This I Believe Project
This was the first project of the year in or humanities class. We started by visiting the This I Believe website and reading a few examples to get an idea of what we were going to be doing. We then used the next few days to try and find a few truths that we believed in. I had a really difficult time with this because I couldn’t come up with a truth that I was really passionate with. Our next assignment was to write a creed that we would be able to get a feel of what our final essay should kind of sound like. Because I could not find a solid idea of what I wanted to write about I ended up writing four creeds about truths that were close to me. I couldn’t decide which one would be the best sounding truth with the subject I was talking about. I finally decided to write an essay based around the saying that my dad often tells me when we are out hiking. This project was actually really fun and great for me in the end, even though I had a hard start to it. I was able to write about a subject that is personal and have it fallow all the criteria that were required. I learned a lot about personal truth and how I see the world though my own eyes THE MORALITY AND POLITICAL OF JUSTICE link to Op-Ed link to Artist Statement this project was meant to help us look at modern issues and use different philosophies to help decide what we think should be done. we started this project by learning the different philosophies and the main people who created the idea. we also looked at other issues in which these ideas where applied to. the main philosophies we learned were libertarianism, deontology, utilitarianism, and Rawls theory of justice as equality. We then wrote an OP-ED and created a visual piece to represent and explain our thinking. The issue that I chose was gun control in the USA, I took more of a libertarian view on the subject explaining it is our right to have guns and we shouldn't lose that right because some bad people made some bad choices. I also argued that guns away from the general public will not stop criminals from getting them. I showed this in the visual piece with the criminal over the cuffed civilian. throughout this project I have learned to look at things from different angles. I think that the best away to look at an issue is to look at from a different prospective or the devils advocate. It allows you to see more an possibly better ways of solving the problem. We also learned how to look at an issue and decide if it is just not solely based on political parties (democrat, republican) beliefs. I feel that I had already been doing this but it helped me get better at avoiding it. my strongest piece of this project was my art piece. i tried many different angles to get a good picture and spent a good amount of time on photo shop trying to edit it. i think it explains my ideas well and clearly makes a point. i think i was weakest in my writing. i had a hard time making my statements sound professional and smooth. i think that if i had an extra week to work i would spend a lot more time on my OP-ED. i think my writing should have been more refined and i could add more to my thoughts. i also think that i would ave tried to do something other then a poster as a visual because i have done that for basically every exhibition. Korematsu Vs the US this was a project where we studied the the history of World war to and how the Japanese interment camps started. WE learned of the conditions of living in a place like those camps and how the Government went about deciding who was guilty and innocent. we did this so that we could then argue in a mock trial case whether or not they were constitutional. We each had a part that we would play in the mock trial. i was assigned to defense lawyer. As a team we began discussing how we could argue to prove that the interment camps were wrong. we spent time working individually working with our witnesses and coming up with questions to prove our points. however during this we often worked together as a team to help eachother out with making good questions. As lawyers we had to come up with questions that we had to ask our witnesses both direct and cross examination. i had to write out these questions so that the witness could display what i was trying to prove. i had to change my cross-examination questions because not all the sources that i was looking at added up to prove my point. I really enjoyed this project mainly because it was different. most of our projects have us writing lots of papers and making an art piece to go with it. for this project i was able to improve on the talking skills that will eventually help me later in life. i was really fascinated by the way a court is ran and how we deal with the issues that happen today. i think that if i were to change anything i would have more practice with the objections par of the case, we struggled with it at first but we were able to do better later on during the case. overall this was a great project that was interesting and fun. Happiness and Meaning a. What is the purpose of your existence? b. What is happiness and what makes you happy? c. What does it mean to live a meaningful life? d. To what extent can literature shape your personal philosophy on happiness and meaning? Links for Project
Project Description The Stranger Seminar prep Happiness and Meaning Seminar Prep Literary Analysis essay Project Proposal New Insight This project let me look more into what makes me happy. I was able to see how happiness affects our lives more everyday. I think that Happiness is essential for a healthy life, it allows to find meaning in things and make a little more sense of the chaotic world we live in. I think that the best way to find happiness in our lives is to do things that we are passionate about. Find a hobby that you really enjoy and make sure that you do those hobbies often. through all the research that we did i found that people who do things that they enjoy often often are happier then people who only have time for work or things that they don't enjoy. I think that's how people decide whether something is meaningful or not, the key to meaningfulness is happiness. Personal Questions 1. If I am not able to Find a Career that i am happy about how will i make sure that I do find time in my life to do the things I am passionate about 2. If I eventually loose interest in something I like to do how will i find new things? 3. How Do you cope when you no longer are able to do the things you like? 4. What do you do if you find a career you think you like but it turns out to be something different? Sense of Place Short Story and Artist statement essential questions 1. How does energy production impact* place? 2. How does your sense of place**, environmental ethic and understanding of our energy needs influence your perception and decisions regarding energy productionThis Project was a deep personal reflection of our sense of place.we spent the first part of this project working learning about energy, how it was collected and how it is used. we then started to learn about different environmental ethics. an environmental ethic is your belief and opinion of the area, how it should be kept, whether or not humans should be there or not. the next part of this project was deciding where i sense of place was and how we were going to write about it. we had the freedom of what style we wanted to write in; it could be poems, short stories, fiction. with that we also had to come up with a visual piece to present as well. During this project i really thought more about the special places in my life. When i decided that i wanted to write about my cabin in Canada i really wanted to have a quality paper that really showed how special it was. it was really hard to come up with an idea of how to do this. i decide that i wanted to write in a futuristic setting of when "I" take my kids to the cabin. though this project I learned a lot about how important it is to have a place like this to retreat from the world and reconnect with your self. I was really proud of both of my pieces of work but i think that i was most proud of my writing. when i started it took me so long to find out what to write about. and after that i just could come up with any ideas either so it took me along time to really start. then when i was on a car ride to Grand Junction i got really inspired and was able to pretty much write up the whole thing in about two hours. I spent along time after that revising and making it flow better. i was really proud of how well it turned out even after it took me so long to start. overall i though that this project was okay. I thought that it was really kind of the same as the projects we had done this year except for the times we had guest speakers for chemistry. I did really enjoy working on it and having the freedom in the writing and visual piece. I just didn't feel it was really unique and different from what we have done in the past |
|