This week started out really slow. With spring break fastly approaching, I definitely was not in the mood to work. All i could think about was getting on the airplane friday and flying to the Big Apple. I have so much fun stuff planned for spring break and a 4 day school week was really killing my vibe.
However, I persevered and did our project. Adding the Environmental factor to my writing was much more difficult than I thought. After reading through the Snowfall project a couple of times I saw how snow was clearly woven in throughout the article. I attempted to do the same with wind in our project and feel like I did a pretty goof job, obviously not as good as the New York Times though. Our group did a really good job of buckling down and getting our work done, and our project came together nicely. While working, I got a deeper understanding of the book which I really enjoy. The Kite Runner was an intriguing book that sparked a lot of interesting questions that all came together at the end. I liked how the story came full circle and had some what of a happy ending. Amir had a good relationship with Baba before he died. He had a happy marriage with his wife and even got the kid they were wishing for. Even though Amir can never apologize and make up for the night Hassan was attacked, he is making amends by taking in his son and raising him.
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This week I continued to read the kite runner. I am finding it very hard to read in class without taking a nap, but hey, at least I made it to first hour. Slowly I am getting this book read though, and it is actually very interesting. Amir was making me very upset with the way he was treating Hassan, it turned me off from reading on for a while. I don't understand how a character can just stand there while find friend is getting injured. However, I get that Amir wants this praise from his father that intervening might jeopardise. He worked so hard in the kite tournament to make his father proud and have the relationship he's always wanted.
Now that they are in America it is getting better. Amir and his father finally have a great relationship, even though Baba won't live much longer, him getting cancer was a huge plot twist. I guess I should not be that surprised since Baba did smoke a lot. I plan on reading over the weekend because I don't have dance on sunday, but I just started the last season of Vampire Diaries on Netflix so we'll see. I am very intrigued by the culture in this book. I never really took the time to think about average lives in the middle east because all we ever hear about it the war and terrorism. This book provides a good insight to what life is like and how it compares to America. Kite Fighting Third Trimester!!!! The year is almost over and I can not wait until the warm weather gets here. All this march snow has got me in a slump. I think most of the class would agree with me on this one. I blame this constant feeling of needing a nap on lack of vitamin D which a good dose of sunshine would clear right up. Anyway, it is not surprising that I am only 25 pages into my book. I am enjoying reading the kite runner, the storyline is interesting even though no conflict has really occurred yet. The language is a little difficult to understand because afghanistan culture is totally different from America's. I like how the author includes some of their language and then providing the translation behind it. This keeps the afghanistan theme more present in the novel.
I like the concept of the note taking with pictures. It allows my whole group to share their thoughts on the that specific part of the story. I think that it will be really helpful when we go to write the story in our project. I will be able to look back and jog my memory on what happened and how it played a role in the story. I am very curious to how our website is going to turn out with the fancy coding and videos we are supposed to add, along with this environmental factor. I think we will go with wind because of the "kite runner" title. Snowfall Project With one week left in this trimester, motivation is at an all time low; so this project is a slow process. I had to finish the book early in the week and then transition into finding my other sources. My topic has also shifted as I have been working through this project. I originally wanted to study love at first sight. However, as I read my books, I realized that it would be more interesting to study how characters act towards each other when they are in love.
Now that I have a new topic, I began searching for my outside sources. Romeo and Juliet was an obvious choice for me, the characters clearly act differently towards each other than they do with other characters that do not have romantic feelings for. I also watched a TED talk on how the brain functions when in love and the different chemicals that are released before, during, and after a relationship. All that is left for me to do is find pictures for my presentation and then practice what I want to say within the time constraints of the Pecha Kucha style presentations. How to make a Pecha Kucha Presentation Finishing and watching TIB's occupied most of our week, The first couple days were spent trying to make our videos perfect. Whether that be with the music, or trying to find the best picture to represent what we were attempting to say at the moment. However, no matter how many times i watched my video or made little changes, the video never seems to be done. I wanted it to be perfect since I was going to be sharing something personal with the entire class. Eventually, I called it good and submitted it. I was done worrying about it because I knew the more I messed with, the less I would like it.
