Humanities portfolio 2011

Art, creativity, imagination, are the cornerstones of life. With out imagination where would we be? Everything we have is the spawn of imagination and creativity. Things that we use everyday are works of art. Think about it! Our clothes, for example, why else would there be fashion industries if this were not a form of art?

When most people think of an English course they suspect boring books, long essays, and tedious hours of reading. This was not true for this year’s English class, we were encouraged to dig deeply into our minds and tap into a corner of our psyche that is not used in many classes.

 

With in our English class we were inspired to make art constantly. When we had to make scenes out of our past, like artist, we used our five senses to make people imagine what we saw, with out being there. This is recurring in book all the time. Or when we had our poetry section, poetry is one of the most famous forms of written art. All of the students realized their individuality when they started to type of put pens to paper. There were so many different forms and styles of poetry we were free to pick. This gave life to our creativity.

 

Now many people would debate that when they think of English classes, there is an amount of creativity needed to absorb the messages of certain writers, for instance the hidden meaning writing of Shakespeare. But would there necessarily be a reason to have art in a history class? No- that is what most would say. Yet there was in our class. We had a chance to stretch our writing skill by creating monologues and scenes to be made into plays. Since when is play-writing criteria of a history class? The main reason for that was to get into the main idea of a historical event of our choosing.

 

Mr. Block brought us out of comfort zones by involving us in the ‘Art In The Open’ festival. Most of the students in his class were reluctant to ‘make a fool out of there selves’, I being one of them, but in the end many were left with pride from breaking down a barrier and viewing the world through a different light. I found myself asking ‘what did dancing have to do with English or History?’ But in the end I realized that Mr. Block wanted us to make history instead of read about it. How many teenage kids got to be in a festival and get a grade for it?

 

I believe, though many of my classmates where reluctant to use such types of creativity, that if more schools were to use this form of teaching, more students would enjoy learning. This was an experience that was unexpected, but greatly benefited from. Art is necessary, without art where would the world go? There would be no change, nor a future. I believe that what we learned in these two classes will help us make decisions for the future. I am grateful that Mr. Block made our grades based on the art we had to make, or else many people wouldn’t had learn that they were artist from the start. Art is in everyone, you just need to dig a little deeper. 

To give you an understanding, or example of the projects that have been given to us that incorporate art, I have posted a link with four to five projects. All four of my links are on one site that has them listed, wiki)