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When I work with both charcoal and pencil, I am reminded that I can both shade and color in. I begin a piece by making a back drop and drawing my head, neck, and shoulders. I know a piece is done when I can step back and see where the light is coming from, the shading, and how the final product works. When my work is going well, I am filled with a sense of relief. When people see my work, I'd like them to know that it is a self portrait. 

The hardest parts were to color over the thick areas of the charcoal because it would either scratch off or fade in with each other. The easiest parts were drawing in pencil and shading with charcoal.

Aunque esto es solo una ejemplo, el maltrato infantil es un tema muy serio. Una persona puede abusar físicamente, negligentemente, sexualmente, y emocionalmente a un niño. Tres millones y mas personas denuncian abuso infantil en los estados unidos pero es estimado que millones de niños son victimas del abuso. Algunas estadística enseñan que ochenta por ciento de niños en el mundo mueren por el maltrato infantil. Esto incluye niños menores de  cuatros anos. Treinta por ciento  de las personas que fueron abusados en su niñez, abusaran a sus niños. Para mas información, visite childhelp.org


Sitios en el Internet:

http://www.yesican.org/ - Tiene muchos instrumentos sobre la solución del maltrato infantil y una Chat Room para as victimas que hablan español e ingles.

http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-village-voice-media-to-stop-child-sex-trafficking-on-backpage-com  -Una petición por la prevención del abuso sexual de los niños.

The music that I chose to represent my culture is one of my favorite songs by V.Music. The name of this music video is “ Que huong toi” (my mother land). V.music band is a group of 4 Vietnamese boys. V.music band began at the end of 2009/beginning of 2010. The 4 Vietnamese boys are young and very active, who love music and dream to be stars one day. In two years working together they had produced 4 albums and 3 singles. During the year of 2011 V.music was one of the most popular bands in Vietnam.  They had success present “Vietnam ngay moi” album which make them become more popular. Vietnam Ngay Moi had brought V.music so many awards. They also went on tour in Thai Lan for a big night event. Album Vietnam Ngay Moi was a 12-song track about Vietnam from the north to the south and the changing in Vietnam of today and back then. The band put them in different endowment to record the music clip. It shows the beauty of Vietnam and their life growing up.

“Que Huong Toi” is one of the sound track in V.music album that I really like. It not just a regular music clip but also the clip remind me so much of my cultural, Vietnam is part of my culture it’s a place where my childhood memories are. It’s a place that makes me who I am today. The clip was about 4 boys, who go to a different country to get education. In their heart, no mater where they are in this world, the love for their motherland is still there. They never forget their homeland and are never ashamed of it. In the clip they also talk about the different states in the Vietnam. Like Ha Noi, Sai Gon and others. They also show a tradition Vietnamese dress Ao Dai. The clip speaks a lot about Vietnam culture. If you can understand the lyrics of the song you can actually be amazed. It feels like you’re in Vietnam at that moment.

Vietnam is my native land, I lived in Ho Chi Minh and I have so many memories of that place. I had to leave Vietnam for almost 6 years, but there will be nothing that can replace this motherland, even though I’m on the other side of the Earth, 12 hours different. I have friend who I grew up with, who I still talk to today. Memories of being in school, being around those friends. Like the lyrics of the song “ I’m proud to tell people that I'm from Vietnam” a country that will continue to grow and change everyday. People who live in different country will share the same the same culture as I’m.

Throughout this project, I had some challenges, but I also had some cool points. First and foremost, it wasn’t hard for me to do more research on my topic. I was able to have a head start on this project s I was able to help my group mates get a little background check on this topic. That was part of the cool points. I had no problems with my group mates. Everyone knew how to own up to their responsibilities. There were wasn’t one time where either of us had to babysit each other. Our responsibilities were very simple and it didn’t take a lot of time to do so. We came up with this idea of making a video and it never happened because we weren’t able to or something happened. I really wanted t make that video come to life, and I couldn’t make it happen. It really upset me.

