Humanities Portfolio 2011

Maximilien Marton

When Mr. Block assigned this project, and announced its full details, I didn’t exactly feel that I had learned anything majorly crucial. As I contemplated this further, I realized that in fact, I had learned multiple lessons and essential nuggets of knowledge, just that they were taught in such a subtle way, that I didn’t fully recognize their importance until I actually took the time to realize them. One aspect of this situation that intrigued me was how the knowledge was not completely hidden in my conscience, but only enough so that I could summon it when needed without the need to decipher its apparent existence in my mind. 

In example, during both of the court trials (here and here) I learned to be more sympathetic and to consider multiple points of views, even if my own expressed a strong adversity to one or more of them. For instance, during the Cortes trial, I prosecuted many of the other groups in defense of Cortes, whom I felt quite strongly against before the trial. During the research period of the trial, I found multiple resources that placed a notion of leniency in my conscience. I found that more and more, as I learned Cortes’ point of view, I felt warmer towards him. Of course, I still disagreed with his methods and his logic, but I still considered his ideas. During the Sweatshop trial, The same effect occurred, where I felt more lenient to the group of people I defended.

Looking back upon the monologue project (here), I found that once again the same phenomenon occurred. Because the editing process was so lengthly, I didn’t realize the full extent of my learning experience. During the first few weeks of the project, I had one idea, and as the project progressed, the idea behind my work evolved as well. I switched from studying prostitution to transgendered individuals. As weeks went on, studying transgendered people shifted to studying their childhood, and then to their life experiences. I didn’t realize at first that I was being taught such an interesting and crucial subject, because I was the one who teaching myself along the perimeters that Mr. Block set.

I found that the majority of the lessons learned in class were taught by the students to themselves, with Mr. Block acting as a sort of mediator. Like our monologue project, many of our essays and papers were for the most part, self taught through research. I suppose that the core values of SLA play a major aspect of this. Our history benchmark for this quarter (here) is a great example of self-taught learning. After our unit on colonialism, which gave us a broad knowledge of the subject, we were instructed to inquire upon a culture inflicted by colonialism, research it, present a proposal for a museum exhibit concerning it, collaborate with peers on the best choice for the museum, and then reflect upon our work.

An example of a more structured assignment, would be our poetry project (here). We were taught to observe poetry with new perspectives, by using poetic forms which we wouldn’t usually utilize in poetry, for those of us who actually write poetry. It is almost ironic that the poetry project would become the most structured assignment in our academic portfolio, when the vast majority of poetry is anything but structured. That aside, I learned many aspects of poetry that I had never learned before. For instance, the poet that I studied, Arthur Rimboud, was a poet that I had never heard of before I decided to research him.

So, in conclusion, I have learned many lessons and bits of knowledge that I had previously not recognized. Now that I have realized this crucial realization, I can better prepare myself for further learning that will also be essential to my academic growth. It still intrigues me that all of these crucial subjects were absorbed by my conscience without my own recollection.