zacks portfolio
bestow yee eyes
philosophy of education
My philosophy of education is as long as you know you're in control of your work and grades you will do good in school, if you make excuses and say you can't do it you're cheating yourself out of passing and will start to gradually slip down the line by your own doing. This is so important to remember in my opinion because if you create excuses for yourself and begin believing it is okay you will not stop because you will convince yourself that it isn’t your fault and that the things around you need to change not yourself, and that’s the end. You can spend your whole life blaming your surroundings for the negative outcome of a certain situation but what will that change?
You're not going to blame the syllabus and change it, you're not going to complain about only being certified for low pay jobs and change it, you're not going to complain about not understanding a problem and change it, unless you stop blaming everything but yourself and actually work to change it. In every grade of school you will see two different kinds of people, on one side you see someone get frustrated and shut themselves down and decapacitate themselves and the other where they get frustrated and use that as fuel to try harder to understand. Last year I let that happen a lot, I would sit there making excuses for why I’m not getting more work done like “the teacher doesnt help me enough” or “I’m not capable of doing this” and then I would never get work done, but this year I changed my thinking in these situations because I realized I was hurting myself by doing that.
I have seen huge changes in my grades and my attitude toward my work once I started making this change in thinking. I noticed that I had more time after class to relax when I just buckle down and do my work, and that i’m now seeing some of the people around me do the same thing I was before and it's not making sense now that i'm looking at it from the outside. In my personal opinion to be considered intelligent, you just have to be able to carry out an intellectual conversation, a debate, or to argue for the things you say and your beliefs with facts and precision of language. Intelligence isn't one category you can not be able to talk but be a math genius or be able to succeed in politics but be a bust when it comes to a text book. You cannot define or label intelligence it's just there.english
My experience in this class has been great just like it was last year because I’ve always gotten along with Mrs.Deleon and generally have always enjoyed this class. I can easily focus on the work she gives us because it’s always fascinating to me at least. Mrs.Deleon’s class is very structured and she keeps the assignments nicely spread out from each other so that we’re not doing two or three assignments at the same time. I found the kind of work we get in this class challenging, because Mrs.Deleon gives assignments that actually make you think, you cannot just bs through all of her work because it will be obvious to her while she's grading and you will start failing. As a student, some things I can change are being on time to her class in the morning so that my attendance and participation look better and to not talk as much during extra work time so that I can get late work in and raise my grade, because just because my grade is okay doesn't mean I should leave undone work alone.
The assignment I chose for my reflection was the english fall final, Mrs.Deleon shared a quote with directions to rewrite it with our own words based on our beliefs. We were aloud to keep a lot of the same words in the quote because it was pretty long and she didn’t expect us to literally write out a new completely new quote. Once we all finished we posted pictures on the bottom if we wanted to and sent it into the classroom for Mrs.Deleon to grade and print out for us to post on the wall. I chose this assignment to share because it was a really good and in depth assignment to show my mom the work I have done.
“RIS activity 14: Analyzing stylistic choices.”
The assignment I chose for my reflection was the RIS activity 14, because it was a nice assignment that was decently long work and that I enjoyed. We had to read these inserts from an article we had just read about putting robots in space and schools, than we had to rewrite those sentences in classier language. I think that I followed the directions of the assignment very well because she told us to translate them into better language and I did that. I chose this assignment to share because it was easy to read through for people looking at my portfolio and it was a good example of a small assignment that still made us change our thinking.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CD6RfuFZ6Zjz3410pITJZ_rv2ha_phU3dO1M-SXVlfk/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/118HkPB6PGEbp6HC6xXp-PbXqzjMPdjd2z1g3asP-7eA/edit?ts=57054f01
history
I enjoyed History class because Mr.Anderson is a very respectable person and always makes sure to keep the class listening and interested. He always makes the topics as interesting as possible according to the likes of the students in his class. I found that the hardest part of Mr.Anderson’s class was the amount of work we get, the work is captivating and makes me want to spend time on the assignments but I cannot because we will usually be getting another subject the next class so for me that would be the most difficult part of this class. Something I can do differently as a student at this school and in this class is to pay more attention to the things that interest me less than others so that I can better keep my grades at a good level.
Why Nations Fight was one of the assignments that really really challenged me because of the depth of work we had to do and the research that had to come before that. I also enjoyed it because it made me dig deeper into the things that I’ve been taught about in the past than I did before challenging me to change my thinking, so it opened my eyes to more things and secret agendas that I didn’t know about before Mr.Anderson became our teacher. I also loved how we had to look at the different sides of each war and every aspect that caused them to initiate war. Mr.Anderson helped us all when we needed it especially in the beginning but as everyone went on he had to help less and less but was always available.
