During this project, we explored the world of poetry, read the likes of Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen, and created our own poems. We spent about 4 weeks creating our poems through refined drafts and going through critiques with our class. We then went into ways of presenting our poems with the options being spoken word, video, and creating an art piece related to the poem.
Model UN Conference
During our model UN project, we were tasked with creating resolutions for one of the UN countries' perspectives on the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan. I chose Germany as my country and proceeded to read many articles on the issue, and my country's perspective on it in order to come to an understanding of the topic.
Adolescence Project/Exhibition
During the adolescence project, our end goal was to show adults how adolescents function, and that it's not just their kid that acts weird, but rather every one of us. We got to explore theories of development, attachment, and moral reasoning. These topics made me realize a lot of things about myself throughout and understand why I'm the way I am.
First of all, I must say that our adolescence project was amazing. I've never seen a group of teenagers work so hard on something, to accomplish a collective goal of having a mind-blowing exhibition and I'm genuinely impressed by it. Throughout writing my essay for the project, I've exponentially grown as a writer. This is evident by the fact that I stopped getting my point across by telling, but rather showing an example with context to engage the writer in what I'm trying to get across. "My brother was hit by 2 cars at 11 years old. When it happened, I hoped it would un-fuck his brain so that I could finally interact with him. Spoiler alert... it didn’t." This is a section in my essay where I feel that it got my point across, without directly telling the reader what's going on. I feel that this project has changed my view of things in the sense that, parents were incredibly intrigued during the exhibition, and I believe it changed their view on adolescents as a whole. This showed me that my generation has the power to make changes in the world, but that we just have to put the effort in. This project made me passionate about something which I’ve never felt with a school project. I didn’t procrastinate my work, but rather put in 100% effort. This is shown by my extensive amount of work and progress on my essay; going through multiple drafts before arriving at my final draft. I’m genuinely proud of this piece of work I’ve created, and I hope to continue to do such projects throughout my remaining time at Animas High School. For the exhibition, we were divided into different groups to cover the whole thing in which, I was assigned to be in charge of the essay quotes. The idea of this was that we’d have everyone in our grade pick out 3 quotes from their essay which would be hung up on the ceiling. It took a little while to get it rolling because our group was dependent on our classmates to turn in their quotes which took them about a week and a half. But in the end, it turned out great, and I’m happy to have contributed to it.