A long fun weekend

I am really excited for the upcoming weekend. This past week has felt incredibly long and everyone is excited for prom and the holiday Monday.  I am not going to prom because I'm a sophomore, but I have lots of friends that are going to prom tonight and I'm super excited to see them all dressed up and looking pretty. It is raining right now so part of me feels bad for the girls because no one wants to be dressed up in the rain, hopefully it will stop raining around nighttime. Tonight, I am going shopping and hanging out with a friend and I have plans for the rest of the weekend. It feels good to have Monday off because ever since spring break, the teachers have been giving tons of work to get ready for finals. I think everyone deserves a nice long day off and a short week next week. Summer is approaching fast and after the Ted talk and finals I will be really excited to finally relax and have some fun. The fourth quarter of the year is always confusing because it is hard and easy at the same time. It is easy in terms of work because majority of the quarter is just review for finals, and it is hard because everyone is tired and talking about summer. I hope the next few weeks of school go by fast.

Genius Time

This week I got allot completed with my genius time project. I had my autism awareness bookmarks passed out and I also held a meeting to raise awareness. I feel like this week has been successful in terms of my project and I'm glad I was able to get everything done with the help of my classmates, teachers, and coach. Over spring break I was sending out emails to different people to get them on board with my passion project and everything turned out well. Monday through Wednesday I had my meeting on the announcements and on Wednesday, my bookmarks were passed out to students from the English teachers. Wednesday was also the day of the meeting and I had about 55 people attend. DJ, my speaker, was also great. I had several people tell me that everything he had to say was very positive and inspirational. I thought that him and his mother were both very nice people and they even followed up after the meeting with a nice email. They have a great cause going to spread autism awareness and I wish them the best.

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?