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And here's a few examples of my work relating to the topics previously mentioned throughout the course of the year:

Through out this school year, I have learned many things to do and not to do. Toward the beginning of the year, I had no idea what I was in for and I did not have the writing skills that I do now. When I look at what I wrote and how I wrote at the beginning of the year, I cringe a little, because I know what I would write now. Another thing at the beginning of the year is that I had the stupid idea of not paying attention or completing homework just because I didn’t feel like it. As the year progressed, I realized that I was flushing my college opportunities down the drain. I had to change, and I started to give my full attention and not goof around nearly as much. When I compare my writing from the beginning of the year to now, I see how much better it has gotten due to simply paying attention and taking the extra time to revise what I wrote.

My first example is from the beginning of the year, the Language Auto-Biography. This is an example of when I did not go back and look at my what I had written. In this Language Auto-Biography, I did not revise. Another thing about this Auto-Biography is that I did not have the writing skills that I do now. When I look over it I read things that are grammatically correct, but could be worded much more maturely and more descriptive. This particular Auto Biography could have had fewer but much longer, more in depth paragraphs.

The next example of my work growing through out the school year is my Poems wiki Assignment. This assignment was in the middle of the year and my writing skills were not at where they are now, but they were much better than the beginning of the year. I had never been that great at making poetry, and I was extremely nervous about writing these poems. I feel the best poem of the ones I created is the Memory Poem. It encompasses deep though, heavy emotion, imagery, and descriptive language. “About to collapse under my impatience, about to explode from building up with anxiety.” This line, I believe, is the best line from the memory poem. I never thought that I could make a poem like this. But with paying attention and asking many questions, I have gotten much better at writing poetry. Another thing I learned about poetry is, it is like writing anything else, you have to go back and revise. When I look at a poem from where I first wrote it based off the top of my head, to what it has become after many revisions, it is so gratifying to see how much better it reads.

One of the later writing assignments, writing chapter 26 of Things Fall Apart, shows how my writing skills have grown. This new chapter is based off the previous chapters and ties into what was going through his head. The chapter is one of the better pieces of writing that I wrote throughout the year. It is very descriptive and well thought out to deal with the plot line already started.

Through out this long year, I have realized that I really need to keep up with my school work and always pay attention and ask questions, even though those may be obvious things, sometimes the obvious is over looked. To develop any skills in writing, like anything else, you must first learn what the teacher has to say by listening to him/her and asking many questions. Toward the beginning I had many things to learn and many habits to pick up. I have successfully learned and picked up most of them. I just need to improve the skills that I have learned and put them into use.

The French Revolution was sparked by the failing economy, the unequal distribution of power and wealth, and a large growth in the poverty-stricken population. “The Holocaust was the destruction of around 6 million jews under the Nazi Regime. The Nazi Germans held a belief that they were racially superior while the Jews where the inferior.”¹ The Troubles in Northern Ireland was an extended time of violence and hatred between the nationalists and the unionists in Northern Ireland. And more currently, the Egyptian Revolution was a series of uprises by the people of Egypt against the President Mubarak. 

“The structure of revolutions repeats itself over time throughout history and in different places across the world.^”2 All of these events started over a conflict between two groups of people; an oppressor and the oppressed. What made the oppressed successful in these events were their planing, support, continuous efforts to change the circumstances. The French Third Estate planned and joined together to write their own declaration of rights. Resistance groups and opposers of the Nazi Regime would hide Jews from being prosecuted. Unionists and loyalists would hold marches to get their message across. But when their message did not get across they persisted in getting their way by rioting, revolting, protesting, and joining together to get the support they needed. “We gave lives up, and we expect to receive our freedom.” ³ Time after time the oppressed would fight and fight until they prevailed. 

While the French Revolution lasted from 1789 to 1799, and many people were killed, the revolting public succeeded in revolutionizing their government and social structure. Different resistance groups and countries all fought to end the cruel oppression and destruction that was happening in Europe under the Nazi Regime. The Egyptian Revolution has been successful due to the large support by the people of Egypt and the globe. The protests were consistent and through the media globally shared, which put pressure on the crumbling government to step down. While Northern Ireland is still connected to the United Kingdom, both the unionists and nationalists have made progress on equal treatment and a parliament that is bearable for both sides.

