Humanities Final Portfolio 2013_ SPELLS

As history and English class come to an end I start to reflect on the common themes that we have focused on this school year. Colonization, power,nonviolence/violence and the use and misuse of sweat shop are just to name a few that we have focused on.

We all know that the united states is the number one richest country in the world, but as a whole we are struggling ourselves and we always go for “what’s the cheapest”. In Mr block’s English class we were first introduced to a text called “Are your hands clean?” I thought it was a trick question but then I began to think about the not so obvious answers.When Thinking about this question I first thought of sweatshops and how my clothes and shoes are all made in foreign countries. Workers get treated very poorly and they don’t get paid a lot for making the clothes.They are in the factories for 23 hours a day just to earn a little bit of money to feed there family.In the video Zoned for a slavery ,the man informed us that the workers earn 12 cents for every shirt they produce, but in the stores in the US we may pay 20 dollars for a shirt but the workers only get paid 12 cents for the shirt so where is the other $19.88 going?  We will never know. When coming to conclusion I knew that my hands were not clean.

In history class we were assigned to do a trail about Modern Day Sweatshops In the trial our roles were either a US consumer, poor country ruling elites, the workers, system of profit and US multinational corporations. My role was to be a US consumer.It wasn’t easy to defend the consumers because we consumers do take part in sweatshops. We buy clothing that are made in sweatshops because it’s cheaper. Stores like American Apparel clothing are made in the US and we could easily buy clothes from them but we chose not to because they are "Too expensive". “Why pay more when you can pay less” says my friend Warda. We girls love forever 21 but they use sweatshops weather we know or not they do.In the video “Made in L.A” We learned a lot about the whole Forever 21 operation and how everything works/ Workers were sick and tired of how they were being treated so they decided to hurt the owners Non-violently by going on a strike and protesting for what they believe in, and it worked. The owners finally gave into what the workers wanted and they didn't use violence to handle there problem instead they hurt them by just protesting.

Speaking of non-violence. Non-violence and violence played a huge role in the themes we learned this school year.In History class,Mr. Block had us write a journal which was about power as well as violence. I thought that “Being non-violent was more powerful than being violent, it takes more work to be non-violent, being violent doesn't make you powerful it makes you look crazy”. After doing the journal we watched a movie about a man who stood his ground and got his way by doing things non-violently. His name was Gandhi. In the movie Gandhi and his followers were treated very badly but through it all they didn’t use violence to show that they had power. Just them being silent and taking all the abuse showed how powerful they really were.

We didn’t just focus on non-violence we also talked about violence as well. In the beginning of the school year we read a novel called “Lord Of The Flies” .In the book teens were stranded on an island and they were faced with many problems being on that island unsupervised. In the novel the kids kill each other to survive on the island. Being in power caused them to act that way causing them to handle situation more violently... They didn't care if you were they're best friend if you got in there way they would kill you.This was the first violent act that we learned about. Later,we started to talk about colonization and how it affected people as well as the country as a whole. We had to pick a country that we wanted to focus on and then create a museum about the country and how they benefited or didn’t benefit from colonization. I focused on Sierra Leone. My project was called Diamonds Of Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone They use a lot of violence to get there point across.For example soldiers known as the RUF recruit children from different villages in Africa and force them to become a soldier.If they reject they will be shot right on the spot. If they accept they go from village to village shooting other innocent people and forcing them to do as they say.

Overall the common themes that we learned in Mr. Block’s class helped me have a open mind on things and they really helped me out. We learned lots of more themes but these are my general understandings that I wanted to focus on.