In the beginning of this school year we started exploring different things in english and history class. We started off with little things that led into bigger ideas. As day by day passed we completed many assignments giving us ideas of many things, which will all come together into this portfolio. All this led to giving me a better understanding of the world revolving around us. Leaving it all to two general understandings, creativity and challenges during this whole school year.

Creativity played a big role in this school year. I learned that creativity allows a person to show many expressions of different perspectives. Towards the end of the year we had a special guest come to our classroom, her name was Leah Stein. She showed us how dancing can express and give a bigger meaning of many different things by watching dances and videos of her own. When we first started this project with Leah Stein we were taken to a building to have an idea on what our project was going to be based on. Afterwards we had to choose a site with our group to represent what her and her dance company do on a daily basis.“When we chose this site we started wondering around to see how we can make the whole space useful.” I found this project very difficult, but I was happy when it was over and done with. 

Another project that we did during the year that had to do with creativity was our podcast. In our podcast we had to interview someone on what his or her personal boundaries were. In my podcast I interviewed my older cousin and when I asked her what a crossing boundary was to her she responded bullying as a major crossing boundary. “One big crossing boundary can be bullying, bullying can be identified as a person who uses strength or power to intimidate those who are weaker.” This assignment showed us how people have their own perspectives on crossing boundaries and how it show others a perspective they might not see crossing boundaries as. 

Challenges showed me that if you put so much effort into it you will have the best feeling of accomplishment. Overcoming challenges makes someone feel accomplished. Throughout the whole year challenges came towards my way and I found many ways to have them accomplished for my goal towards the end of the year. During the beginning of history class we had an assignment on global education. This assignment gave me a broader idea on how lack of education remains a global problem. “I think lack of education remains such a global problem because of economy effects.” In my opinion this meant that due to many things occurring with the economy many children tend to lack education as if it meant nothing to them.

Another project that I created that represented challenges was the Young Playwrights play. It was presented to use by a woman named Kate, she gave this assignment to write a play on an global issues. Kate was a big help throughout this whole project, she always helped out with any feedback needed and gave ideas on improvement. “You must not worry about education. What you need to worry about is finishing that breakfast for your brother and I.” My play was called “The Life of an Indian Girl”, this play basically was a bout a young indian girl named Chandi. Chandi is just like any other indian girl living India who doesn’t have the opportunity of an education. She brags to her father about having an education but he refuses and tells her she must be like any other indian girl and be raised to be a house wife. WHile writing this play it showed me how we take things given to us for granted that other people wish they had the opportunity of. Also showed me how people take challenges to achieve what they’ve always wanted.

​Introduction:

Over the 2011-2012-sophomore year at Science Leadership Academy, I have learned a lot of new things as well as encountered a lot of challenges in both English and my World History class. Coming into this class, I thought that the work was going to be easy with simple spelling test every other Friday or reading random books and having a test on them after the unit was over. However, I got the complete opposite of what I thought this class would be like. Before getting start on the work, I had an expectation of the classes being easy and not a struggle. As the year progressed, I found the work to be more of a challenge for me. The concepts of the work made my mind stretch and had me look at things from a different perspective. On the other hand, a lot of the work wasn’t easy at times. There was a lot that needed to be done and having good time management. Overall, I think this school year in English and World History has definitely helped me a lot with my writing and understanding things with comprehension. This blog will show you two general understandings of what I learned and how much effort it took to get to where I am now.

“Creativity comes from the heart of the person of how they feel.”

I thought of this quote because I do believe that whenever someone creates something, it comes from the heart and what they believe should be created. The piece that they create is theirs and they have ownership to it. One of the projects that we worked on was our poetry wiki. This was a project where we had to pick a poet and study them. Then we had to write poems that were similar to the flow of the poet that we studied. It was interesting because it made me think more and stretch my mind to further explore the art and creativity of poetry. The poems that I wrote came from my own experiences and how I felt at the time. I think that this project was fun and I enjoyed myself throughout the process of this project. In the later part of the year, we studied the world and cultures of Haiti. We read short stories that an author named Edwidge Danticat, who was from Haiti and her family that still lives there. In addition to reading her stories, we had to write about her stories and then write a letter to her explaining how much her stories meant to us and how they were interesting. In my letter I said, “I liked how you talked about your family and what the culture is like in Haiti.” Both of these projects required a lot of creativity and I think both of my projects were very well done.

