil in Camden, A girl and a wooden pipeline. This is a quote from one of my monologues “ I knew that I would be developing, because The Governors think that everything has to be developed.” here is the assignment here is also a video to this assignment. It was so fun doing this project, some might say “well what are you learning by just writing monologues?” and I’ll say they weren't only monologues; we actually had to research facts about the keystone Pipeline. We read articles, and a lot more other interesting stories. We made sure we had our facts right.

“Religion does not equal culture.” In our religion unit, we were able to explore different types of religion and their sacred books. It was very different to understand other people’s religion, because learning just your own isn’t being knowledgeable but being flexible enough to learn others is being wise. In some religions for example Christianity, is often mixed up with culture. That was always my curiosity; I just always wanted to know why this often happened. As we got farther in the unit, we received an assignment where we had to pick a religion that we weren’t familiar to make a brochure, and since I was so concern about the whole “Religion does not equal culture.” I decided to approach some of that issue in my brochure. Here is that Assignment.

This assignment was a journal entry from over the year. I would just like to share this with you, Here and also one of my favorite quotes from the journals we wrote over the years. is “Trying to relocate you from every angle that you was never there to form.”

This is not all of the work we did, this is just some. I don’t think anyone would have the time and patient to write and list all of the assignment we have learned and did this year, I never knew it would be possible for me to learn so much in a small amount of time. I am convinced that anything is possible. All thanks to Joshua Block for making me such open minded and a wise writer. I feel like my brain has expanded ten times larger. I am grateful to have you as my 10th grade English and History teacher.