Favorite Teacher

This week I am going to be writing about my favorite teacher in all my years at Lake Norman Charter.  After thinking about who I wanted to write about, I quickly narrowed down my choices to my English teachers since that is my favorite subject.  In eighth grade, I had a really good English teacher named Mr. Sherry.  Not only was I excited to go to class everyday, but I was also excited to learn and see what Mr. Sherry had in store for our class that day. He would have a lot of assignments for us to complete in class so we would never be bored doing busy work, and there were many group projects.  One of the reasons I thought his class was great was that the group assignments were sometimes our choice of who we wanted to work with, and other times he would pair us in groups.  This way, the class was always motivated to work hard so that the next time we had a group assignment, we could choose our own classmates.  I think that having group work where everyone was forced to participate, also bonded the class.  We were able to joke around as a class and get our work done at the same time.  Having a class where you can be friends with everyone in the room is a great experience because people will get along and it is an enjoyable experience when there are class discussions.  Mr. Sherry was also a very unique English teacher because he shared his love for music with our class.  During our poetry unit, we would listen to different genre songs and analyze what the artist was talking about in their song. I also love music so getting to go to class and discover new songs was great for me. I will never forget his class because of the fun I had and also because it has impacted how I listen to music today.  When I hear new songs I can't help but to think about the meaning behind it and often times, look it up.  The curiosity I have behind artist's music, stemmed from Mr. Sherry's class.



Source:
http://www.edison.k12.nj.us/domain/1014

Human Rights

Learning the human rights was really interesting because I had never heard about them or knew that they even existed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is something that everyone all around the world needs to hear.  I think that people, especially in America, take these rights for granted because we are treated fairly well in this country. I think that any group of people who are denied these rights, need to learn about them, and stand up for themselves.  If a lot of people are fighting for rights, the government can't ignore it.  I think the best way to spread these rights is to have everyone tell at least two people that these rights exist and to spread the word.

Update

As the school year comes to an end, my genius time project is also coming to a close. I have everything prepared except for my confirmation with Mr. Svoboda to come speak to my meeting about Autism Awareness. I have my bookmarks that I will be passing out during the week of Autism Awareness Day but until then, I cannot do anything else with that. We have been really busy in DigCit working on video projects and entering in contest. Our last unit has come to an end and we won't be doing videos any more. I have really liked the work we have done and it will be interesting to see what we do in class next.

Genius Time update

This week I feel like I have gotten a lot accomplished with my project. I ordered my bookmarks that I'm going to be passing out at school and I have a set date that an autism speaker is going to come and talk to some students about his experience. I'm really excited to hear what he has to say and I think that other students will be interested too because it's more exciting to hear about a person's experience  who actually has autism then to hear information come from someone who doesn't have it. I'm going to pass out bookmarks that have facts about Autism in the mornings during that first week in April because April 2nd is autism awareness day. I also plan to pass these out in the meeting that should happen on April 6th and some classmates helped me by creating posters to advertise the meeting.  I feel like I am in a good place with my passion project and it will be interesting to see how the meeting goes.

Write for Rights

On Tuesday January 5th, Rachel Gebelein came into our class to speak to us about Amnesty International and Write for Rights.  Amnesty International is an organization that works to help free people who have been wrongfully accused or are unfairly treated in other countries.  They have 12 cases a year on their website that people can write letters for requesting things to help out the person. I think the idea behind Amnesty International is great but I'm skeptical of how many people are actually helped due to the letters.  Rachel said that someone in high power such as the Minister of Justice, can't just ignore an issue when he recieves a lot of letters about it but I disagree with that.  He can ignore the letters if he chooses to because there isn't anything we can do if he throws those letters away.  I would love for someone's life to be helped due to a small letter that I wrote but we may never know if anyone reads that letter or not.  Overall the organization is doing something great however, it's hard to know if their success rate is legit.  What is your opinion on Amnesty International? 

Spread the word to stop the word.

Recently in one of my classes I heard multiple people use the word retarded.  I'm sure many people use the word retarded loosely and don't think much about it and when I hear it I usually don't think twice about it.  However, I started thinking about how the word came to be considered bad and if people really should use it or not and that is what I want to reflect on this week.

I thought about how this word relates to my passion project and how if I'm spreading autism awareness I also need to think about words that can be hurtful towards anyone with mental disability.  Retarded discriminates against people with mental illness in the same way that Nigger discriminates against black people and Fag against gays.  The problem is, retarded has become a word that people use jokingly with their friends unlike other derogatory words that can cause fights if used in the wrong place.  I went online and found an article called "Noah's Dad" and I really liked the points that the writer had.  I learned that there is a campaign called "Spread the word to stop the word" and he even had a link to a PSA posted on his website that I thought was intersting and had a strong message behind it.  I am going to link the website below for anyone who wants to hear about his story and why he stopped using the R-word.  I am going to make an effort to tell people not to use the R-word when I hear it and you should too.

Link to article:
http://noahsdad.com/spread-the-word-to-end-the-word/

PSA completed

This past week my group has finished editing and making our psa video and I really like how it turned out.  After making it last week we thought that it looked good and we really liked the product but after showing our psa to the class and getting their feedback, we realized it needed a lot of improvement.  I went home the next day and worked on it a lot and sent it to Jamie who edited the video some more and added the music to it and Taylor improved our website even more.  What I really like about my group is that we have our own website as a call to action for our psa.  After people view our psa they can go to the link at the end of our video and read some of the things that Taylor has out there on the website.  I feel like I learned a lot during the process of creating a psa.  The biggest thing I learned is how to have a strong impact on the viewer in a small amount of time through the music and fonts that you use.  Every little detail counts as something that will benefit your psa.  The music and how fast we were able to complete our psa went really well.  It helps when everyone pitches in and finds their own part to work on.  However, if I could do this assignment over I would have done something that involved filming because I think some of my other classmates that have actors in their psa, have a more professional look to their video.

image from http://www.informationanalyticsinstitute.com/OtherServices/CompletionServices.aspx