The propaganda poster assignment was definitely my favorite assignment because I love art and creating things and that's pretty much what this assignment was. We used an app on the Ipads that allowed you to use different tools to draw anything you wanted and to put pictures in the background and then zoom in and manipulate the angle to trace and create your own drawing. I used about six different pictures to trace and create my own drawing using all the tools, creating an anti-war poster. This assignment challenged me because it was hard to think of how to take multiple pictures and put them all together on a new piece. Mr.Anderson helped with my assignment because when I started he showed me how to use the app and what tools there are and what they do as well.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18O3ACcHlW2biLAkWkBOQiCv8dGAcYHvf05zeNDO8vwE/edit
math
My experience in this class was very different from other math classes I have been enrolled in the past because the standards this year have changed in a big way for the first in a while and that largely affected the school year for me. I have noticed that it was a little easier this year for me to stay on top of all of my work and to not talk to all of my friends all day like I did last year. We also got a new math teacher this year which also shocked a lot of students, we loved our teacher last year and it was hard realizing we’re restarting with a new one. So this caused a lot of resistance among the students and made the school year, work, and regaining chemistry a lot harder for everyone. I think a mathematician studies, dissects and teaches the language of mathematics. They are the english teacher of the number relm, they have to translate what they have been taught by teachers who were taught by another generation who all used methods thousands of years old, a mathematician is a missionary of this trait that is needed for everyday life. And I think that in this class mrs.McDonald does this very well in many different way and activities. She gives us vocab words to study so we understand the language, she walks us through new things were learning slowly so we have time to adapt to it. An assignment I enjoyed were problems 2-11-2-14 in the textbook, where we were looking at a graph and deciding whether it is a function or not. We have to show with words and equations for each letter of the problem to prove our statement is true. On these assignments you have to work hard to make sure your equations are correct and aren't going to prove your original statement wrong. I chose this assignment to share because it has good visuals to show the people looking at my portfolio.
Another assignment I liked and that kind of challenged me was number 2-57 in the textbook, we were given a line and told to copy the graphed line into our notebooks, than we were supposed to determine the slope using knowledge we learned in Mrs.McDonalds class. Mrs.McDonald is always available to us at anytime we need and she walks around to help.
science
Science class has always been one of my struggle areas but I have always also loved this subject. I wish that we got more time every week to work with partners though and that we didn't get another assignment given to us the next class because sometimes it takes a long time to complete them because they are very in depth. I loved the documentaries that we watched this year, they were very very eye opening and informational and informed almost every student on things they had no idea about and we all loved it, I also loved the current events and always have because of the research it causes you to do and the fact that it is on what you choose. Something I can do differently is not talk to other students as much and to focus harder on the assignments I need to get in.
I highly enjoyed almost all the fracking assignments we did because it is a huge topic in the United States and in my opinion something that needs to be looked at way more among our citizens because oil companies are successfully sliding their actions under our nose and as citizens of this planet this is unacceptable for us to just let happen. And if we were going to a normal high school I can bet that learning this would not be on the regimen, so that is a huge part of this school that I love. Mrs.Dennon always makes sure to allow us to further our thinking and definitely encourages environmental studies which I highly agree with being seen as important and like learning about. Sometimes the assignments got boring but the information we were getting was really useful so I toughed it out. While we were looking into these things we found out that some peoples sink/well water sets on fire due to methane gas leaks into private wells.
The other assignment I enjoyed are the current events, because it makes us research something that is happening now, forcing us to look further past just what’s around us. Mrs.Dennon is always there to help us when we need her but we all are pretty use to having to do current events so we usually can do it on our own. I go onto the website IFLscience that Mrs.Dennon has provided the link for, and pick a current event happening around us or around the world ot of the news stream on the homepage. We can also choose a category and look for a news story in that area of interest. Than we use the template Mrs.Dennon has created for us to write a report on it. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ltggonoOfrnqrPl92ZIlteelZT7fxunOlUeTYaMVl_c
music appreciation
I'M ZACK
comments
2. taught me to dig deeper into an issue
3.interactiion
4.i used to resent going to school in the morning and thought i wouldnt learn things i needed or that interested me and that doesnt happen anymore.
5.listen to the students and not shut down on them because they're young
6.make me accountable for tardiness.
7.it is a great school
parent comment-
As a parent this school has been a lifesaver. This school has given Zack a place to be himself while he learned about himself. A place while accountability is vital, there is no judgement. I truthfully thank everyone! He actually likes school and I have seen him grow as a person.