“Challenges lead to trying new things.”

I think this quote meant a lot to me especially in the 2011-2012 year because there were a lot of challenges that I had to face in my English/World History class. The work wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. To an extent, I think it was good that I had a challenge because it allowed me to stretch my critical thinking more than usual. One of the projects that was really a challenge was the Art and the Open project. That’s when we had to create a dance that symbolized freedom and we had people come in from the Leah Stein Dance Company and they talked to us about the type of dance that we had to do. It was major challenge because the type of dance that we were taught was not the type of dance that I am used to. During this project, we were also put into groups to put in our ideas together to come up with a dance. It was totally out of my element because I wasn’t expecting to do anything like that. At the end of the project, we had to write a reflection on what we liked and didn't like about the project. I said that it was challenging because working with other people to create a dance was hard because not everyone knew how to dance and the location of our presentation was difficult to use because we were on public property and didn't want too mess it up. Another assignment that we had to do was write a letter of advice to one of the characters in a book called Passing. That was a challenge, because I had to use what I knew about the character and give her advice on what I thought she should have done. In order to do that, I had to read the book, as well as, reading it with comprehension. Along with the letter, we had to create a podcast and interview someone outside of school and talk to them about how they view different things and how they would react to certain things. To me, this was a fun and enjoyable project. I had working with my group and interviewing my cousin and here what she had to say and her view on certain things.

 

 

This past school year has opened my eyes and showed me that the solutions to the world wide problems can be the solution to our personal problems. 

“Many people use their voice to express how they feel about certain actions that are happening. Language is one of the greatest ways to express yourself.” Language allows you to share with others how you as a person explain and express your opinion. When one has something to say, sometimes it can save millions. 

In class we had to write a language auto biography that deeply explained solutions that were used for issues in the world. For instance Edwidge Danticat wrote a short story. The story explained how not having a father/guardian that understand and could relate to how you felt is similar to how a government doesn’t listen to their citizens. Understanding someone who is somewhat in charge of you is one of the toughest things to overcome. If they say one way, and you say another, and no one comes to peace. It’s one way or another. 

In the last few of our past english units/projects, we learned as a class how to express ourselves from different views. Such as dance, art, writing, movies, and music. In order to express yourself, you need to have a voice that needs to be heard, to get a point across. As a class we had to find a way to express freedom without using our physical voice, but by using dance as another voice. Or how we use language in our daily lives, in and out of school to have a certain effect on us. For an example speaking english in public and school, and speaking spanish at home, is like living the best of both worlds. You get a mix of both cultures as well.  

Expression was a key struggle this year. Given an assignment and being allowed to approach it from every which way was very challenging. Some of the other classmates approached it as if their a teacher, peer, the public, outsider, instead of writing as a the student. When you have different approaches so much can be discovered and noticed. Even solutions to problems that could be solved world wide. 

Coming together as a whole, sophomore year has taught me to use my voice, to express how we should feel as a person, and not as students at Science Leadership Academy. How we can use our voice without talking to impact our school, community, city, world? 

Examples of work: 


Language Auto Biography

Journal 

Tenth grade was one of the best, yet most difficult years of my life. It had a lot of great moments where I achieved a lot, and other moments where I really struggled. When I look back on this year, especially in Mr. Block's class, I find myself gaining more knowledge each time. I learned so much this year. Not just about wars or how to write a paper correctly, but about myself too. I learned that it really takes hard work to go far, and it takes you as an individual to make something out of that work. If I could describe this year in two broad ideas, it would be "Challenges are always there, waiting for you to overcome them" and "When you're struggling, you become a stronger person."

            The first one I will talk about is  "Challenges are always there, waiting for you to overcome them". The first day of school, I walked into Mr. Blocks english class frightened and not knowing what to expect. He was very friendly, and excited for the year to come. He gave us a poem, and we analyzed it. Then he told us to go home, and write an "English B" poem about ourselves. The assignment was very broad, but the next day we had to present what we had to the class. I was so worried that I did the assignment wrong. But when the presentations were over, I realized that there is no wrong. The assignment was made so you can interpret it however your mind works, and take the assignment and run with it. 

            Another example of this general understanding would be writing my play for the Philly Young Playwrights. We had several months to write a play. Mr. Block also had a playwright Kate come in and do exercises, help us elaborate on our ideas, and help us anyway she could. In the beginning, I had a hard time coming up with an idea for my play. Kate and Mr. Block really worked with me and helped me find something I really related to. I found a topic that combined multiple parts of my life and I created a crazy plot. Kate and I emailed each other constantly revising pieces, and giving constructive criticism on how I can make it even better. I submitted the play proud of the final product, and excited to see what they thought of it. I really don't think my play would be as good quality as it is now if I didn't challenge myself and revise my work.

            The second general understanding of this year would be "When you're struggling, you become a stronger person." I struggled a lot this year, however I don't see it as a bad thing. Struggling is learning in my opinion. Throughout this year we had a poetry unit. I never thought that I was a great poet, or that I was even capable of writing the different poems we wrote. I struggled a bit, and "marked up" my poems a lot, but in the end they were awesome. 

            Another time I struggled was when we were working with Leah Stein and dancing in Art in the Open. I missed most of the workshops because of softball games, so I was confused about the concept from the beginning. Each day when we went out to think of new ideas, I just didn't know what to do. I contributed some ideas but they didn't make much sense. I was too overwhelmed that we had to perform and it took the fun out of the experience. Leah and her dancers then helped us and by the performances, I completely loved them. I was confident, and I had fun. I became a stronger and more outgoing person because of Art in the Open, and I thank Leah Stein, her crew and Mr. Block for that.

            This year in Mr. Blocks class really made me take a step back and enjoy every assignment, project, and work that was given to us. Yes I struggled and there were many challenges, but it made me work to the best of my potential and I thank Mr. Block for his creative work tactics and positive attitude throughout this year. I learned so much from this class and now I can apply what I learned into everyday life. 

Throughout this year I was given many different challenges within my work. Coming into tenth grade I was a little nervous and didn’t know what to expect. One thing that I was really nervous about is if I was going to be able to turn everything in on time and make sure it was A+ worthy. But once I got the hang of things, I realized early on that I was going to need to put a lot of hard work into everything I put my name on, but in the end it would pay off.

Nothing worth having comes easy you need to put in hard work. This is what I told myself every time I was frustrated with work. Every time I was fed up with an assignment I would just remind myself how great it would feel to receive that A on my report card, paper, or project. There were times when I was extremely overwhelmed with work but it was all a learning experience because it made me realize early on that college isn’t going to be easy either. Another thing that is clearer to me now is that creativity will never end and nether will the ways of expressing your self. These are a couple things that I learned from everyday experience. This is not something that can be taught. Every project that we did in this year had different ways of expressing ourselves. We had projects from papers, to drawing things, to making videos, to re-writing the end of books. These are just a few projects. There was also projects were we had so many different choices and if we didn’t like any of those we could make our own.

           

One thing that my class and I did not to long ago was teamed up with Leah Stein and her dance company. At first I wasn’t sure what to expect and thought it was a little weird at first but once I got into it, it was really fun! My group and I faced a couple struggles in the process of making up our dance. For example we got kicked out of our space and had to move into another one that set us back a little bit. There were times when someone in my group was absent or late which kind also set back the process but this gave us motivation to work harder. We incorporated things that were going on in everyday life, and everyone gave us ideas that were helpful. Even though we were nervous that something might go wrong, I just told my group “Always smile don’t worry about the little things!” In the end I have to say our dance was really amazing! It was a lot of fun! (Link for picture of my group at the bottom!)