My ending piece was not something that I was proud of. The reason why I wasn’t proud of my final piece was because it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. We should have taken the time out of our day to do some interviews, make a video, and check out our final piece before we turned it in. When I saw Cecelia’s group presented their project, I was stunned. It looked so legitimate and when she presented her campaign, I felt the pity for homeless people. And I thought that was pretty awesome because they were able to give the audience an emotion. I think that if you’re able to give the audience an emotion, then your campaign is working.

I felt like my final piece did not offer that. I feel like I didn’t put in so much effort when I should of. I should of spread around the word around and make it happen. All I thought about was “get this project done.” I didn’t think of it as in “this is actually going viral and we need to stop this.” I guess my mindset was more focused on spring break. If I could do this campaign again, I would take my time and put in more effort than I did before. I would actually check my final piece before it got turned in. The only thing was that I wasn’t in charge of putting everything together. Maybe next time, I should be in charge of that job.

I have a culture that I’ve formed through friendships and social interaction, in which an interest in Rock & Roll, as well as a particular band is shared. We all enjoy the music of The Black Keys, and have learned many of their songs on different instruments. We can come together at any time to enjoy each other’s company while playing their music. We all share a common value system that revolves around this type of music and band, and can all connect it to our own personalities and individual lives. Because of this, we can all connect with each other, and reconnect with our roots and how we were raised. Our environments were such that when we were growing up and developing, this type of music was all around us. We were already in the culture of Rock & Roll and Blues from a very young age, and through it have created a sub-culture that is specific to this band. There is a song that we all enjoy and have experienced with one another called Gold On The Ceiling. It is a very unanimously preferred song, and is very adaptable to any situation. Through the music comes an emotion that can only be felt by those in our particular culture, and is shared throughout. It is difficult to express those emotions by one’s self, alone and isolated. It is easy to come together in a culture or group and experience those emotions radiating and connecting you to each person through the music. This is true for many culture groups and communities, but there is a special aspect to music that really brings it out in each individual. The desire to have your views, opinions, emotions, and personal connections shared in a community is a natural human desire, and it drives us to find these people who are alike us in a social environment. This instinct is what influences us to make social connection, and through it expresses even more of these emotions. It is a never-ending cycle that thrives wholeheartedly in the culture of music, whatever your preference may be. Everyone has a personal story that can be told through a song, but the emotion that it expresses is one that can be shared and experienced throughout.

Our project was about school district funding it was done by Joe w, Mathew Walker, Vincent Russell and myself. We sort of did the project as a group but Joe and I did the website and Mathew and Vincent did the video but we turned it in as one big project.

One of the things that my group could not come up with was what part of the work each person was doing. First Vincent and I were suppose to do the video and the other two work on the website than later on Mathew said that he did not want to do the website and he wanted to do the video with Vincent. I did not know how to make a website so I did not want to make a website either but for some reason I decided at the end to do the website. Thank god Joe had a little experience with weeby.com (website) so him and I were able to work on the site and we tried to have everything on it.

Our biggest problem was collaboration I feel like as a group we really didn’t collaboration a lot. Some time we will tell each person what they needed to do before the next day and when we get together again and when we ask did anyone do everything they were support to do, some of us be confuse and act like we did not know what were suppose to do. There was one time when Vincent and I try to get every one on the good doc and the others did not feel like getting on or they were to busy with other works.

I think we should have done our project three days before it was due so in that will we could have tell if people our really plying attention to it or not and is it effective or not. It was really hard to figure out if people will actually view our website

Music and Culture

Music is a very important part of my life. It’s always been there for me to pull me back on my feet. Dancing is a very big part of my life as well and it’s one of the very big cultures I am apart of. You can’t have dance with no music. I mean you can, but it’ll be difficult to count and appear to be graceful and flowing. The song that I chose to write about for this assignment is called, “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley. Not only is my uncle a big fan, but I also find his music quite enjoyable. This song plays a very important role in my dancing life this year. It’s the song we are going to dance to at our annual dance recital. The music itself is slow and flowing. The beat of the music helps the dancers to stay on track and count their steps. In the world of dance we count our steps in 8. 1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…and repeat.  It’s easy for the dancers to get into the song and actually feel it. Plus it’s really easy to choreograph a dance to this song because it’s not too fast nor is it slow and boring. It’s just the right speed for experienced dancers such as myself. 

