About My Website

This is my best work from my freshman year. The work that I have selected demonstrates my learning and growth in the six 21st Century Competencies. Each 21C Competency page includes my best work in that area, and my self-rating with my reflection that defends the rating I have selected.

About Me

In my A1 class period, I have physical education. In this school year, our teacher, Mr. Leffort, has taught us how to play a variety of sports. Throughout the entire school year, he has taught us how to play Flag Football, Soccer, Volleyball, Badminton, Ultimate Frisbee, Floor Hockey, and Basketball. We also towards the middle of the year had a health course. During this time the Yale Health Educators came and informed us on how to be sexually healthy, what makes a healthy relationship, general information about drugs and alcohol and sexuality.

In my A2 class period, I have modern world history with Mr. Comando. In his class this year, we've learned so much about past history. We've been taught different revolutions, imperialism, the eight stages of genocide and how a genocide starts which was really interesting. We learned about urbanization, roles of the church centuries ago, we've even learned about how the ages of imperialism happened. Besides work we do every time we have this class, every other week we are required to write a paper about a "current event" this can be globally or right here in the United States. The first paragraph would be a summary, the second an analysis of what we read or watched, and then the last paragraph would be any questions we had about the article or the text, and the final component would be to find a couple of vocabulary words from our article or video that we didn't know and find out each definition.

In my A3 period, dramatic arts or "A.L.I.V.E class", with Ms. Kelly, Ms. Chelsea, and Ms. Antonietta we've learned about real world problems and also, how to construct a monologue from one of our memories, then memorize it word for word, and give a performance on it that doesn't look or sound forced. Sometimes though, we have what's called "A.L.I.V.E" class. In this class we discuss our feelings and we play games that relate to the topic of the day, in the past topics have been trust, loyalty, and stereotypes, gender and sexuality, and religion. Recently we've been learning about social justice issues and as a part of our final we had to construct a play a group of people about the issue our our choice, memorize our lies and perform our play.

In my A4 period, I have geometry with Mr. Donohue. This entire school year with him, there was never a day where you didn't learn anything new. In the past we have learned different kinds of angle relationships (complementary, supplementary, corresponding, alternate exterior/interior, and same side interior), as well as rigid transformations (rotations, translations, and reflections and dilations). He has also taught us how to find distance as well as midpoint between coordinate points using formulas. Recently, we have learned the pythagorean theorem, basic trigonometry, and how to find the interior sum of an angle as well as the exterior sum.

In my B1 period, I have french with Ms. Nouchkioui, This year we've learned so much about the language. In the past, we've had to create a french menu and we learned how to order from them like we're at a restaurant. She has taught us how to talk about time, how to say the numbers in french 1-100 and beyond, how to talk about weather, our high school class schedules and how to have a basic conversation in french. We've also learned about colors, how to speak about different types of clothing, how to speak about our families, our houses, our furniture, pets, even how to invite friends out with you.

In my B2 period, I have writing workshop with Ms. La Pan. In her class we've have learned a lot on the different kinds of writing. We learned about how to write a good narrative, the importance of multiple drafts, how to create a good a cover letter and resume, how to create a goof children's book, how to use programs such as microsoft word and excel, and powerpoint. Some of our other works include how to spell words correctly, how to use correct grammar, the parts of a argumentative essay, the importance of setting time aside to read time to time, which we do in this class every time we have it for 25 minutes.

In my B3 period, I have English 1 with Mr. Staysniak. In this class we have just finished our final unit on answering the question "is it right to fight," which was our final argument essay of the year. In the past some of our other projects include our gender studies unit. In this unit, we came up with stereotypes that are placed on the male and female gender and looked for those stereotypes while analyzing children's books, video games, and even Disney princess movies. We then had to create a "ideal character" one who didn't conform to stereotypes but went against them like for example how it is common for girls to be over-sexualized or portrayed as weak. In our other unit about the affects of technology we read articles, pages from books, short stories, watched phone commercials and TED talks to gather all information to write another argument essay answering the question of what role should technology play (an important role vs. a limited role). In the past we've also done an auto-ethnography unit. This was tied into our previous poetry unit but, the goal was to write, make a video, or show pictures of something that represents you, or something important to you that makes you who you are today. This was a really interesting unit because you got to see a personal piece of each and ever one of your classmates and it was extremely emotional. Besides the course work, Mr. Staysniak has taught us the importance of reading as well, and how to write a argumentative essay. He also helps up widen our vocabulary with words of the months sheets we are required to do every month.

In my B4 period, I have phy-chem, or as our teacher Mr. Willems likes to call it "cosmos." In this class we've learned a lot, from the parts of the brain, to why our brain does certain things, to how burning fossil fuels and our large use of it is changing climate drastically. We've also learned about how the object that most teens hold dearly to their heart, our phones, are actually made with these really rare metals which we have to go to different continents to find and how those metals have been harming those who mine them and our planet. and the different parts of a battery. We've also learned about the electromagnetic spectrum and the way these machines use different kinds of waves to operate. The past couple weeks we have been reviewing for our final specifically, wave properties, energy transfers (radiation, conduction, and convection), and the parts of a battery/how a battery works.

This year I've learned that I am a very self-motivated and driven person academic wise. I've noticed that when it comes to my school work I hold myself to this high personal standard, which is to try and not earn less than a competent - exemplary on any of my graded work. If I do fall below this, I do anything I can to try and make the grade better. So I've also learned that I have to stay true to my goals. Outside of academics though when it comes to making friends and socializing, I noticed that those kinds of things come really easy to me. I'm a friendly person and generally bubbly.

This year so far has actually been a landslide, I've met new people, got comfortable with my new environment and school setting, and haven't being in any drama which is something hard to do in high school. With my school work, that hasn't been too tough either, some of the work just becomes tiring because of my busy schedule but other than that, things have been great. I look forward to coming to each class each day and getting my work done doesn't feel like a drag. With the year being over I'm excited to get into my sophomore year with a whole new schedule and new opportunities.

Honestly, I don't have any lows that I have experienced this school year, thats how smooth this year has been going, which I'm really happy about. Some highs that I've experienced was meeting the people I have, because I've made good friends, and just the school itself. In my opinion this school gives you way more opportunities than others.

My transition into high school has been pretty normal, there was nothing extremely awkward about it. Of course my first day was extremely weird because I was a freshman coming into a school where I knew no one at all but, literally just after my first day, I got paired up with two girls in my english class and ever since then we've been friends. After that, I started meeting other people and started figuring out who the other freshman were. So, practically after the first week I already felt welcomed and it just got better from there. When you're friendly, and you know how to stay out of dramatic situations, high school seems easy.