Portfolio
Carpe Diem
Philosophy Of Education
Before entering Carpe Diem, I hadn’t made much progress at Petaluma High School, not just grade wise but learning. At Petaluma High School the classes I took didn’t teach me much about how I can keep information instead of just throwing it at us and hoping we understand. The things that the teachers would stand up there in front and jabber on about were pointless, because they don’t understand that most kids aren’t prepared to obtain and keep information at a high school level. When I transferred to Carpe, I was immediately noticing a difference in my attitude towards school and how much information I was gaining in a manner where it was working knowledge that I can bring up in everyday conversation without having to think back and go, “what was that I learned yesterday” or last week or month.
I do not agree with the state’s requirements on education. Why should the state or society be able to dictate what you learn and what you don’t learn. The state wouldn’t be a state without government it would be land, the government tries so hard to make everyone “smart” that they don’t see how stupid and inconsiderate they are. Without the government there would I admit be chaos but there is a point where it is controlled by society which is another messed up group of individuals who are not willing to change, and yet you let them decide what your children learn and how. Learning should be in nature like understanding new ways to measure a cut on a construction site or in an office building learning to type, but the point is it should be your choice where you lead your life and where you want to begin, and I guarantee that we could cut the amount of homeless people in the United States in half by letting them choose their direction in school. Ask what they wanna be and send them to a school fitted to law enforcement, or teaching, or science. I understand that there are electives in high school or middle school but what if we could have an experienced teacher there to lead you on a path to success in the area you want to go in, if you want construction for example. In kindergarten they could teach about why it’s important to have contractors and how difficult the work can be and as they move to 1st and 2nd grade you teach them the core classes but directed towards what someone needs. I see that there is no perfect program and that the one I have come up with probably wouldn’t work out but the way schools operate right now is not in my eyes an acceptable way to raise the leaders of a country.
When I grow up I plan to take over my dad’s construction business and it does require a lot of information that you would never learn in school because the government is afraid to teach you those things in school. The skills I would like to aquire are based around that general area of construction but I know that isn’t something we will learn here and math may help but not if you can’t take anything from the math class you’re in. I think it is important to be able to obtain information one day and a month later, be able to bring it up in conversation or to start a conversation on it. It is also important to be responsible and let’s say a police officer confronts you, if you’ve got stuff on you you’re screwed either way so don’t run just face the consequences, otherwise don’t have illegal stuff on your person and you won’t get in trouble.
Since I’ve gone to Carpe Diem High School the most significant things that have changed are based around how I view school and especially the schools that I have been to and how I have done my work and how I have seen the teachers that have been trying to help but i’m not the type of person to take help. I like to be a very individual learner and progress and see that i’ve grown and changed as a person. Learning has never been a challenge for me but it has always been difficult for me to sit in one place all day and focus on a person talk and then to get into an assignment that you don’t quite understand how it can help later in life. I feel like since I have been here that I have expanded not only my vocabulary but social skills and been open to new ideas and being away from the big school has made me an all around happier person. I am glad I came to this school to help change who I will be in the future.
Further in life I plan to work for my dad for a year to learn the ropes of the family general construction business before I take it over, I hope to make my family proud and I hope to take care of the company and keep it running steadily with a flow of work. I couldn’t imagine having to have a desk job and have to sit in a cubicle and stare at a screen all day the way I have all my life with the highly evolved world that we live in that is drenched with technology, I plan to do outdoor labor for my life and if I ever do want to go further to go to the Junior College and get the credentials that I may need to go to a four year college and get where I want to be in life. I have also always been interested in cars so my backup plan if something goes wrong is to go to an institutional school to learn about the mechanics of cars and follow an education on cars into a career working on the bodies and interior of cars.
English Reflection
So far english has been a fun class with a good balance of work and activities. I liked the few extra work days we got in the middle of the grading period to catch up and get work done. I didn’t find much challenging in the class but I didn’t enjoy the topics we’ve had so far, especially the robots in school. I feel like in english we should be learning about grammar and spelling and stuff like that and I don’t feel that I took anything from the robots in school subject. Sometimes when I ask for help, I feel like Mrs. Deleon sometimes just re-explains the assignment instead of showing me a way I could do it.
I enjoy the daily reading assignments and how they give us freedom to find whatever we want including an article off the internet, or a book, or a magazine, pretty much anything and write about how we feel about them and what they said. I worked hard on these assignments because they aren’t difficult so why not just get them done right. In this assignment we have to pick something to read and read for 30 minutes, after that we write about what we read and then give our detailed opinion on the subject. I chose this assignment because it gives us freedom to discuss opinions and to share thoughts with the class without having to be paying attention to the same thing.
Another great assignment was the Common Core Vocabulary activity from our second vocabulary assignment. In this assignment we chose 15 words to make into a story, the subject of the story didn’t really matter so we had creative freedom but it made most of the stories make no sense. I worked hard on this assignment because it was fun to write even though I don’t really like typing. The purpose of the story was to stick those words in our brains and make sure we would be able to remember what they meant. I chose this assignment because although the vocab was not fun, thinking of a story to fit with it was.
