Portfolio
cherry blossoms, a new school year i hope senpai notices me,
Philosophy of Education
the cool thing about brains is that they never stop developing. maybe not developing synapses, but they never stop making connections. it's more difficult to learn things as you get older but it is possible. education is the most valuable weapon a human being can have, more valuable than anything physical, because you can have a sword, but there's a really big difference between swordsmanship and just swinging the sword around with wild abandon. you could wind up cutting someone on accident or yourself if you're not properly trained. education is important because if you don't have basic knowledge of something you could wind up hurting yourself. you want to make sure that you cut people on purpose.
wow that was a really long-winded, confusing analogy. i'm sorry. i guess what i really meant was you want to make sure you know what you're doing? like you can't just go and be a neurosurgeon and not know how to read or do basic algebra.
English
Even though we’ve only read a couple chapters I’m really loving the book we’re reading this year, All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s about a German soldier’s experience fighting in World War I, known back then as the Great War because nobody was psychic and they weren’t milking stories for sequels yet. WWI is a really unique war in the respect that it was so brutal. Everyone had shiny new weapons and they couldn’t wait to try them out on each other. Because it was a test run for everyone, a lot of people died, as a result of accidents, poor hygene, etc. Entire family names went extinct because of that war. It was just a bad time. For everyone. But some really beautiful pieces of art came out of it, like this book. Books like this are like snapshots of that period in history, from the author’s eyes. It’s pretty amazing to see the different perspectives of other human beings.
I've always enjoyed silent reading. It's a nice place to gather up my thoughts. I've been really loving JoJo's Bizarre Adventure lately, it's really complicated to explain but everyone is super buff and it makes you cry a lot. I've been able to do SSR sheets on it, which makes me really happy because I think the out-of-context summaries are really, really funny. I don't know why but out-of-context things just make me laugh. I'm still reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it's a brick and it gets really repetitive to just be reading one. Currently I'm also reading the beforementioned assigned English book, The Water Margin, a traditional Chinese legend, and Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson, which is really relatable for me because she talks about her experience with coping with anxiety and a clusterfrack of other mental illnesses. I've been coping with various comorbid mental illnesses for a while and it's nice to read something that's so cathartic.
History
The Nativism thing was a really cool thing to learn about because the whole 'I'm better than you, I've been here longer' seems to be a recurring theme. Humans' pretension never ceases to fascinate me. Immigration in general was a really fascinating unit because a lot of the views some people had on immigrants nearly 150 years ago are really similar to the ones some people have of Mexicans today. Which kind of sucks. You'd think we'd have moved on by now. But y'know the old saying, those who are too proud to admit their faults are doomed to repeat them. That's not an old saying. I just made that up now. It's better than the other one IMO. Suck it, Morissey.
Another assignment, one that we had earlier this year, which I didn't necessarily 'enjoy' i.e. I didn't take delight or gusto in finding out about this, but I still found it interesting, was doing research on a genocide that wasn't the Holocaust. I found out about the Holodomor, when the Russians tried to starve the Ukrainians out in order to get them to join the USSR in the 1930s. They took away the great minds of Ukraine, along with the farmers and their leaders, and executed them. Without farms, there wasn't any food to give the people. Russia still denies that it happened, and only 25 countries admit it was a genocide. It's pretty horrible that people deny genocides, especially one that slow-burning.
Math
I liked doing the tile patterns, which you can see on the back wall. As a visual learner anything where I get to draw something out is helpful. It was nice because I got to make the tile pattern into a shape I wanted, I chose a heart because I’m a piece of Undertale TRASH. I put a lot of thought into it because as previously stated I’m not too great at math, and I wanted it to form the shape at the end.
We did a lot of coloring geometric patterns in as well, which was pretty neat. Getting to experiment with color patterns and looking at the shapes really was engaging for me as far as my art brain and my (very small) math brain goes. It was a fun exercise to go along with the lesson and helped me focus a little bit more.
Rachael Elizabeth Midcap
last year i seemed really sure of myself but now i have absolutely no idea what i want to do with my life. everything feels unoriginal and like i'm copying someone else. i'm gonna be a camp counselor this year which is a really fun shift in perspective for me. if the world were a person i would punch them. i'm going to punt my bottle of ssri's into the sun.
Email: rmidcap16@petk12.org
Website: adrenalvapor.deviantart.com
Twitter: @sassqueengamora