 

Everything that you do that is new to you will cause you to make mistakes. But that’s what you learn from. I made a lot of them this past year but “I was raised by learning from mistakes.” That was from a poem that we did this year. It was all things that we were raised by. (Link at bottom!) One thing that I loved was no ones were the same. Also with a poem of our choice we had to make a piece of artwork. I made mines about this poem! (Link at bottom!) Another mistake people make a lot is thinking they can trust a lot of people. “You can’t trust everyone that you think" that’s something that I learned from reading Passing by Nella Larsen. Which we also had a project on and some people made drawings, videos, or typed papers.  I made a drawing of the main character to show her two different sides. (Link at the bottom!) For this book I also made a video of a new ending, a ending that was how I think the book should have ended. (Link at the bottom!)

 

 

Passing drawing!

Passing video!

I was raised by poem! 

I was raised by.. picture!

Art in the open picture! 

 

For our 10^th grade year in Mr. Block’s classes, Mr. Block has introduced us to many world issues with the work we were doing. Most of the issues, I didn’t know of. It was like watching World News in my classes. We would research what happened and write about it. In English and History classes, we would read a book and relate the issues from the book to the world. It’s the end of the school year, and now we have to create a final portfolio to reflect on what we had learned throughout the school year.

One of the greatest general understandings I learned in class is Creativity. Creativity is the ability to express your work in many different ways. One of my favorite quotes from class is, “One of the many ways a sculptor of ancient Egypt was described was as “one who keeps things alive.” (My response) People who write about the “mythic element of the story” keep the “art” alive in Haiti. The “art” keeps the moral of the story alive. People, who know about the “mythic element”, write about it as “art”. People will then discover the art, and inspiration will come. (Edwidge Danticat Chapter 1: Create Dangerously) I learned that the quality and understanding of the topic itself would help you create your piece of writing. One of my projects that I did with a partner was the “Passing Final Project”, where we read the book Passing and made an interview between the characters in the story. We made sure that the viewers were getting our message with the people we were using in our video. I wanted to make people see the element of the story of our interview. My creativity was very bland when I first came into Mr. Block’s class. As the year went by and is coming to an end, I can say that I feel my creativity has grown so much with the work I did in class.

Second to Creativity is Understanding and Hard Work itself. With all the work we did in class, there had to be a deep understanding of the topic. Understanding helped me with everything in class. It increased my creativity, because it helped me see things in different point of views. A quote I found from my Burden: Response Poem “They go and try to get rid of that burden/Working under any conditions/But all they can do is relief the burden”. When I wrote this, I tried to look at all the world issues brought up in class in different perspectives. At first, I thought that you could completely get rid of the world issues with that one solution. As I began to understand more about the world issues, I looked at the solutions to be insignificant to get rid of the issues. I found out that the solutions would only relief the problems the world is having. As much as it sounds bad, I see it in a new way. Instead of a solution, it’s actually just a relief to the burden. I feel that they find the biggest relief possible for the world’s issues. To relief the problems, it requires hard work. In my letter assignment I wrote “Self-control makes me work hard in school, working hard in school gains me trust from my parents, trust from my parents leads to my freedom.” I use to think that I only did work to do the things that I wanted. I now realize that that is not true. I learned that I did work to learn and discover new things. I work hard to give myself a good image that I am a hard worker and that I want to learn.

To sum it all up is my general understanding of Experience. In my descriptive essay, I wrote, “When we grow up, we leave our family and work everyday like adults. We don’t get to see much of our family after that. I try to cherish all the time I can spend with my family”. Back when I wrote the descriptive essay, I was thinking of the past summer with my whole family being together. Now it’s the end of the year and I’m thinking about what I learned and how a great experience it was learning in these classes. In May 2012, we had the Leah Stein Dance Company come teach us what “Art in The Open” was. “My first impression of the project wasn’t very good. I was very lost when I first met the Leah Stein Dance Company. I thought it was very weird to do dancing that involved your environment. It was something new that I was introduced too.” (Art In The Open: Final Response) It was a great experience doing Art In The Open. I found it to be very different from the usual dancing, but I need to understand what it was to express what I needed to do which was to dance. I can say this year was a good experience, an experience where I learned a lot that I will not forget.