With all projects come challenges and easy points. So, I’d say our group did a fairly decent job. When we first got our topic we told each other what our weaknesses are and our strengths, and planed accordingly. As a group we were split on what medium to use for our project. Eventually decided on using both a video and a website. We then split our group into smaller groups; Mabintu and Joe working on the website while Mat and I work on the video. Collaboratively we all gathered resources to put on both medias and shared the google doc so we could have access to it. 

A challenge for me was finding videos that go along with the facts. It was easy finding out what had been cut but for a video you need someone to say it, to be more believable. Also, I thought communication with in our group was a challenge since some people would be on at times and other not, but we over came that. 

I think our success was knowing what angle we wanted people to view the topic as. It is such a complex and broad problem to talk about so we ended up showing more about the struggles that the district is facing. Not so much that its their fault but its a system that we’re apart of and can improve.

All in all, I think our project was pretty decent. We’ll start getting the word out there this spring break to see the impact, if any, it has. Hopefully there will be. And continue on from there.

For our group’s projects, there were plenty of downfalls but there were also some successes along the way. For example, when we first started planning what we were going to do for our project, everything sounded as if it was going to go well. In the beginning, we wanted to first go around the city and pay homeless people to do an interview with us but we then seen how that could be a problem beings though some homeless people may feel offended to the idea. We then thought of another idea, which was to visit homeless shelters and food distributions. When we visited one of the homeless shelters, we thought it was a hospice because of the sign in the window. We asked one of the few guys who were coming in and out of the building what exactly was the building for and who exactly lived there and the man had said it were for homeless men who were trying to work their way out of homeless. We thought that connected to our slogan since our slogan was  “Homeless not Hopeless”. We then wanted to set up something there so that we could buy them something to eat in exchange for interview questions. The director agreed to let us make sandwiches for them while we interview them and he gave us a set time. Beings though NHD took longer then we expected, we missed the time that the Director told us to come and he was not answering his phone. Another issue we faced was that we wanted to buy stickers with our slogan on it but we couldn’t purchase them in time so we brought posters from staples instead. One of the successes in this project was our fundraising bake sale. We wanted to raise money so that we could buy food for the homeless people who we interviewed and my group nearly sold everything and made a lot of money from it. In the end, our group managed to get interviews with homeless people. Ways that we got our issue out to people in Philadelphia was that we made posters with our slogans on it, both for the city and to put around in SLA as well. Also, we made a website explaining what our organization is and how to help and we also put the stories of the homeless people on the website as well.  

Hello, my name is Temperance Moore. My culture is Christianity. Christians believe in God. We believe that there is only one God. As Christians we don’t really call it a “religion” but a lifestyle. The artist I chose was Sarah Kelly and the song I chose by her is called “Take me away”.  Sarah Kelly is a gospel rock artist. My history with this song goes back to when I was about 9 or 10. My aunt first introduced me to one of Sarah Kelly’s albums. She would play it out loud in the car and my two favorite songs on that album were “Matter of Time” and “Take me away”.

We loved Sarah Kelly and would listen to her all the time. The song “Take me away” is basically about how Sarah loves God a lot and she expresses how much he did for her. Also how she just wants him to take her away so she can just be with him. What moves me about Sarah are the lyrics in her music. To me they are so genuine and true. Just by listening to her music, I can tell she longs for that closeness to God, like that’s all she wants. Also there’s a story behind it all. To me it’s a story that I can relate to.