Watching everyone's TIB's was very exciting. Getting a closer look at my peer's beliefs made me feel closer to my class. In addition to learning more about them as a person, I was able to see their artistic interpretation of the project. My TIB was a slide show of memories of my childhood playing volleyball and dancing. But some people took a different route, choosing to have a video sailing over the mountains or watching the sunset. As this project comes to a close, I think it was one of the better projects I have ever attempted in High School. I was something personal to me, but also allowed me to grow as a writer and video maker. I expanded my horizons as far as learning about we video, and got to look back on my past which was also nice. Watching Presentations I thought that once I got my This I Believe paper written, it would be all downhill from there. However, that was definitely not the case. I had an idea of what I wanted my video to look like in my mind. A sort of slide show of pictures from my life that represented what I was saying in my piece. Thank the lord for facebook and my mom being a postaholic so I can find all the pictures I needed. There was some parts of my video that picture can't depict. In those cases, I had to resort to images of arbitrary things like an alarm clock or a logo. I thought this would ruin the aesthetic of the video, so I tried to avoid it as much as possible. Overall, I think my This I Believe video is coming along good. The editing is taking a lot longer than I expected it to be. Fitting in the pictures and messing with the volumes and effects is quite a bit to think about and execute. I am excited to watch everybodies because I think everyone will have a different take and perspective on the project because it was so open to interpretation. This project was a good was to help us open up and dig deep, which I think will transfer into all of our other writings we will do throughout the rest of the year.
Editing your Video I believe was a challenging assignment for me. I feel as though I have strong beliefs, but I haven't come about through experiences in my life. The belief I chose was one that has really had a large impact in my life. I plan everything, and believe it's an important aspect to include if you want to be successful. The struggle while writing this paper was to be able to explain how much planning has been a part of my life without saying to much. I also wanted to make my paper seem interesting, because just telling people that I plan a lot of things, isn't very exciting. However, deciding to share that I got cut from the volleyball team is a big decision. It's not something I like to share about myself since I consider it a failure in my high school career. I believe that I created a decent paper that is deeper than any others I have written in this class. I am excited to see what everyone else has to share about their life and beliefs.
I believe This week we focused all of our attention to the national writing program. The main idea with all of the activities we did is forming an argument and a claim. We took a look at what tracking was, which was a interesting topic that gathered our attention and made it easy to form an opinion. Tracking is when these websites can install tools that gather a bunch of information on you without your permission. The websites can then sell this information to data companies so they can market their products specifically to you. However, the worst part of that there are no rules to regulate tracking, meaning that this information can go anywhere. This is especially dangerous because these websites are collecting for financial and health records, and that information falling into the wrong hands can have a big impact on your life.
Another interesting part of this week was the debate we had on wednesday. We chose a side, for or against government intervention of tracking, and then presented our ideas to the class in the form of a debate. This activity was helpful because we got to express our own ideas along with hearing the opinions of others. It personally helped me fine tune my thoughts on the subject of tracking, so when we wrote our paper on it yesterday, the ideas flowed out smoothly. The only struggle of writing the paper was to include information off of the sheets we read of monday without just regurgitating the article. Finding a balance is key in argumentative writing when it comes to supporting your ideas, as well as counterarguments. Tracking is more than cookies We spent almost of last marking period and the weeks in this marking period working on the same project. And at times it felt like I would never see the end of it. After struggling to understand what the heck happened in King Lear, we had to decipher it within the realms of deconstruction. Thankfully, Dr. McDermott was able to shine some light on that subject and really help my group start on our paper.
As far as team work went, our group sailed through this project fairly smoothly. By assigning different sections of our paper to the person that best understood that section made our paper come together easily. We then just had to blend our different voices and come up with a conclusion that embodied all of our points. Converting our ideas from a paper to the presentation was the most interesting part. Since we focused on the idea of "nothing" the entire time, it made sense to take a simplistic approach. We have very little to no writing on each slide and that made it possible for us to tell the story ourselves and not be tied down to reading off our powerpoint. My favorite part of our presentation was our song choice of 4'33''. It was such an obvious choice when you think about a presentation about nothing and pair it with a song of silence; but there was also a deeper connection which I believe surprised the audience. p.s. the meme doesn't relate to my group, I thought it was funny though Group Presentations The first week back from winter break is always a little rough. Everyone is still in the holiday mood, getting over their food comas, and probably already sick of the cold weather. And diving right into this huge project has been a struggle. Surprisingly, I remember most of what happened in King Lear, so that's a plus. However, the paper and presentation is a little fuzzy. I guess I am just confusing on how we are supposed to mesh the play, theory, and relevance together into one fluid paper. I think my group has a good idea with looking into Edmound's struggle for power and his motives behind it. It's just a matter of connecting Edmound to deconstruction. I also felt pretty confident in the PoW's this week. I understood that they were about spring and the rebirth that occurs. The first poem by WIlliam WIlliams gave me the idea of harsh winter weather being replaced by spring and how winter is holding on to stay as long as possible. The other poem was different, I did not get the whole idea of killing the flowers like the other groups talked about. I thought it represented the first beginnings of spring and the beauty that comes with that. Interpreting Poetryfaculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Readpoem.htm |
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March 2017
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