¹ Auschwitz Brochure

² Revolution Reflection

³ Monologue Project

    History can teach you the many wonders of the past. English can teach you how to write and create things beyond your imagination. In Mr. Block’s classes this year I have learned many new things. I learned about a lot of different things from the worlds past and about how things work and how cultures affect the world in different ways. The world is full of thousands of different types of cultures and religion accompanies them. The art of writing and poetry is also very fluent in every culture along with music and artwork. All of these things connect and all of them connect the world and make the world what it is today.

    I learned throughout the class that power could make a person insane. Power is something that can be highly dangerous. It can make people loose their humanity. People can loose themselves to power and do horrible things. We read the book night and that was a prime example of such things. I wrote a Thesis Paper about this topic. The holocaust was a great example of power overtaking people. The sweatshop trial also shows this. People that ran sweatshops abused their power to make a better profit over their mistreated workers.  Another thing I did about power was my Op Ed piece, which was about dead peasant insurance. This was something that had a huge impact on many people, but people still don’t know about it. Industries get drunk with power just like anyone else.

    Other stuff that I learned was about how poetry can be a form or art and writing. Poetry is more then just writing on a page and can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people. People can experience poetry in many different ways. We made a Poetry Portfolio in English class that I had very much enjoyed. Although poetry has guidelines the possibilities of how poetry will come out are limitless.

    In the final unit in history we learned about colonialism. I learned that something as commonly used as colonialism can have a hugely bad effect on the world and the people right around it. Wars were started and there were huge revolutions because of it. It made for great profit and helped economies, but usually at the price of blood. I did my Museum Exhibit on the Vietnam War, which started because of the colonization of Vietnam by France.

    Many people and many ideas surround us. All of these things are unique. We are all our own person, but we share many things with each other. We all have many similarities and the world needs to process how similar people are to each other whether we like it or not we all share common ground. We are all human. We are all people in society and we all owe each other similar things that need to be in our every day life. Everyone in their community, from a small town to a metropolis must learn to respect that community and live among each other as similar and unique human beings. In Mr. Block’s class, both English and history, I have learned this is a very in depth truth.

    History can teach you the many wonders of the past. English can teach you how to write and create things beyond your imagination. In Mr. Block’s classes this year I have learned many new things. I learned about a lot of different things from the worlds past and about how things work and how cultures affect the world in different ways. The world is full of thousands of different types of cultures and religion accompanies them. The art of writing and poetry is also very fluent in every culture along with music and artwork. All of these things connect and all of them connect the world and make the world what it is today.

    I learned throughout the class that power could make a person insane. Power is something that can be highly dangerous. It can make people loose their humanity. People can loose themselves to power and do horrible things. We read the book night and that was a prime example of such things. I wrote a Thesis Paper about this topic. The holocaust was a great example of power overtaking people. The sweatshop trial also shows this. People that ran sweatshops abused their power to make a better profit over their mistreated workers.  Another thing I did about power was my Op Ed piece, which was about dead peasant insurance. This was something that had a huge impact on many people, but people still don’t know about it. Industries get drunk with power just like anyone else.

    Other stuff that I learned was about how poetry can be a form or art and writing. Poetry is more then just writing on a page and can be interpreted in many different ways by many different people. People can experience poetry in many different ways. We made a Poetry Portfolio in English class that I had very much enjoyed. Although poetry has guidelines the possibilities of how poetry will come out are limitless.

    In the final unit in history we learned about colonialism. I learned that something as commonly used as colonialism can have a hugely bad effect on the world and the people right around it. Wars were started and there were huge revolutions because of it. It made for great profit and helped economies, but usually at the price of blood. I did my Museum Exhibit on the Vietnam War, which started because of the colonization of Vietnam by France.

    Many people and many ideas surround us. All of these things are unique. We are all our own person, but we share many things with each other. We all have many similarities and the world needs to process how similar people are to each other whether we like it or not we all share common ground. We are all human. We are all people in society and we all owe each other similar things that need to be in our every day life. Everyone in their community, from a small town to a metropolis must learn to respect that community and live among each other as similar and unique human beings. In Mr. Block’s class, both English and history, I have learned this is a very in depth truth.

