OMG!!!

I am so excited about the coming up holidays, I mean we have 4 days off and we are to Bali for vacation!!!

First Fish Bowl On "The Giver"

During this Humanities class, we spent almost all of the class on fish bowl. You might be wondering what a Fish Bowl is in the first place. For a quick summary it is when five chairs are arranged in a circle, in the middle of the room. Based upon the topic of the discussion 5 people who want to share their thoughts would go in and sit in the chairs. After sharing their thoughts they can choose to leave the circle or be tapped by someone who would like to speak, so you you would get up and leave the circle. The trick is that only the people in the circle are allowed to talk, and the rest that are not allowed to even comment or whisper.

I think that overall, our fish bowl could have a bit more participation and talking because a lot of the times the circle was almost empty, once leaving only one person at the end. This was different than the other fish bowls because in the others we had, there weren't really moments where only one person had a thought/opinion to share. I personally went in about once or twice to share my thoughts which is average, I think. I have to say that talking about the stirrings and all the things about it in Jonas's community was easier than the topic on "realising". This was because I already read the book a while back and I know a lot about the realising which makes it hard for me to give others a chance to figure out what realsing is on their own. Although we didn't talk as much as usual, I think we stayed on topic most of the time and we answered the main questions we had at the beginning at the class. I think our next fish bowl on the book "The Giver" will be more sucsessful than this one.

Freedom or Being Ordered???

Today in class my class talked about the "One child policy in China vs the freedom that the "octomom" (mother of 14) had in having as many children she wanted. After our discussion we created headlines in order to describe the discussion we had. I chose to do "Freedom or Being Ordered"? I chose this because I was kind of in the middle for both. My post-it was kept in the middle of the continuem, a bit more to the One Child Policy. I thought that having freedom to choose how many children you want depends on what type of country you live and the level of smartness you have. For example if you live in China then you would probably need the one child policy, since the country would run out of resources if it was over populated, unlike America where there are plenty of recources so the Americans could probably choose to have more than two or three children. Another thing I mentioned was that the level of smartness you have. What I mean is that if you are a person that is smart enough to say "Okay having more children means spendiing more money. Can I afford to have 3 or more children"? This is considering the consequenses for having a lot of children and asking yourself if you would be able to haandle it. Although there should be a balance between having freedom and being ordered having controll will give off better futures for the poeple until the people are able to handle it.

China's One Child Policy

Yesterday my class had a discussion about China's one child policy. At the end of the day we were asked to make headlines of the discussion. My headline was "Is China Right? There is another way."

I chose to use this as my headline because I personally thought that this rule was a cruel way to stop the over population in China and that there could be a better way.

First of all the one child policy is where you can have only one child to stop the over population that had been made. Many people didn't like this rule but if they tried to rebel you would suffer from huge fines such as losing you job. This made everyone follow the rule but there was another problem. since people could only have one child, most of the couples wanted their child to be a boy because people favored the male side better the female. Not only that but if couples did have a boy they were desperate enough to do abortion when the girl was in the mother and is the girl was already born they would expose the child so she would die and have a son. On and on this lead into different problems caused by this rule that no one liked.

I personally think there is another way to stop this problem without such a cruel punishment.

Second Thoughts on Sonnet 7 ... Whole New Way of Thinking

If you have seen my previous blog I was talking about some of my thoughts about the Sonnet 7 after reading it for the first time, and interpreting the poem and turning them into an art piece.This time all three groups went though this was the first time for us, the artists.

Lo! In the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climb'd the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage:
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract, and look another way:
So though, thyself outgoing in thy noon
Unlooked on diest unless though get a son.

After our performance or rather just presenting our piece I realized that we created some thoughts that we never meant to create and that had change my thoughts completely. The next group was the actors who had modified their story/script. After watching the performance I realized we had many things in common such as the fact that both of the group's work showed the path or journey of the sun and how it died relating a normal human's lifespan. After our discussion on this, the class decided that the sun and humans are kind of the same since we are both born and die at the end. As we went along the third and last performance was coming up. After the music group we saw that a human and the sun were also similar because at mid day the sun got stronger and at middle ages a human is the strongest.

Wait for my further thoughts on Sonnet 7.

Having a Mind of a Poet... Shakespeare Sonnet 7

After listening or rather reading the poem "Sonnet 7" written by Shakespeare, my class was split into groups to discuss the poem and understand the meaning.
This is the actual poem:

Lo! In the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climb'd the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage:
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract, and look another way:
So though, thyself outgoing in thy noon
Unlooked on diest unless though get a son.


Personally I didn't understand the poem the first time I read it. I had to look over it at least 3 times to figure out the poem was talking about the Sun since the first line refers to orient which means Sun. When I started thinking about this poem with my group we decided that this poem reflects on the greatness of the sun. After the music performance of group 1, I kind of changed my mind. The rise of the sun represented the birth of the sun and when it set was the death. I thought that the poem represented the the process of the sun rising to the sun setting and the all the things that happen during that time. I also think that this poem tells the reader how important the sun is to the the people.

The Ancient World of Mesopotamia.... what do you think?

Today in class we got to watch a video on Google earth that was about Mesopotamia, turning into what it is now, Iran. After the video (which was 3 min long) we were told to write what we saw, thought, and wondered from the video. The video showed two maps. One was of Mesopotamia (when it existed) the other one showed the developed "Mesopotamia" which is now Iran.
Overall, I think that this was a good activity to do, because it made you think above and beyond to answer the questions. We first recorded all the basic things we saw in the two maps. Some of the basic things I wrote were: I see red lines, I see red and white stars. From the basic observations, we made connections and linked them on to inferences, and thoughts. A thought would be, I think the red lines are borders that divide the countries, I think that the red and white stars indicate the place is a capital or something important. As our class was getting deeper into this activity I started noticing things I never did before, and I came up with good questions that linked to both what I saw and thought. After the class our teacher asked us to create a headline that we thought would probably sum up everything we basically talked about in class. I chose "The Ancient World of Mesopotamia... what do you think?" I chose this title because I thought we mainly discussed about what we thought, and inferences that came from just some obvious details. I also chose this title because the first map (of Mesopotamia) was titled the Ancient World which reltaed to what we discussed about. We also asked some questions in response to others thoughts like: What makes you say that? Where do see this or that?

I personally thought that the class went well, and I learned a lot from this activity.