 What also moves me is the fact that she’s not doing it for show; she’s doing it because she truly loves God. That’s what I really admire about her. This song is an important part of Christianity because it’s a Gospel song so it promotes God. Sarah Kelly is also a Christian who loves God so that’s also why it’s an important part of Christianity. This song shows Christianity because it’s talking about God. Not only is the song based on God but also the person who sings it is a true Christian. The song “Take me away” represents the life a Christian, the life of Sarah Kelly. 

The song that I have picked to represent my culture is Basketball by Lil Bow Wow. I grew up with him, when he was younger. He had a lot of popular songs, Like bounce with me and puppy love. I think lil romie and him is one of the youngest rappers to rap.

He was in a movie called Like mike. That is where is song came out. This song kinda moved me to go out and play basketball. The thing that moves me about him is that he put different basketball terms in a song to show what they mean. The importance of the rapper to my culture is that he put basketball in a song.

            This song shows represent a big thing to my culture because he is very big.

Music is important to me for many reasons. It can explain how I feel at any moment in time. Also its just a way of life using music to put yourself Black Star is one of my favorite artists ever. I grow up with a mom who was really into old school hip-hop and a lot of R&B no matter what year it was. So growing up I listening to them, tribe called quest, Indi are, tweet, etc. the way I grew up would be totally different due to music.

In the song “children’s Story” by “Black Star” it’s basically the uncle Mos def telling his nephews a bedtime story. I grew up listening to a bedtime story from my mommy “goodnight moon” and that was like my favorite story of all times. I relate to the little kids at the beginning saying they want a story before they go to sleep. In the song it talks about real life issues and things that some people may go through. As a young teen and child it was important to me to hear stories about these things as long as it bettered me. I am apart of the bedtime specials culture. I read my little sisters, and cousin and sometimes myself.

                        "LOVE HIGH"

My culture is Chinese. I use Korean music to describe my culture because many people think of Chinese people as people who study and who don’t have much fun like other race. In my culture, friendship, family’s bond and dreams are the most important things. We believe that dream is the most important thing because it’s our first step toward a goal and succeeding on becoming something. Our culture is also very big on education. My culture believes that education is the first step in everything because we believe that education leads our future. Our parent always educated us to go forward with our dream. This song called “love high” has no artist because it came from a TV show called Dream High. I found this song important because it is important to express feeling toward one another to make a better and stronger friendship and bond. In my culture we also believe that music is another way to escape darkness. In my culture, we always say, “No matter what stand in the way, always move forward toward that goal.”  Love high is a song about dream and how to always fly up. I choose this song because it motivated other people to fly up to their dream like in my culture.

Through the show called dream high, the two girl who high five each other was rival, but through music like this, it pulled them back together in a inch closer on becoming friends again. And in my household, whenever something happen we use music like Love high to sing and enjoy the time and creating the bond of the family stronger. During Chinese New Year, our family always prays through our god saying something about leading our children into the right path with their dream and let them succeed with that dream. And using that dream to created their future. That’s why I choose this music called “Love high” because it talks about dream, and dream like a key into our future in our culture. 

The culture I am apart of is being a positive person, and not always trying to look at the negatives of everything and anything. I stutter very often, but you don’t see me walking around silent and not talking. Or always upset and angry at the world because of what my problem is. 

DJ Lil man demonstrated that perfectly. He’s makes party music to party to, and at party’s you are happy, excited, and ready to have fun. That’s the type of people who are apart of my culture. In his video flex, it’s a group of boys dancing and showing you how to do the dance, “Flex.” There’s flashing strobe lights in the back, and smiles on everyone’s faces. That screams Marcus. 

I can’t listen to the music that’s out now because it’s either talking about what new stuff, how much money, and how sex their artist is having. Personally, I don’t care about what you have because it won’t help me in any way. That’s also bragging as well, and I’m not one to brag. I let my actions do my talking. In the video “Flex,” DJ Lil man did a great job of showing that in his video, and he and the rest of the DJ’s out there are keeping music alive to me in my eyes. With out them I probably wouldn’t listen to much music.

Song: Flawed design

Artist: Stabilo

Culture: Family trust

Genre: Alternative

What moves me: Their voice, and the lyrics.

I’v been listening to Stabilo for 3 years so far. Flawed Design was my first song I heard by them, and I instantly loved their music. It’s got a really good beat, and the story behind the song is really interesting.

The lead singer describes the hardship of getting over imperfections and flaws, and making the best with what he had. He tells his girlfriend that even though he keeps lying, he’s trying the best he can to be faithful, and he’s still a good person at heart. In the video, it shows several different people lying about their flaws, including treason, cheating, bribery, trust, and temptation.

I feel this is a great song and is relevant to my culture because it talks about how hard it is to trust other people.  My family itself values trust a lot. This is the case because my Mom constantly thinks my sister and I are doing something bad behind her back; sometimes that’s true. But when everyone understands that we all make mistakes, we become a closer family.     

You have to take the time to become close to another person (and trust them) and even when they mess up, you have to learn to forgive. Every person’s imperfect, and once we realize that, a persons mistakes won’t seem as bad anymore. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2jwjmhJ2AE

First of all I would like to apologize, this was downloaded off of a YouTube video. Also I would like to say that this doesn't reflect my personal music preference, only my culture.

I chose to show the culture of D&D. To start with simple explanation, D&D was developed as a prelude to Videogames, and was a board game where anything could happen and you didn’t have to respond the way you normally do. It was played for fun, and also to give you a life where you felt strong. Now that videogames are out, it has less of a following. Instead of gaining a feeling of power by hanging out with people and rolling dice, it is gained by shooting Nazis in modern videogames. However, D&D still has the advantage of giving the player more options, and never really ending until you die.

D&D has a rather twisted culture, on that even the people involved in it don’t exactly revere.  The clip shows the women dodging the question for as long as possible before opening up. However, the clip also shows a few culture that aren’t necessarily involved in D&D. Sure it’s possible for everyone to dress up as their player, it just doesn’t need to or usually happen.

Before seeing the video I had no idea who the person was. That’s part of what D&D is about; you have no clue who’s involved, which’s shown by the beginning of the clip when the singer denies that she’s involved. I learned about the song from someone else that also liked D&D. He thought it was cool and showed it to me. The genre of the song completely shows what D&D is all about. After all, D&D loves parodies. The whole entire thing is made as a merge of all of the fantasy books in existence. It’s also directly involved to the game from the characters in the song, the terminology involved and also the monsters mentioned. I am not involved in the specific subsection of D&D that this song is interested in, since I don’t role-play as seriously, I just go and kill things and hang out. These people have stuff that they dress up in, which is way more serious then most of the people I know of.

I’ve been looking up to Kanye West for the longest. He’s so inspirational, and sparks so much controversy. This song illustrates who Kanye West is. He does what he wants, says what he wants, and doesn’t care about the consequences. His drive to say what he wants and get his point across “moves” me, along with his catchy lyrics and deeper meanings to his songs.

Kanye is known to be “the asshole” because he speaks his mind. Some of the things he says people don’t agree with. That’s just how it is. There is no one out there who will have every single person relate to what they’re saying, or even support what they’re saying, and that’s perfectly fine for Kanye in his situation. He has experienced pain and judgment from other people because of it, and apologized when he took it too far, but he never goes back on his word. That’s someone to look up to. Someone who can rap about sex and money, but also have records about diamonds in Sierra Leone, songs about Jesus, and songs that displays how great mothers are. He’s reached out to different genres, sometimes it could be about happiness, sometimes it could be about pain.

The song “Touch the sky” represents the outspoken culture I’m apart of. I’m part of the people who voice their opinion, and isn’t afraid to go against the crowd. I’ll challenge people’s ideas and I won’t just go with something everyone else is doing unless I find it right to me. It also represents the culture of people who have a hopeful future and have something to look forward to. In the song he describes his journey to where he is now, and is a person to look up to. 