Over this year in English and History I learned a lot about the nature of people. I learned that it is easy for people to stray off of human nature for various reasons. While writing my Op-ed I talked about how violent video games are blamed for many school shootings, when it really has to do with home problems or mental disabilities. This showed me how people are aware of things being able to change people, but might not have the best judgment to know what is changing them. For my first quarter English benchmark I talked about how the kids become more savage when exposed to less technology. Throughout Lord of the Flies the kids start to revert back to having animal like behavior while on the Island. This showed me how people are willing to go back to savage behavior very quickly, instead of work together and act civilized, or can make sure that they do not become savages. The way to not become savages would be to make the island like their life and not change anything, but this is very hard to do; that is why it is so easy for people to revert back to being savages.

            During the fourth quarter we learned about freedom and prisons. We had several assignments talking about torture. During these lessons we discussed how almost anyone could become a torturer. We watched and reflected on a video called The Milgram Obedience Experiments where “scientists” would bring in someone from the street, and ask them to question another person in a different room. Every time the person in the other room got a question wrong the person brought in from the street would press a button that they were told gave an electric charge to the other person. The person who was answering questions was not actually getting shocked, but was just acting and pretending to be in pain. The questioner was told to turn up the intensity of the shock until it got to a certain point, and keep it at that level. There were several circumstances, and the results varied from where the answerer was, where the person telling the questioner to do their job was, and if there was any other people in the room. In the end most people would go somewhat far, even though they could hear or see the other person that they thought they were torturing.

            One of the units in History dealt with sweatshops, and child labor. We talked about why it happens, what the benefits are, what the downsides are, and how it can affect consumers or other people. We had a group activity where everyone was split up into several teams for a Transnational Capital Auction. These teams were the Ruling Elite for countries. The object of the game was to try to please the Multinational Companies, so they would give work to our citizens, but to make sure that our citizens were not going to rebel against the government. We had to decide our standpoint on key issues like ability to form unions, child labor, laws on keeping a clean environment, and several others. There were five rounds to change the bids, and depending on what you did, the Multinational Companies would want to go to your country. The team that ended up winning didn’t put everything good for the Multinational Companies, because that would mean their citizens would be very unhappy with the government. The teams that did good put things somewhat in the middle of good and bad in the choices, even though they all seemed to be very bad from our standpoint in the United States.

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. 

            During the video the man protests shocking the other person, or asking a new question many times, and seems adamant on his decision. Almost every time the “scientists” are able to get him to go back and “shock” the other person by just talking to him and telling him what to do. I was surprised that the man would go back so many times, because he seemed ready to stop asking questions very early on, but continued because he was told to. The thing that surprised me the most was that after the person on the other side of the wall stopped yelling or making noise, the man didn’t show as much resistance until he finally decided to stop. 

            In middle school we are taught strictly into the essence of American History and grammar for English. No class discussions about opinions and no ideas of expression. What the teacher taught you was the way life was. &As we grew up, we took upon the role models of our parents. In my case, parents don’t show creativity or expression of opinion, so I was raised to reply on nothing being out of the ordinary.  As our knowledge of World History and the fights for revolutionary change have developed, so have our minds to the ability that we can fight for something we strongly believe in. Then our brains intertwine around mazes of creativity through English that taught us that you could go beyond the normal term of an “essay” and possibly create works of art. Thus leading us to express what we have learned in new and creative formations, like the poetry unit we used in order to learned forms of writing.

            If you enter the classroom of English and History you are entering a room full of doors. Doors that are all locked and wish for you too find the keys in which to open what they have held for your imagination. An imagination is a form of creativity that helps you show the person you really are and the thoughts that beg to be spoken. A door that many kids have opened was the door of play writing. As students we took topics that touched our hearts and expressed through Monologues what we feel these problems would be told in a story. It was an amazing way to let out how we truly feel in such a story after story break through.

