Humanities Portfolio 2012

  Sophomore year with Mr. Block was one of the most eventful years, with both classes! From the egg on the floor to Art in the Open, nothing was ever the same each day. There were struggles, and achievements, but overall I learned a lot this year with so many different experiences. Finishing up the year, there were many things I’ve realized looking back at my work. I feel like I’ve accomplished and gained so much knowledge. For a lot for the topics we discussed, it broadened my views on things. The two main ideas I am going to discuss are about struggle and creativity. “Without struggle there will be no learning,” and “Creativity broadens our views on life.”

At one point in the year we had our playwriting unit, I remember first starting it and having no clue what to write. I had a few in my mind, but then thought too much into it, and I felt like it wasn’t going to be good. I then started looking through Mr. Block’s magazines and saw a man working in a mine, and immediately I came up with the idea for my play. My play was about a small family living in a poor part of Brazil. The younger sister eventually had to care for her baby sister because her Mom died in childbirth. Her older brother worked most of the day with the mines. The whole play unit was really great. Although I struggled with writing it and then finally submitting it, we had an amazing teacher come in and help us. Her name was Kate and she was apart of the Philly Young Playwrights. She was great because when she looked at our work, she would really take her time into helping you improve it. “You say the brother has replaced him, which is something I’ll bet happens a lot in mining families.  Keep working, don’t be afraid to use monologue, like Andressa talking out loud to the baby perhaps?  How will they feed themselves now? -K”(One of Kate’s feedbacks for a scene) This project leads to one of my general statements about struggle. I’ve always been told you need to struggle through something to be able to learn. If you just did an assignment and had no trouble with it, you most likely didn’t learn anything. Creating and putting together this play was much harder for me then I thought. I faced many struggles during the process, but in the end when I submitted it. I learned many different strategies in working on assignments productively, but also efficiently.

Creativity played a big role in both of Mr. Block’s classes this year. Almost all the projects had to have a little piece of your own in it. There were small projects that we were able to use our creativity in them, but there were also projects that helped us open up and express our creativity. There was a time in the year where we read the book Passing. At the end we were assigned to do some sort of art piece on a main point in the book. I choose to draw a picture showing different aspects of the main character's personality. This is the drawing I drew with the two faces of Clare. Art in the Open was one of the main events of the year that I saw everyone come out of their comfort zone. It was a great experience, and really fun for everyone to participate in. Here is a picture of my group’s site and our wiki. Another project towards the end of the year was creating a poetry wiki. This was very creative in ways where, although we all were on the same wiki and had the same format on each of our pages, everyone’s work had their own tweak to it. We were able to express ourselves through the writing of poetry by using our own experiences. My wiki page is here with all the assigned poems.