For this mini-project. students were asked to choose a category within the cycle of socialization to make a poster about. I chose to research and write about gender roles and norms within society. The point of my poster was to provide a closer glimpse into the lives of women in modern-day society. in the form of a "life cycle" map. I enjoyed this project because I was able to choose to discuss a topic that I can strongly relate to. Through the creation of this poster, I was able to reflect on my own life as well as the roles of which women are expected to fill throughout their lives. My goal for this project was to give others the opportunity to reflect on different societal norms in today's society.
Mexican White Boy Reading
For humanities class, we were recently given the option of two books to read; Mexican White Boy and American Born Chinese. I chose to read Mexican White Boy. This book follows the story of a young teenage boy named Danny who is half Mexican and half white as he navigates the challenges of being integrated into a primarily hispanic community. Danny struggles to feel like he belongs in either community that he lives in. For our reading, students were asked to annotate as we read, basing our annotations off of what we have learned in class about white privilege and the cycle of socialization. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would definitely read it again on my own time. I really enjoy reading, but recently I have felt like I don't have a lot of time to read on my own time. It was a little hard at first to stay engaged in the book while annotating, but once I started using the strategy of reading a few sections at a time then going back and annotating, I got really into it.
Privilege Walk
This is an activity designed to simulate how different factors affect privilege within certain groups in America. To do this activity, participants stood shoulder to shoulder with their eyes closed facing the teacher. The teacher would provide prompts such as "Take two steps forward if your race is widely represented in the media" or "Take one step forward if it is expected of you that you attend college." In the end, we opened our eyes and looked around at where everyone ended up. This activity was interesting because it was very personal and relevant to current-day issues.
Final Project Mask Display and Essay - A Silenced Society
For this project, students were asked to work with a partner or individually to create and informational presentation about a specific example of civil disobedience from the past. We learned about and studied different significant examples of civil disobedience, along with reading The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail in order to build knowledge regarding the topic. We then chose a specific event to focus on and researched that event as well as significant people that demonstrated civil disobedience such as MLK and Rosa Parks.
For this assignment, students were given the task to create a mini-zine for practice before we create a real zine for humanities. I chose to write a zine based on the question: "Is cereal actually just soup?"
Shakespeare Project
Shakespeare Project Self-Assessment and Reflection For this project, students studied the work of Shakespeare, and dove into the question of “Why, 400 years later, does the English-speaking world still gravitate/celebrate the works of William Shakespeare?” After thoroughly analyzing these literary works, we collaborated as a class in order to create a student-made puppet show of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare. The goal of this project was to give students the opportunity to utilize collaboration and critical thinking skills as a team.
When I found out that we were doing a unit on Shakespeare, I was honestly not particularly thrilled. The reason for this was because I did not understand the relevance, importance, or structure of his writing. I also did not understand the language that he writes in. As we continued to dissect his work, I began to understand these things more. However, I never got super into it. This was because I felt like I could have been doing something better with my time. Nonetheless, thinking back on specific lessons within the unit, I would say that the area that I felt the most connection with during this project was when learning about poetry and sonnets. I have always been interested in poetry and enjoy writing in different genres of poetry, and it was fun for me to be able to break down these complex forms of poetry. It was also interesting to be able to see the rhythm of Shakespeare’s writing become clearer and clearer as I became more comfortable with old english.
For me, the most difficult aspect of this project was finding ways to effectively and evenly distribute the workload of puppet show preparation throughout the class and throughout my team. This was challenging because of the size of our groups and varieties of individual skill sets. There were times that I felt overwhelmed with the amount of work that needed to be done in a limited time frame, but I didn’t feel like I was able to receive quality help from my peers.I observed that a large portion of my peers were not very interested in the project as a whole, and lacked the motivation to produce refined work. Because we were working in such large groups, it gave certain individuals the opportunity to check out and not contribute to the process of putting together the puppet show. However, towards the end of the unit, I feel that we were able to get together as a class and pitch in to create a final product at the last minute. Additionally, when creating our puppets, we were initially going to find individual images and cut them out; but I then found out that there was a website with all the characters that we could lazer cut from. We decided to use this program, but for some reason it stopped working. This made it so that we had to hurriedly go back to our original idea and hand-cut every puppet. In the end, we were able to sort it all out, but it was pretty stressful at times. Nevertheless, I feel that it taught my group and I key collaboration skills and perseverance.
Something I learned about myself during this project is that I struggle to get the maximum amount of work done when working with a large group of people. When I am working on a project alone, I tend to be able to get more work done that is of a higher quality because I am able to go at my own pace and take the project in any direction I want. This way, I am more engaged. However, I’ve also noticed that when I am in a leadership role I am able to easily find ways to distribute the workload among team members in order to efficiently accomplish tasks. During this project, I often found myself naturally gravitating towards a position of leadership. For example, my main focus during the creation of the play was making puppets. In order to help the group complete this task in an efficient and organized manner, I created a spreadsheet with all the information about the puppets along with assigned characters for each team member to find. This made it so that everyone in the art team was able to contribute to the creation of puppets in order to have a unique and creative display. This also allowed for the task of finding characters to print to be completed much more quickly. This is an example of an instance in which I naturally found myself in a position of leadership.
At the beginning of this unit, I was skeptical about the relevancy of William Shakespeare’s work to the modern world. I felt that in some way , we over-analyze his underlying themes and subjects. After thoroughly analyzing the work of William Shakespeare, I’ve decided that the reason that Shakespeare’s work is still so celebrated in the modern world is because of the relevancy to the nature of humankind. Almost all of Skakespeare’s writing can be connected to common situations and emotions that still occur today. He discusses topics such as love, life, death, birth, and other more complex theories that we as humans can all relate to. Additionally, William Shakespeare’s work has had a very large influence on language, storytelling, and theater throughout history and in current times. Many novels and plays utilize phrases and themes “invented” by Shakespeare. Even in our everyday lives, english-speakers incorporate the use of words created by Shakespeare. Also, the rhythms and rhymes present in his poetry and sonnets can be found within modern music along with sounds from the natural world. This is why we as humans gravitate towards the work of Shakespeare; it is pleasing to the mind and body.