History Reflection
In this class I feel that I have learned more about history that has stuck with me than in other schools. It keeps me entertained in the subjects that we learn about and how it’s done. The history class was not too difficult, but that might have been the problem with other classes I have taken, with how they taught kids to do their work instead of how to learn and store working knowledge. To change this class I would like to do more interactive assignments like real life examples of how people lived or things like that. I have been doing pretty well this semester in History, but I need to make sure I check grades and assignments more often.
The Propaganda Poster assignment was challenging because it made me think about what war would be like and how desperate the country was to gain troops. I worked very hard at this assignment because it was interesting to me how posters were laid out and what skills the government used to pull people into the army. We haven’t done anything with them yet but i’m excited to see what other student’s posters look like. The directions were to create a poster using the ipad or chromebook to bring new troops to the war, the goal was to teach us about how detailed the posters were and how everything you saw was a purposeful attempt to grab young men off the streets and throw them on the front line. I chose this assignment because I feel like it was the most fun and interactive assignment yet.
WWI Technology was a fun assignment to do as partners and to be able to discuss with someone, your opinions on war and the topic you got. My partner and I worked pretty hard on this assignment trying to find proper and true information. The directions were to pick some technology that was invented or improved because of the war, the purpose was to teach us that things we use today wouldn’t even exist without the war. I chose this assignment because even though it may have been tedious it was enjoyable to learn about trenches and how they were used in the U.S. civil war, to how they were used and despised in WWI and then WWII.
Math Reflection
In math class this semester, I haven’t learned too much new, but I think that is because it is an integrated class and it has just crossed over with what i've already learned so far. I didn’t really enjoy this class, I haven’t ever really liked math so those classes are kind of just something I have to get through instead of something to study. It was a little bit difficult trying to figure out how to do certain assignments because of how I learned at Petaluma High School, it mixes up which equation goes to what problem and how to solve it. I think a mathematician is someone a bit like a scientist because they have mastered a skill to solve problems.
Out of the assignments we’ve done this semester, one of the less stressful ones was the transformations poster. I have always enjoyed projects that involve drawing and transformations have been something simple to learn for me so I worked hard because it was worth the effort of doing a good job in order to get a good grade. The directions of this assignment were to create a poster showing some form of mathematical transformation out of the 3 offered to us Translation, rotation, reflection. I chose this assignment because it allowed us to be creative and still get their work done the way Ms. McDonald wants.
The next one isn’t really an assignment because it involved multiple worksheets. The Area Models and Multiplying Polynomial unit was a very simple thing to learn but it took time to do because of the process to find the equation to find the answer. I worked pretty hard at this assignment because even though it was a little annoying it was fun to get into the flow of doing a problem then figuring out the next one and completing that one. I chose this assignment because it was an easy assignment that didn’t take much work but it was a good exercise to learn a lot from.
Science Reflection
For the most part, science has been a good class with a balance of projects activities and other assignments. I like how the current events have options of which topic and website you can use instead of being assigned something. Our first assignment with explain everything about methane was challenging because we were learning to use the program as we were also trying to make our assignment look decent and function properly. Maybe on more difficult projects we could put the directions on google classroom so that say we are on our ipads we can just check the classroom instead of having to ask around or ask you for the next step.
One of my favorite assignments was the Water Quality assignment at the Petaluma River. In this assignment we walked to the Petaluma River and used kits that our teacher provided to test the quality of the water in the Petaluma River. I worked pretty hard to get the assignment done in the forty minutes we had at the river to get the information we needed to complete the following assignments. The directions for this project were to walk to the river with the class and then get some water and fill out the water quality sheet with the tools given to us. I chose this assignment because I liked how it worked our daily walk into the assignment and how it was kind of a short field trip.
Another great assignment was the Watershed assignment in explain everything. In this assignment we had to find a picture to draw a full watershed on, we found a picture with a body of water and mountains and we would draw on objects like rivers, streams, runoffs, rain, snow, ground water, etc. I worked as hard as I could on this assignment because I like to draw and create images so it was a fun assignment. If I had to grade myself, I would give myself somewhere around a B+ to A-. I chose this assignment to share because I felt that it gave the class freedom to express themselves as well as get their work done.
Music Appreciation
Music has been an okay class this semester. I don’t love the class because the teacher doesnt pay any attention to how the students feel about the class, we do music genres that she knows we arent gonna like then gets upset when we don’t like the assignment based around it. Music appreciation is a lot of reading and talking and while we work sometimes we listen to music but we don’t normally end up doing interesting things in music. I feel like with a better understanding of how high school kids think we could learn a lot more and actually benefit from the class, because i feel like we get information thrown at us and then we get an assignment on it even though we probably don’t understand what we’re doing unless you play an instrument regularly.
Music Assignment
Second Music Assignment
Song For Presentation
Answers
2. Learning about the environment is a responsibility that all people carry.
3. I learn much better in a area where others are also doing the work I and where i am able to get a hold of the teachers easily.
4. My attitude at school has been much better, the people here make the experience more tolerable because of how i fit into this school compared to bigger schools.
5. Possibly in math class it would be helpful to have more hands on projects instead of just worksheets.
6. Review aries weekly to make sure im not falling behind.
7. This school needs a pie table.