8-29-2013 humanities Ancient Greece project

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=c4-feed-u&v=-Xv9IA8m2CM

8-27-13 humanities summer reading final

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHfFYLJy1GE

8-27-13 humanities infographic project reflection

While working on the project, I learned many skills that will help me throughout the year. First off, I got a better understanding of the revising and drafts it takes to have very good final draft that you are proud of. If you only get feedback from your teacher, you most likely will not be as good off as if you also got peer feedback. Peer feedback gives you different standpoints from different people. By doing this, it will make you not only look at your work from your standpoint, but from others standpoints as well. From this project, I learned how to take feedback, and turn it into content to help me with future drafts. If I did this project over again, I would have asked more than one person for feedback on my work.

     During this project, I also learned how to analyze information. In the book, there were many vital pieces of information that would help the reader see the importance of the main characters journey. Finding and understanding all of the information would help the reader understand the books purpose and connect to the reader better. The project forced me to look over the whole book again and see if I had a perfect understanding of the story and plot. I was proud of myself after looking trough the book and understanding all of it. If I could do it over though, I would have made notes and annotations to make it easier to remember the book.

     Finally, I learned collaboration. Not only with my partner in the beginning of the project, but others throughout the project as well.  Learning how to take criticism was one of the most useful skills I learned throughout the project. Being able to take people's
Opinions and use them in your work is a very good skill to have. It makes your work more appealing to people with other interests, and uses the ideas of others, in almost a collaboration, and makes your work twice as good. I was proud of how people were very open about what they thought of my work, and in turn, I told them what I thought of there work. The only thing I could've done different was to ask more people what they thought about my work.

conservation post 8-21-13

After the all of the activities, projects, and the field trip to Hpower and the recycling place, my knowledge of conservation, along with the new found importance of it, has taught me to look from both side of the argument. Some want to burn our trash and use it as an alternative to coal and oil, while others, while others want to reuse the recyclable material inside of the trash and compress it so that it can be shipped to places or transported. Even though both techniques are very different, both are trying to help not only people, but also the environment. After visiting both places, whenever i would think about conservation, I would automatically think back to both Hpower and the recycling facility. Both are doing exactly what everyone else should be doing. Even if it is just remembering to recycle, or just to take shorter showers, it would have the exact same effect as both the Hpower and recycling facilities. Both were started by someone just like you and me, but they felt their passion to find new ways of tending to the peoples needs in a cleaner, more efficient way needed to not only be used on themselves, but on the whole state.

Hpower and the recycling facilities both were good ways of using conservation to the maximum level. But, don't let that think you can just slack off and not worry about recycling or littering. Conservation is a group effort. Without everyones contribution, we will never be able to effectively conserve our resources. Just as  Ghandi said, there is only enough for the needy, not the greedy. A definition of this in a nutshell would be that we all have to do our part in not using more than we need, and to not be lazy. If everyone just used or ate what they needed, the world would be much better. However, most of the world is now turning into greedy, unfair people. This is what Ghandi was trying to warn us about. Man was never meant to be greedy. We brought the greed upon ourselves.        

activity questions

One of the main things I learned from sorting through all of the trash that we found was how wasteful many people were. There were many uneaten sandwiches, unopened snacks, and wasted food that could have been eaten. This plays a big role in the sustainability focus of this year. Being wasteful is about as far away as you can get from being conservative and being sustainable. When you think about it, most Americans are very lazy, and when your lazy, you always try to take the easy way out. Even if the easy was out is not always the right way, many people do not take into account the significance of their actions. For example, littering. When people act lazy and throw their trash onto the ground, they don't take into account what happens to the trash after it is thrown onto the ground. They assume that someone will pick up all of their trash, but they are wrong. Most times the trash end up going down drains and into the sewers, which can't be good. Another thing I learned is that There is actually a lot of things that can be recycled that I thought would never be able to. If you look on the bottom of any container, you can check if it is recyclable or not.

