HUMANITIES/ELA
Mr. Porter
Mr. Porter
In Humanities, we have discussed the inequalities and flaws in our government system and how they have impacted our society in the past and how they are currently impacting it. We created TED Talks on a specific subject that was an injustice of the past, I did the court case Brown v. Board of Education. We also read three books, Just Mercy, which was a true story about Walter McMillian, a man of color that was wrongly accused, put on death row, and executed for something he never did, The Marrow Thieves, which was a fictional dystopian story about Native Americans being hunted for their bone marrow, which has the capability to make people who have lost the ability to dream, dream again, and The River Between Us, another fictional story set at the beginning of the Civil War, from the perspective of a young lady whose brother goes off to war and pulls her family apart. Over the reading of these books, we have made newspapers, posters, presentations, and speeches about how what we have learned relates to our lives now. We also had an exhibition about Westward Expansion, and how specific people or events led to or spurred it on.
Just Mercy is a non-fiction book of hope set from the perspective of Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer that opened up his own non-profit business to help people on death row, and who have been wrongly convicted, such as Walter McMillian, a colored man who lived in Monroeville, Alabama.
The Marrow Thieves is a fictional story set from the perspective of Frenchie, an Indigenous fifteen year-old boy who loses his father, brother, and mother to "recruiters", who are trying to steal their bone marrow so that they can dream again. While on the run, French meets another group of Indigenous people.
The River Between Us is a fictional story set mostly from the perspective of Tilly Pruitt, a teenage girl living in Grand Tower, Illinois at the beginning of the Civil War. She has a twin brother named Noah, and a little sister names Cass. They live peacefully with their mother on the Devil's Backbone until Delphine and Calinda show up.
For this project, we worked in groups to create a fake newspaper that was supposedly written right at the beginning of the Civil War. I enjoyed creating this project, but it was very stressful due to the fact that we had only about three days to finish it before we left for intersession. I wrote a feature story on the court case Brown v. Board of Education, and the editorial, which was also mainly focused on the court case Brown v. Board of Education.
For this project, we worked in groups to create these. We had the option to create them on paper or digitally, and we originally wanted to create it on paper, but ended up running low on time and did it digitally. I think that it is very informative, but kind of weirdly formatted.
For our exhibition, we created TED Talks on a specific topic, that we could choose on our own. I chose a revolutionary court case, Brown V. Board of Education, which faced the racial prejudices that plagued our country and our world in 1954. I created a Prezi Presentation to express my work and my opinions, and I think I did a fairly good job doing so. I got a meets+ on this exhibition, and I feel like I should have gotten an exceeds, but I am still satisfied with it. Next exhibition I would really like to have more time to practice my script, because I felt wildly unprepared, although I still feel like I did very well for the time I had.