Creativity, Understanding, Hard Work, and Experience is what I learned most throughout the year. Experiences are what this year created. All these general understandings link up together to create the experience I had learning. 

Helen Kilmartin

One of the first classes I walked into, on September 6, 2011 were Mr. Block’s History and English classes. When everybody walked in the room and got settled down, Mr. Block threw an egg on the floor. We were all astounded on how our new teacher introduced us. He welcomed us with splattered eggshells and egg all over. Over the crazy days that we’ve spent learning in class, I’ve realized two things. One of the things I’ve realized is that working hard pays off. Over the months I have done many projects, and I must say that I’m proud of all of them. I love all of my projects, but the ones I have worked harder on are the ones I like the most. I like my lit lens project that Danielle, Brent, and I worked on together. We made a puppet show about the book “Their eyes are watching God”. That was a great project, and we all worked so hard on it together.

The other thing I realized when in Mr. Block’s class was that going through struggles is the only way you can become successful. I have been through so many struggles over the past few years. My first big struggle was probably coming to high school. At first I was really scared to be in a room with a bunch of strangers, but then I realized that it isn’t so bad to meet new people. I realized that either way I will have to met new people and be socially interactive. So I went for it and now, in my second year of high school, I have so many friends. I went through a week of being scared for nothing! Another example for how I went through struggles to be successful was when we had to write in our journals. I never really liked writing and when I walked into class everyday, for English and history, we had to write a journal entry.

Over the course of a year I have questioned so many things because of these classes. In one of my journals I wrote “Religion = myth”. Before I never would have questioned religion. I wasn’t saying that all religion was a myth, but I had opened my eyes to multiple possibilities. I also questioned other people’s personal beliefs. For instance, another statement I wrote in my journal is "Why do we ask people if they are gay, but we don’t ask people if they are straight?” I always believed in one side of the story, but then I realized that isn’t true. I have always believed that working hard pays off, but something this class has made me have different opinion on were struggles. We go through history classes year through year and learn about struggles, but this year we went in depth on both sides. So another thing I have learned is that going through struggles is the only way you can become successful. I have learned a lot from these classes, but those are two things that I will always remember.

Links to work I have done:

I am really interested in prisoners and phsycological so here is my prison research response. 
https://docs.google.com/a/scienceleadership.org/document/d/1OdeHC99oSsdi1Z9s9uMjH4Q_ZZAFRrG9HtT6aYVu3O8/edit

This is the link to the last project we had. I did my project on crime and jail systems. 
https://docs.google.com/a/scienceleadership.org/document/d/1sAB7ancDz-FwSZe-rCPmh9tUg7ZFU2knh6XOBz4444o/edit

This is an image of the lit lens project that I mentioned earlier. 
file://localhost/Users/helenkilmartin/Desktop/untitled%20folder/IMAG0072.jpg

This is a link to (one of my favorite projects) my poetry portfolio.
http://ironpoetry2012.wikispaces.com/Helen+Kilmartin

This is a link to my descriptive essay, it is the first project I did for Mr. Block.
https://docs.google.com/a/scienceleadership.org/document/d/1uLuF_dcwvCcP73Tw7heMjIVRIEs-fK2F1T68qimFnew/edit?hl=en_US

Below you will see my wordle that was made from my first draft of this!

This year, my English and History teacher, Mr. Block, has brought up many world issues that changed my views on the world. Also, he has taught many subjects which I didn’t know about fully or correctly. It’s the end of the year and our last project is to create a final portfolio that shows at least two general understandings about some of the things he taught us and we found out ourselves also then incorporate quotes from our work to support it. My two general understandings are that social inequality will always accompany humanity, and that there’s always another side to a story.

