Humanities Portfolio 2012

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This final portfolio is about my general understandings from this school year about History assignments and mainly English.
In the beginning of the school year, I wasn't aware of the different writing techniques and the different poetry techniques. In English, my writing techniques got better and I learned different general understandings about different topics. During English I had a lot of experiences with interesting and helpful people (Leah Stein Dance Company, Philadelphia Young Playwrights etc.)   For example the poetry wiki, we had to write different styles of poetry, which made me think out side of the box. I also never knew that their was so many different poetry styles to do, for example The Ode to Teachers, that I wrote, I got to express myself about the type of teachers that I like and dislike. As for Persepolis and the book Night, I began to understand the general understandings about how teenage kids coped with living while the Iranian war/ Concentration camps and war, happening in their own backyard. This English year made me more open to different writing tecniques. The beginning of the year, I was expecting English class to be a regular English class, but as the year progressed, it became a unique English class, with hands on assignments.
 
 
Hope is what makes you want to survive through the hard times…
 
Hope is what keep people going through hard times because it is stronger then fear. People rely on hope to get them through their darkest moments. For example, in the book Things Fall Apart.   I wrote a chapter 26. The previous chapter was when the main character Okonkwo hung himself, mainly because his life was turning upside down and he couldn't handle it anymore. One of the lines of chapter 26 says” I’ve been through a lot, these past eight years. When I returned back from exile, I was determined to be the same, powerful person I was 7 years ago. When I came back I was striving to be powerful, but when I was sent to jail, and beat. I knew that my time was up and if I kept on striving for something that would take so long to get, that throughout those years the Commissioners would become stronger and take over."  The reason why I wrote that for chapter 26, because that's what Okonkwo would've said, Okonkwo always had hope to be the person he was before, while in exile. When Okonkwo left the exile, The Commissioners took over and everyone was following them. The rules changed and Okonkwo tried to go against them but it made everything even worse. Okonkwo was the kind of person who had hope and a plan, but if his plan didn't start to work, he would eventually give up and that's what he did.
 In the book Persepolis, Marjane, was growing up during the Iran war, she had to live in another country because of all the harm and damage the Iranian war was doing.  During the book, Marjane would always end up giving hope, until one day she got her act together and she had hope that she could get through hard times. Although she went through depression, and the Iranian was still going on, she never gave up hope and that one-day she would be happy with out a husband. In the book Night, the war was going on and all Jews had to be sent to Concentration Camps, Elie, who is the main character went through a lot during the past years he was in the concentration camp with his dad. He was separated form his mother and sister. Him and his dad always had hope, that hope didn't get them killed for years. Elie still kept hope even when his father was slowly dying. "Elie never stopped fighting for him and his father. Also during the book Elie was powerless, for example when the Germans were beating him, he couldn't do anything but take the beating, and keep on being fearless."  When you don't have hope in yourself, you let yourself go and things fall apart. Hope is what makes you want strive for what you want.
 
 
Art is the doorway to express yourself. Art- the expression of creative skill and imagination.
 
Art is something you can do with out speaking, for example the interpretive dances called Art In the Open, when we had to interact with each other with out any music and just using the area around us, to make noises etc.  Art in the Open, made a doorway to another way to express you, and just go with the flow, with out thinking, which is what Leah Stein and her dance company taught us, to not think when doing the interpretive dancing, just do. "Not all art has to have a story, which is what I learned through-out this experience. For example the interpretive dancing, we weren't supposed to make a story but to just use our surroundings and interact with each other. What makes art powerful is that you don't think about what you're doing you just do it."  When being apart of Art in The Open, we were split up and groups, and had to perform our interpretive dancing at a location that we got to pick. It was a great experience and taught me a lot about using your surroundings to make art.
When writing the play, I got to express myself, because I wanted to make my Play just a little bit romantic and I got to make the characters any way I wanted them to be. When writing most plays it's like a dream that you put on to paper, or a situation that you make in to a story.  When reading the book Passing, we had to make artwork about insight in to some of the issues related to the book. In the book passing the main characters are Irene and Clare. Clare is passing, because even though she is black, she can pass for white, and back in that time, people judged you based off of your skin color. Irene on the other hand wasn't exactly passing.