Sophomore year was my 1st year on Mock Trial. In this club I was able to communicate ideas properly and work with my peers to win my trial. As a witness in Mock Trial it's very important that I understood my character and was focused and specific about what I said on stand and how I said it. Communication is a key part of the competition and points will be docked if someone messes up and says something they aren't supposed to. 

Mock Trial ties in with JAGS as the entire trial you are communicating with the judge so that they will see your side. The better you're able to do so the more points you're awarded and you'll win for your team. Mock Trial is especially important to me since it showed me that I could speak confidently in public and do it well. 

One of lessons that's stuck most with me from Spanish 4 is when we learned about Guernica. At the end of the year my class had a unit over the Spanish Civil War and one of the final things we did was study the symbolism used in the painting. 

This painting connects to the JAGS pillar, Recognizng Perspectives as my class learned that the bombing had been a practice for World War II and that it was at a civilian town. It means so much to me to be able to understand every piece of this painting and see the mother holding her dead son to show how innocent lives were taken and the tiny flower showing that even when things are really bad there is still hope.

At the end of Sophomore year I wokred in a small group to create a documentary. My group's documentary explored beauty standards in the United States, Ecuador, and Kenya. I wanted to show how beauty standards are heavily influenced by western culture, highly subjective, and can be so harmful. For this project I researched beauty standards in Ecuador and Kenya and learned about beauty standards regarding hair, skin color, and other beauty standards the countries have. 

This project was really helpful for me because I was able to talk and meet with women from different cultures and learn face to face about this issue and how it affects people in their birth countries and here. I enjoyed invesitgating this part of the world and comparing it to my own while seeing what needs to be bettered.

Right at the beginning of APUSH every student had to pick a book to read and then write an essay about. The book I choose was The Whiskey Rebels. The story is told in dual perspective with different timelines that meet only at the end. In order to truly understand this book the reader had to recognize the perspectives of both Ethan Sanders who must fight to save the girl he loves and Joan Maycott who lives in a time where she has little rights and is constantly underestimated. 

This book was an enjoyable way to immerse myself in the United States history and understand it in a way that just wouldn't have been possible without reading it. Learning about the struggles the characters went through even though the specifc characters were fictional the book properly addressed life in this time period.