Hello teachers and parents, today I will be speaking to you about all the learning I have done so far this year and how I am going to make improvements from this point forward. I will specifically be talking about my ‘Monster In the Mirror’ project, ‘We didn’t start the Fire’ project and my ‘Taming of the Shrew’ project. So without further ado, let’s jump right in. 

Taming of the Shrew

Let’s start off by talking about each project in chronological order. The first project we did this year was the ‘Taming of the Shrew’. This project has many different aspects to it. I wrote an essay explaining why ‘Taming of the Shrew’ is a classic piece of literature. This was very good for me because in prior years my writing had not been my strong suit. I felt that this essay was great example of the growth I have shown as a writer. The way I answered the question related to the essay was another reason why I was proud of piece of literature. The feedback that I got from my teachers was positive which kept me in the right mindset to write. The last part of the unit was the big animated short that we were assigned to create. This short story showed our understanding of the time period that we were assigned as well as show the necessary parts of the play ‘Taming of the Shrew’ that we felt need to be included to explain the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional settings. My group that consisted of Adam Robbie and myself were assigned Act 4. Act 4 had a number of different scenes in it. We worked as a team to create a good first product that we thought would suffice. We handed in our first draft to receive critique and feedback from our peers and teachers. We took these pieces of critique and feedback with open arms and made changes to our animated short. Both the essay and the animated short were great examples of how I took critique and feedback from my peers and teachers and evaluated and changed my product. In the future I would like to understand more about the critique and feedback that my peers and teachers give me to create the best product possible.

Monster in the Mirror (field school, movies, book)

The movie-making process tested our work as a cohort and tested our ability to work in big groups. This movie had to answer our driving question for the unit, ‘Why is horror such an effective way to reflect and comment on our society’?  We picked an issue that is relevant in today’s society which is mental health and violence that relates to mental illnesses. Our teachers were the executive producers and they assigned roles for the movie. We had two producers who were second-in-command to the teachers but still in charge of the rest of the class. Next in line was the director and his job was to look more at the artistic side of movie. I started off being the second line producer as well as the camera operator. We learned a lot about planning during the pre-production stage and the different roles need to make a movie.

Heading into the production stage, there were many challenges like trying to find filming times outside of school hours when people would be available since everyone is so busy with different activities. There was a lot of work done but partway through the production, the teachers decided that they wanted to go in a different direction with the leadership. I was nominated and elected to replace the two producers. It was quite a difficult to jump into the top leadership role of a project that had already been half started but I was happy to try it. First I reviewed the team’s feedback on their roles to understand their perspective up to that point. I had to think on my feet with questions and creative ideas coming forward from many people. I considered everyone’s input but I also think the project benefited from my more centralized decision-making to move things along. I had to clean up some situations but at the same time I could use some of the good ideas that the previous producers had. The unfortunate part of the move was the product wasn’t as long as originally planned. Due to timelines and other unforeseen setbacks we were unable to finish all the filming that we had planned in the allotted time. These setbacks included camera malfunctions, discontinuity in props while shooting and the hardest part of this process was scheduling.  Combine all these problems as well as many more and you can start to understand the struggles we went through while trying to make this movie. Sometimes you can’t win them all, this time we had to compromise and come to a decision to make a trailer with the footage that we had already shot. On the positive side, moving people around gave us a chance to try out different roles and gain new experience.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

The last project that I’m going to talk about today is the most recent one.  Since Christmas break we have been working on a unit called “We didn’t start the Fire.” by Billy Joel. This song is over 30 years old and talks about significant events and people in history. This project is based all around this song. We were given a list of all the references to people and events that were mentioned in the song. There are over 100 different positive and negative lyrics in the song. As I scrolled through I made a list of five that stuck out to me as significant. The list consisted of the Watergate scandal, the assassination of JFK, Einstein, the moon landing and Little Rock. I ended up choosing the assassination of JFK to be the point of my project. The next part of the project was to research your topic. This research document consisted of 5 to 10 pages of a MLA format with at least five different sources. After finishing and submitting your research we were tasked to think of a media that we could use to explain our facts. I chose to create an informational video that explains why the assassination of JFK was important. The final piece of the project was to present our findings to our class. To help myself and others understand the significance of the JFK assassination I took the approach of asking the difficult questions. I asked myself what would today’s world be like if Lee Harvey Oswald missed that day? Would Nixon have ever been president? Would Watergate ever have made the American people lose faith in their country? Would MLK ever have been assassinated? Would JFK have been able to follow through with the 1964 civil rights act like LBJ did? All these questions really showed me how significant that presidential assassination was. In the past, presenting hadn’t been my strong suit because I would start to rush through my presentation and talk very fast. This presentation was different, I had practiced many times before the presentation date and when it came time to do my presentation I was ready.

 

For the upcoming school year I would like to focus on two major points. I would like to work on my writing and my public speaking skills. I will continue to practice my public speeches un private before I present to become more comfortable with the material and focus on the public speaking skills. For my writing goal i will continue ask for feedback and revise my writing with the critic that I get back. I would also like to consistently ask myself more questions while doing projects to better understand the topic at hand.