This activity got me thinking. Would reusing the left over food as pig food be a good idea? or would composting it in one of our composts be a better idea? both help the society in a number of ways. By feeding the pigs the leftovers, it will diminish the need for farmers to buy food for them, and also put our leftover food to a good use. Composting the leftover food is also a good idea. By doing this, we can turn the food that we used into nutrition for plants, and complete a full cycle of sustainability. It will directly affect the MPI community and also get the students and teachers one step closer to making our classes live and breath sustainability.

Peer feedback

Peer feedback

Peer feedback gives the writer a critique from a different stand point. When you are given feedback from a classmate, it tells you what other people your age think about or about others writing styles. When given peer feedback, the peer will almost always tell you exactly how they feel when they are asked to critique your work. Personally, when I give feedback, I always read or look through the whole project or paper to see if there are any mistakes, and also to then give my opinion not only on the work, but also the idea that the writer had. By doing this, this gives me and the writer new found ideas for how to make not only the writers, but also my work better. Peer feedback sometimes helps both people, The writers and the peer, find new and exciting ways to understand and make each others projects or papers even better than before.
 
For me, one piece of feedback stood out to me a lot. The comment was not about the actual content, but about the actual idea. One of my peers told me that instead of only using pictures I drew, I could actually also focus on the writing content of it too. By making the writing more descriptive, it would help readers understand what is happening in each picture better. The next time I give peer feedback, I will make sure to not only look at the picture or idea just from my point of view. If I can look at the writing or picture from not only my point of view, but the writers, it will make me better understand what the writer was trying to say or what point they were trying to get across. Another thing that I will do different the next time I give back peer feedback is to not only look at the content, but also look at the general idea. If the idea for the project or paper gets all of the readers points across, it is a success. But, if the idea is very jumbled and hard to understand, no matter how good the content is, everything will seem hard to understand and very vague.

Sustainability

     After I got home from school, it felt almost like fate. The first thing my parents told me was that there were people coming over to our house this evening to talk about the costs, pros, and cons about installing solar panels on our roof. This then got me thinking about how long it would take to gain back all the the money spent on the solar panels through the money saved from our electricity bill. I then talked and contemplated other factors and interests about solar panels with my parents. We then came up with a various amount of questions that we would ask the salesman, ranging from cost to how efficient it was. I didn't really discuss any other topics of interest with my parents, because the talk of solar panels took up most of our day.

Conservation

      "Earth provides enough to satisfy every mans needs, but not every mans greeds."(Mahatma Gandhi). Conservation: using resources in an orderly, conservative way, so that future generations will be able to thrive just as well as the last. Personally, I am very aware of conserving what resources I use, reuse what I can, and recycle renewable materials. I grew up in a household where we never wasted or neglected living a conservative life. This taught me to always use less, because you can always use more after that, but if you take more than what is needed, the excess is then wasted.

     If I had to explain conservation in a nutshell, it would be reduce, reuse and recycle. Reducing the amount used to exactly what you need will significantly help keep you from wasting resources. Reuse what you can. If you can use anything more than once, whether it be a bottle, a bag, or even a plastic fork, reusing anything is a great was to conserve what little resources we have left in world. Throwing away a plastic bottle or a can is just as bad as just throwing it onto the ground. Eventually, everything that is thrown in the trash ends up in landfills, and all that does is makes less space for everything else. Recycling is a great way to revive something after it is done of its use. It's like an endless supply of materials, or as close as we can get to that. If every person were to just recycle as much as they could, the world would be in a much better shape then it is in now.

     In conclusion, conservation can be interpreted simply to reduce, reuse, and recycle. If everyone was to do their part in keeping this world as  beautiful as possible, the outcome of this world would greatly differ from the path that it is heading down now. Many people don't understand that the world is actually very fragile. If you think that you as an individual will not make a difference in the world, you need a reality check. I hope that people will heed to the early warnings that the world is showing and use that as fuel to step up their act. For me, my drive is I never want to see this beautiful island change. And I hope others feel the same way and will not give in to greed.