Mini Project

      Categories. Life is filled with categories. We put everyone and everything we come across into categories to identify them- sometimes we do it unconsciously but a lot of the time we judge people based on a sole image or scene that we have scene.
       For example this man on the left. If we had walked by the bus stop and he was crying and cursing we might categorize him as crazy. Or maybe as an alcoholic.
But what we don't always think about, even though we comprehend it, is that every single person in this world has their own life, their own problems and troubles that they face on a daily.


What most people probably wouldn't have figured out if they didn't know this man:
Earlier that day his wife came home and wanted a divorce and they fought in front of their children (below):

                                             Then his wife divorced him (on the right):



Now he's divorced (the left):







                                                    Heartbroken







There is so much we don't see when we just glance at a scene. So why do we think that it's okay to try and put the someone else's life together in our own head when we don't know all the details. If we didn't know the man at the bus stop above then we wouldn't have known anything about his family and what he had been dealing with.





     Everyone sees things differently and I think the picture on the right proves my point- Some people only see a woman walking on a path. Some people only see a man's face in between the trees. And some people see both. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words- so how come we never take the time to see the meaning behind the picture? Why do we put everything into categories and think we know the story behind everything.


                 It's hard to change habits though, and it's a habit for us to judge things, people, and scenes.

merp

     I almost didn't come to class on Wednesday to be honest- I wasn't really feeling like being a mentor to some high school kids but I ended up actually coming and it was really fun. Autumn and I had a really cool group of 4 other seniors who were nice and easy to talk to. They seemed really interested to hear about our college experiences so far and any advice that we were able to give.

    We also played a little activity with everyone that Lacy came up with. We played this four corners game where each corner stood for a different thing and you had to match yourself up with the corner that fit you best. It got everyone to participate and be involved which was good- it also got us to realize that we have more in common than we think.

     Overall, Wednesdays class was good and I'm glad I ended up going. It was really interesting to see how the seniors gave all their attention to us to hear about what we've encountered.


               

     On Monday we did this activity where we went around the CHHS building and looked for random chunks of a sentence to write down. I chose to write down the following words.

After we chose our words we went back to the room and wrote the words on the board. We had to write a found poem with the words on the board- we could only use those words but we could use them in any way to write our poem. I actually really enjoy doing these types of poems. It's interesting to see what kind of a poem you can create with only the words that you have. The poem I made was short and simple with no real meaning, but it still made sense. It's crazy how much can be told with only twenty-six letters in the alphabet. 

College Journey

        In class we looked at a picture online of how the college journey is portrayed. The picture was a straight line that was basically an academic check list of what you should complete before you go to college. What we talked about as a group after we looked at the picture were some things like: not everyone goes to college, what about sports and clubs and extracurricular activities, jobs, and all the other things the picture didn't take into account. After that Lacy wanted us to draw our own college journey. As you can tell my journey was more like a tree that kept branching out because college isn't a straight path. There are so many different bumps in the road when we go on our journey to college and not everyone even goes to college. Some people wait to go, or join the army, or go into their own business. This was a good activity to do because I don't think about this a lot but I'm glad I got too.

Picture Activity

In class we did this activity where we got into groups of two and we each had a piece of construction paper where there was a picture on it with an image. Autumn and I got this image from the show Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader. We were suppose to observe the picture and write about what we thought was going on and what we got from looking at the picture. Then, after a couple minutes, we passed the picture on to the next group in line and they added something else on to what we said or just something they observed about the picture. I liked this activity because if you didn't know what the picture was about or what was happening in it then you could assume anything about it and it could be totally wrong. I think this activity sort of portrays life. If someone were to freeze or lives at any given moment what would they see? What would we see? Would we like the way our life was seen or would we be ashamed? 

I learned something from this activity and I think it was a good activity to tie into what we are talking about this semester in English. 

MOVIES!

         We watched this video to write into the day; it was about the message that kid movies send kids these days and in my opinion it was pretty accurate. I agreed with the guy, I think that most of the Disney movies portray girls in a way that makes them seem like were all princesses who are stupid and don't know how to do anything without the help of a man. The video also talked about how the guys in movies are rude and treat girls poorly. The video basically said that it is hurting the way our kids are growing up because they see these movies and then start to act that way. Some movies aren't like this though and he mentioned some of those. I thought what he said about the girls was true though, a lot of time in Disney or kid movies the girl seems like she needs a guy to do everything for her. And the guy seems like he is her only hero and in some of the movies the guys take advantage of that. 

Improv Games

      

     In class we did Improv games which I thought was going to be really stupid and embarrassing. It actually wasn't too bad though. I haven't really done a lot of Improv games but these ones were interesting; it was definitely a lot harder to multitask with these games and have two people starting the games. One of the games that I thought was going to be really easy but was actually harder than I expected was the game where you had to look at something and say what it wan't. Then that got harder when Lacy added different rules to the game. Overall, I thought the games were really fun and Lacy connected it to the lesson well. After we played the games we did a group activity where some people got in a circle and talked about what Lacy asked and then the other people were around the group listening and recording what everyone was saying. I was the recorder and I liked doing that because I like listening to what people have to say.