Social inequality has many subcategories to it other than just race, there’s also wealth, power, and etc. In English, we explored a website that gave me a completely new understanding about race. Your race shows opportunities you have, it gives first impressions about your personality to certain people, and it divides people into their own group. Although, you can’t classify someone’s race by skin color, fingerprints, or blood type because race isn’t biological.  In my history journal talking about race, I followed the quote from Mr. Block which was, “race is a social construction” (English journal #26), and then I figured out what he meant when I read on about race on the website. Race has just begun not so long ago because in ancient times, people weren’t divided into groups of race; there were groups of people’s wealth and class. Racism started when slavery became very popular in the US and all the slaves were all African. Many people would discriminate and stereotype people based on their race. This kind of inequality won’t end because just like I posted in a forum discussion about race in our English class, “There are many racists in the world and they raise their children that way, too.” From the same forum, I created another post from which I took from saying, “I read on and figured out that the only cure for racism is FULL equality. There would have to be sacrifices for some groups to even things out. Then I thought...Not everybody is going to sacrifice things in their hard-earned life for other people." (Race: The power of illusion moodle forum)

Another kind of inequality is the division of three classes of wealth during the French Revolution; the commoners, clergy, and nobility. The commoners were the poorest and had the biggest population, whereas the clergy and nobility were the richest and were very little in population. In history journal #27, I wrote a poem in which I created an analogy that compared the current US’s wealth class and the wealth class of France during the French Revolution. “Clergy and Nobility are to the 1%, as the commoners are to the 99%” (History Journal #27). In this unit, not only have I learned about the French revolution, but also that social inequality still remains as if revolutions never happened. There’s still a huge gap of the amount of rich and poor people. Also, I learned that skin color doesn’t make a difference. You can have white skin, but be African-American just like Clare in the book we read during this unit also called Passing. Clare had a racist husband who never knew that she was black, and loved her until he found out. It’s not the skin color you should judge, but their personality if you actually get to know the person.

My other general understanding is that there’s always another side to a story no matter how good or bad the main character can be. Throughout the year, we took part in 2 mock trials. One trial was about the age of exploration with Cortes, his men, King Charles V, the Aztecs, and the system of empire. Everyone was charged with something, and we were be split up into groups for each person and defend ourselves with the sources we had and found ourselves online. With everyone having a fault and more than one person to put the blame on, it was easier to be proven less guilty. I was in the Cortes group and immediately I knew all the blame was going to be put on my group. So my main goal was to put the blame on others. My job was to create the opening statement, and in the process I really felt like a lawyer defending my client. I wrote it as if Cortes isn’t at fault of anything because he was forced into his decisions, basically sugarcoating everything against him and what his actions were. I got so deep into it that I started believing this other side of the story and no long saw him as the bad person. For example, here’s one of the ways I blamed another person and made Cortes look good; “When Cortes was accused of killing 400 Indians, he only did it under self-defense. The Tlaxcalans are to blame for, too because they decided to help Cortes and also fight him, while Cortes only fought back in self-defense.” (Opening statement from Cortes Trial)

The other mock trial was about sweatshops. Just like the Cortes trial, the multinational corporations, poor country ruling elite, poor country workers, US consumers, and the system of profit were all charged with something against them. Again, I was put into the group that everybody was going to attack, and I took the same position in writing the opening statement. “We didn’t force them to work at our factories, they had options in life on how they could make a living and they chose to work in a factory.” (Opening statement from sweatshop trial) This was one of the ways we defended ourselves in the opening statement to prevent from the other groups blaming us for this.

This whole year has been not only a direct learning experience, where Mr. Block has taught us about all the different issues, but he gave a lot of room for letting us learn on our own. The learning “experience” has definitely let me experience and learn these new things in a more and effective way. For example, as I would research for a project online, I constantly ran across new information that I found really interesting and shared it with the class afterwards. Beside all the weeks and months of non-stop work, it was worth it. I feel more confident about my knowledge, and I'm not afraid to actually speak up with giving the correct history of things. Also, this class molded me into a different person understanding the world issues and acting to be the small change.