Skyscraper- Demi Lovato

I loved Demi Lovato ever since I saw her on the movie “camp rock”(2008) and princess protection program (2009) and when I heard one of her first songs “LaLa land”. I liked her because she didn’t come off as a “fake person”, most people that are famous act like a robot, with know personality or is scared to let it show there afraid to be them selves. They act like they don’t have problems, or struggles in there life, but Demi Lovato is very different from them. She doesn’t try to hide her problems from the world, and act like everything is perfect, instead she speaks out about having depression since the age of 11, and that she had a bipolar disorder. She does not speak about it to be in the spotlight, she wants to let her fans that are going through these challenges know that they can make it just like her, and that they are worth it. She’s a remodel to me because she helps me get through the things that I go through as a person, and a teenager. The song skyscraper is about believing in your self, and know matter what your going through or what has happen to you, you can always rise and over come your struggles, like how a skyscraper rises over top of a city.

 The song represents my culture, which are sports. When you play sports there’s always going to problems you have to get through. If you playing basketball or football you might have to play defense on someone that’s faster than you or stronger than you and your going to have to believe in your self to “stick with your man”. If you miss a shot in basketball you can’t be discourage, nobody is perfect so your going to have to keep your head up high and try it over and over again.

 This song represents all different types of people and cultures. It doesn’t matter what you’re skin color is, what type of music you listen to, or even the religion you believe in, everyone goes through hard times in life. Because this song is so uplifting, and inspiring it came reach more than the “average listener”. The song just has one purpose and that purpose is to let everyone know that the matter.

An aspect of my culture is perseverance. I believe that perseverance is a major aspect of your culture because without it, life is dead. Perseverance is what makes you keep going each day as each battles encounter. I chose the song The Climb by Miley Cyrus. This song relates to my life a lot and others as well. When I was growing up, I never knew such thing like perseverance. I heard of it before but it doesn’t mean much until now. As teenagers growing up, like Miley Cyrus, never know the real meaning of perseverance. In The Climb, it is all about facing your battles. Keep you head up and lead your path, as it can lead you to somewhere special that you may never know. The objects in this song centers around imagery of a mountain, symbolizing the difficulties of life, and climbing, symbolizing the ongoing struggles of life. Although the lyrics are talking about the journey rather than focusing on the destination, many assume that it is about reaching a final goal. It depends on the mindset of the listener to judge whether the destination is in front of them or it is on the other side of the path. As a child, I have battled many battles during my childhood, especially the violence back them to now. That limits my childhood from spending time inside rather than outside due to the craziness of violence. As I was growing up, I began to develop the meaning of persevering. Each day conflicts come at you and you have to overcome it. In the music video of The Climb, it shows a mountain. That symbolizes the conflicts that you have to overcome by climbing the mountains. The mountains are the problems and you are the overcomer. The combination of both is what I call perseverance. “…Ain't about how fast I get there. Ain't about what's waiting on the other side. It's the climb…” That phrase is from the The Climb. This explains how you have to go step by step in life to get through the problem or problems. What moves me about them is the voice of the artist singing it. It is so demanding and convincing to start something new. In other words, if something is bringing you down, you should never quit. Never quit trying to quit is basically the whole purpose of this song.

I believe this song is a very important part of my culture. Without perseverance, I wouldn’t have made it to this day with all the battles coming at me. I persevere every day to get what I want in life. Challenges come and go, but it won’t go if you don’t persevere through it. Like the mountain, in the music video of The Climb, the mountain is still going to be there, if you don’t climb over it. Overcoming your challenges is the word to describe this culture, perseverance. This song has a lot of meanings and it speaks for itself a lot. But the main focus of this song is not letting yourself down when something encounters you. That would just make you a failure. Perseverance brings you up and guides you to do something better to get over the problem. It doesn’t matter how fast or how slow you overcome it, but as long it is overcome, you are leading your battles to where you want it to be.