            It’s always easy to understand yourself and the reasons for things you do or make, but it’s not always easy for other people to understand the beauty of the masterpiece inside your mind. Whenever we’ve debated on Trials for who is the killer of human civilization or when we try to inform people on the customs and diversity of Religion, people might not always understand how strongly or right our points of views and sides are. In order to help them understand the best, we must give as much as detail as we can possibly give. The more details the more of a vision we can give to the people. An example of this detail would be in the descriptive essays we have created in class.

            English and History both come together as partners on the road of education for us. For the past year we have learned a lot about our selves and the world. We have been taught to express and to teach. We can only hope that next year holds the same opportunity.

Sophomore year was a hard year for me emotionally, the one class that always had me thinking was English, and I felt the class related to me a lot in a personal way. For example the journal entries, my favorite had to have been the rant. I remember that day clearly I was in a really bad mood, I had this rush of anger going through me, and a rant was exactly what I needed. A lot of the other journals had me thinking too, like the “Remember when” one during the Night course, I was also very sad that day and writing that poem came easily to me and for some reason I felt moved after writing it.

            MY favorite unit had to be the poetry unit. I really like writing poems and, at that stage of my life all of my poems had a certain theme, and that theme happened to be about my bad decisions. “As much as I hate you I can’t forget you” Looking back on my poetry it’s kind of sad to see how unhappy I was, I know I brought it upon myself but I had no idea what to do, and I think in some weird way writing helped me get through it for that moment for that 65 minute English class the poetry took my mind off of the person that was screwing me up physically and emotionally.

Art in the open was amazing. I loved working outside of the classroom, and I couldn’t possibly ask for a better group. During Art in the Open I think I was the happiest I’ve been all year; I started to put my life back in check. With the Leah Stein project I learned to not judge a book by its cover. When I first heard about this I was a little creeped out I thought it was weird. But when we started dancing and actually got to meet Leah I knew that it was going to be an amazing experience. My group Rocky Road came together and as soon as we picked our location we knew exactly what we wanted to do and how we wanted to move, our piece flowed together and in the end we had a great final product.

I think the greatest thing that I learned in this class, was about myself. I didn’t know my limits at the beginning of the school year I thought I was indestructible; I thought I could handle anything that came my way. But after millions of journal entries and Mr. Block saying, “make smart decisions” I think it finally stuck with me, it may have taken 8 monthes but it happened. Mr. Block I’m going to miss you dearly thank you for everything, you may have not realized it but your class helped me so much this year, and I’m truly thankful.

letter outline

We were asked to write Descriptive Essay about something that happened in our life. I chose to write about the summer earlier that year. “Out in the 90-degree weather and a storm we were up on the roof trying to prevent the resistant leaks”.  As I realize now this first assignment in English was really the backing of the whole year. I had to learn to be more descriptive and creative at the same time. It was a bit challenging at first because I did not write like this before. As time went on and the projects called for more and more I started writing better and better.

Oddly enough the project that I surpassed my standard for writing was the Monologue Project for History.  For this project we had to pick a human rights struggle. I had to do a lot of research to understand and convey the topic clearly.  I had chosen drug trafficking because of the different reasons to do it and how some people don’t really have a choice. “I know she needs the money but its drug money!”(Scene-1). The daughter had kidney disease and the family needed fast money to pay for her medical bills.  This project forced me to be very original, descriptive and creative.   Though, we had a little help from Kate from Young Playwrights. She helped most of the class and I our plays.   Even still it really pushed my ability and raised the bar for realistic fiction writing that will come in the future.

            The Sweatshop trial that we as a class did in middle of the year was probably the most enjoyable activity for history.  The class split up into groups to take positions on the real world problem sweatshops. Each group was questioned on the amount of control that they had on the situation and why it was still going on. “U.S. Consumers - If you wanted these “sweat shops” to end, you would have to stop buying into these companies”. As well as, each group had to present opening and closing statements on their position.  Finally, as a class we voted to see which group we thought had the most guilt. My group was the Poor Country Ruling Elite.  We had to research a ton of statistics, information and articles to fathom our position and perspective on the issue.  This assignment taught me about perspective because we had to really see from a group of people’s point of view on a hard issue.

Overall this year has been very enjoyable and memorable. I learned many new things and polished others that we rough. I hopefully will remember the experiences or the hard earned skills. English and History class in sophomore year was a wonderful opportunity.