9th Grade: 2022-2023

Throughout 10 weeks I created a garden from scratch I went through processes of trial and error and learned the importance of optimism and persistence. This project was very open-ended and gave us students an opportunity to build, create, or research anything we wanted. Though serving as a project that was supposed to be something we were excited about, many of us including me learned a valuable lesson on procrastination and lack of motivation.

 I'm very appreciative of Mrs. DePriest being able to assign this project, I learned lessons that we are taught over and over with a new first-hand perspective. I had previously never been a procratinationer until this project. Each week we were required to have updates on our progress and in the beggining I would wait until Thursday night and sometimes even Friday morning to complete these progress checks. Seeing how being rushed and not put together made me feel I learned that being ahead is very important and that even if doing the work in the moment seems frustrating that it pays off in the end.  

During Freshman Year world history with Mr. MarLett I learned a lot about how the government and the UN has evolved and came to be overtime. It showed me that things have not always ran as smoothly as they do to this day. Being in JAGS a lot of the projects and perspectives we look at in the classes are through the United Nations and their sustainable development goals. Learning this my freshman year I can forsee this being a good way to set me up for future projects. 

The way this game was structured was in the way that groups of people were each different countries and you had to act as your country through the duration of the game. I was a smaller country during this game and seeing how the League of Nations would dismiss a lot of the issues that would happen to smaller countries helped me recognize how overshadowed a lot of countries in our world were and still are to this day by larger more powerful countries. 

The Hispanic Heritage Project in my Spanish class this year helped me to communicate ideas to those of different languages. We learned basic surface level spanish but it was definetely enough to be able to communicate! This project I chose to highlight from the year was one that helped our class to explore the Hispanic culture and how they celebrate their different cultures. I did some research about famous artists and even recreated some artwork. I also cooked empanadas which were harder to do than I thought! 

This projected helped me to appreciate other cultures and communicate ideas about their traditions. This helped to show me the similarities and differences I share with the Hispanic cultures. All helping me to become globally competent and be able to engage with those talking about cultural traditions!