World History - Final Portfolio 2014

Throughout the course of the year studying in World History, I’ve learned overall how important it is to stay together as a whole community, and not as separate countries. If we fail to contribute to a safe, respectful, cooperate community, then how will we ever have the power to stand up for ourselves? We’ve learned this broad statement over the course of the year by learning about sweatshops, bill of rights, revolution eras, and even colonialism. All of these small topics reflect on the idea that although the world is going through a rough stage of poverty, discrimination, segregation and more, we still need to represent our community by acting as a whole.

When we started the class in the first quarter, we learned that a method (not the best) to stand up for what you believe in is to simply protest in to stop something from happening. It also begins because there are many people out there who want to protest for the own rights, sometimes discrimination rights. In this monologue, I took the role of a boy trying to stop a construction worker from helping out with the recent Keystone XL Pipeline. It showed that people protest because they do not think that some things will turn out to be beneficial for the community.

In the second quarter, We were starting to learn about different cultures, if they are different or not, and what we could do to stop the discrimination. In a journal entry prompt given to us in the beginning of the year, we were asked if it is ever okay to criticize another culture. This relates back to the idea of teamwork and communities because it explains why it is never okay to make fun of somebody else just because of where they come from and what they believe in.

We’re halfway done the year now? Good lord! When we reached the third quarter, we had a big unit focusing on revolutions. We learned that people mostly protested in front of their own government because they heard of recent laws that did not satisfy them. However, instead of finding a way to safely inform the law that they have rights that should be heard, they led to violent protesting. In this digital story, I compared two very important revolutions on how they started and what effects they both made: The French Revolution and the Arab Spring Revolution.

In the final quarter, we worked on a playwriting unit. Basically, we spent several months writing our own plays and have been making stronger every day. Then we got into small groups and rehearsed our plays to perform in front of classmates. The pictures show our performances. What I took from this was that It is very important to listen to instruction so that when you perform the play, you can do your absolute best. I also personally learned that if you feel a little uncomfortable with what your lines say, you can just keep telling yourself that they’re just words on a piece of paper and nothing more. Here is my finalized play.