Humanities 9
Project Reflection:
Operation Iraqi Freedom:
Truth Of War
Exemplary Essay:
​Creative Art Piece:
​All of the objects in the jar were either off my dads army uniform or stuff directly from Iraq. Inside of the jar there is a name plate, captains badge, unit battalion pin, dogs tags, a mini tabasco sauce bottle from an MRE that's full of sand from Iraq, a stamp off a letter my mom wrote my dad, and some Iraqi money.
​For the most part this project went well for me. We had a lot for freedom in what our end projects were with the creative piece. I personally like having so much time to do our own thing. This is because I'm quiet independent and I don't like a lot of structure all of the time. All of us had to write an explanatory essay that was on the war related event of our choice. I chose the 2003 Iraq Invasion, or commonly known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. I ran into a couple issues when working on my essay. Writing my stuffed outline wasn't a problem, everything I wanted to say came easily. Although after that I started to experiences a bit of writers block. Once I stopped stressing about it, and just sat down at home with a cup of tea and my headphones, I wrote the first draft. By this point I still had plenty of time to rewrite and edit different parts of my essay. Because of this the project wasn't very stressful or overwhelming. I was able to rewrite and edit unlit I was completely happy with the final essay. My creative piece came along while I was still working on my essay. To the right you can see a glass jar with sand in it. I filled it with sand to symbolize how deserty Iraq is. I then placed several objects inside of the jar that were supposed to show pieces of a soldier in Iraq. Over all I really liked the project and how it was conducted. I found it fun to learn about something close to me and not something that I'd probably forget about in a couple years.
Personal Growth and Development:
I developed throughout the project because of the refinement that I did particularly on my essay and some on my mask. When I first started my essay I was not happy with it at all because it didn’t sound right and there was too much information to know what was going on. I had to rewrite and add and restructure my essay until I was happy with it. On my mask, the struggle that happened there was that I was going to transfer newspaper onto my mask to show an aspect of the media. This didn’t work though because it just stuck to the mod podge and wouldn’t transfer the words onto the mask. I still wanted to have words on my mask so I just typed them onto a google doc and then printed and cut them out so that I could mod podge them on after. I wanted to have something extra on there so I added the wax rainbow to symbolized the range of people that there are. Everyone is different. I wanted to show that and that everyone is going to cross paths with someone else so that’s what the wax streams are supposed to show.
The Mask Project
Throughout the last couple months of school we have been learning about sociology. Before we actually wrote our essays and created our masks we had to learn about different aspects of socialization such as, The looking glass self, then we started the reading, The Cycle of Socialization, we also read a book titled “American Born Chinese” we did a Socratic seminar on the book, after this we started on watching varus short videos of socialization in the media as well as watching a documentary called “Miss Representation,” we also watched Mean
Girls and we had a write up about the movie. We talked about implicit bias and finally, we read The Cycle of Liberation. We watched videos on race and ethnicity In the looking glass self-project witch we a mini project we created memes of how we see ourselves and how everyone else sees us. and We read The Cycle of Socialization and The Cycle of Liberation both by Bobbie Harro.
Project Description:
Project Effort:
In this project, it proved rather hard to write about something that
​was really meaningful to me because of this is I wrote my essay on the effects of video games which is underneath this reflection, titled “From Pong To Battlefield V:
The Effects of Video Games in Our Society.” This essay was something that I was pretty proud of I know that I could have done a better job on it but overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. In project-based learning, we are supposed to push ourselves and get out of our comfort zones. I don’t think that I did that as much as I could have. This is because I know that if I did my essay more on a personal reflection to The Cycle of Socialization that I would have done a lot deeper into how I have been socialized and how those experiences have affected me. I’m a pretty introverted person so asking for help is something that I struggle with. Because of this, I didn’t ask Stephen as many questions as I should have to fully understand the project. I understand the project but I didn’t know exactly what direction I wanted to go in, because of this I went in the direction that leads me to writing about video games. This was something that I was still very interested so overall I enjoyed the project. I did not advocate for my classmate as much as I have in other classes I think that this is because the project was something that everyone has to advocate for themselves even though I could have in some ways I don’t know how I would have. I didn't give up when the project was getting hard because I’m not someone that likes to give up on something easily. I work through it even when I don’t want too. During the whole project, my perspective changed on what it means to be socialized. People are socialized by everything around them when I learned this I was astonished because I have never thought of that before. Overall I’m pretty happy with how my mask and essay turned out even though I know that it could have been even more refined that is was.
Project Reflection:
From Pong To Battlefield V: The Effects of Video Games in Our Society:
Exemplary Essay: