Humanities Portfolio 2011

            When it came to history we learned a lot of different view points and where different people stand through out the world. It was interesting to see what other people think and why they think that because of how they were brought up in life.This was one thing we really focused on during the religion unit. "Is religion real?" This was a question we looked at during this unit as well. We studied what other believed in and what made them believe it. We did a benchmark, and I have to say it was one of my favorite benchmarks. We had to compare three or more religions in some way. So for my project, I compared the idea of God and what it is and why God is so important. Other people looked at issues of gay rights or heaven. This project forced you to learn about religions that you don’t practice and compare them and really study them in-depth. It helped open my views and it was a great learning experience.

            To start off the year on the first day and the first page of our brand new crispy journals we wrote about a song we listened to. The song was sung by a woman and was about the travel process of clothing. The song kept bringing up the question of weather or not a person’s hands were clean and asked each listener if they thought their hands were clean. This was the start of the year and Mr. Block already had us thinking deeper into such common everyday things, our hands and the new back to school clothes everyone had on. It broadened my perspective and got me ready to understand how basic things were not really all that basic.

            Towards the mid-end of the year we started a poetry unit and was able to write and create a wiki-space that was filled with our own poetry and writing pieces about how we understand poetry by different famous writers. From one of my pieces I said "I start for you, the flash of your hair, pushes me back, makes my heart whirl, fall to ground, your power is so overwhelming." It was really cool to see everyone write and perform their written pieces and to read over everyone’s personal wiki-spaces.

One of the biggest projects I have ever done in my whole life I can say I did this year. During this year we had to write monologues that turned into a story. These stories were about something about change and hope in other parts of the world and it involved them overcoming something. We started the project lost and confused but through the exercises and activities we did with Kate, a lady from the young play writers company, everyone was able to complete this project. There is no way I would have been able to do this without the help of my peers. They helped give great feedback and ideas to add to make the plot more interesting. It really gave peer editing a whole new meaning. This project included two Google documents, one with all the facts and information about our topic and country and the other was just strictly the monologues and the feedback to help us improve.

            In English we read a book called Passing. This book was all about how to make you look or act one way to fit in with certain people, this was called passing. This book was based in the past and focused a lot on blacks trying to pass as whites because of shame or for their safety. With groups we were assigned parts of the book to reread and analyze closer. My group wrote a found poem, meaning we took quotes from the book and put it together to help explain and tell the story and themes of the book in a different way and then we presented it to the class. To do this project we all both it on a Google document and edited and wrote in together.