​

C r e a t i v i t y helps mold your simple thoughts into an explosion of splattered art that runs from your mouth or your hands. When I first found out that Mr.Block was going to be my History/English teacher I didn’t know what to think. I’ve never really knew him, but I would see him teach classes when I used to walk by the class room as a freshman. He first wanted to get to know us better so the first thing he told us to do was to take down bullet points of a successful descriptive writing in our journals. I knew this was going somewhere, I just didn’t know where. I was determined to impress my new teacher even if my writing wasn’t good, I was going to not try my best, but do my best as well. 

How was I going to do my best? Easy! I was going to focus on work all day everyday! But that did not turn out well. I had friends that I barely saw all summer so it was kind of a hard start but I pulled through. 

My descriptive essay was surprisingly amazing! I didn’t think I could describe something in so much depth so that other people would get an understanding of it. I guess it was the C r e a t i v i t y I put into the whole paper. Though at first it wasn’t that good. I had to get help from my teacher’s assistant, Mr. Zelnick.

He was very nice and he explained everything that I did not understand in so much description, it was almost like he was telling me a story so that I had to pay attention.It would have been impossible for me not to get it after he talked with me. My descriptive  essay was my first starting point of having a creative flow in the way I wrote my papers. Being creative was, I guess in a way, one of the reasons for me to keep going and to aim for more success pieces of writing. Not only in Mr.Blocks class, but in every other one of my classes too.

Even with my play that I created. You at least needed some type of C r e a t i v i t y in order to have a successful Play. In the end, all of the plays from my class were going to be read by the highest people of the young playwrights organization.Therefore it was important to put a lot of your C r e a t i v i t y into not only your plays, but your mind as well. You had to open your mind up to different possibilities. And for me it wasn’t really hard. I already knew how to draw, and at that time I was learning how to play an instrument. My play was called Broken Idiotic Memories, and at the end of turning it in and all I would say,“It had to have been one of the creative things I’ve ever done”.  

Hard work makes one person preserve enough to not only reach for the sky, but touch the stars as well. Though I finally found a place to start at, things were still hard. You had to kind of struggle for “greatness” I would say. It takes hard work to persevere. A perfect example of persevering is when we had to write several different poems different things. It was labeled Poetry Wikispace  and everyone in my classes including my teacher had poems that were on there. Matter of fact it’s still on there now. For me that was probably the hardest thing to work on because I knew I wasn’t good at poems at all. 

I always had to have them rhyme and I knew that wasn’t a good thing to do. Though I did it all the time. I was scared to go out of my comfort zone. I didn’t want to stop, but I knew I had to. So on my 5th poem I just didn’t care anymore and I didn’t rhyme. Even on my 4th poem called All in a day it stated,“Okay, be that way / I learned something cool something cool today / 96, and you late / I cannot fit any more stuff on my plate / This is one boss library jawn / Marker holder jawn / And he just hits it off / So, are we all game characters or something / I’m gonna go home and write a song about you / Cause, you know he don’t care”.

I somehow started to make the founded words in my poem rhyme because I was too scared that my poem wouldn’t be as good as it was without rhyming. Though I put all of my attention into the poem wiki to be sure I could make an efficient poem that still sounded good without the rhyming scheme. It was hard, actually very hard to come up with something non-rhyming. I was even behind on about 2 poems because I was having such a problem with the poems. But I somehow got through it and I received an awesome score on it in the end too.

I was proud of myself that I could put all my hard work into something that I needed improvement on. It was a challenge, but I got it done like an overachiever would. 

Even with AiO (Art in the Open) I had a hard time really enjoying it. I hated it! When I say I hated it, I mean with a capital ‘H’. I disliked trying to make up my own dance. Though I’d challenge anyone in a game of Dance Dance Revolution or so Just Dance too, I just really did not like AiO at first. But because I got to see it more and more in the 2 weeks and because I was working with people that I knew and could sort of chat things over with, I started to get used to the silly movements and such. 

It was pretty cool and fun and I was happy that my group got done in time and that we actually pulled off some solid quality. At first it was difficult to play the stupid weird game but they taught me how to relax. Not only that but that there are a lot of things around that make sound and art in its own special way. The things we later turn out to notice always seem to be the best part that makes us unique.