The Rights That We Deserve

In the first unit of the Argument class, we talked about what an argument is and what it is made up of. We focused on the elements of an argument and how we can craft one. We took a look at the Declaration of Independence and fully analyzed the argument that it makes. For this action project we were asked to create a class that could be taught at school. I chose to create a class about human rights called The Rights That We Deserve. I want students to learn about what rights they have and when it is important for them to know and use them. Something I struggled with was a creative title. I am proud of my course and I think that it could have real potential. I hope you enjoy my declaration.
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MF. Human Rights, 2016

All human beings need to understand their rights. There are so many instances where people in power violate and ignore the rights of people “below” them like in the case of a Lane Tech student who was arrested for a crime he did not commit just because his skin color matched that of the real crook. When he was arrested, he was not read his Miranda rights and when he tried to protest, they didn’t listen. Citizens of this nation need to learn what rights they have. Human rights are an incredibly huge part of being human. They make or break us and can save our lives in some cases. They can keep us out of prison and can keep us safe.

The purpose of school is to educate people on things that they need to know in order to succeed. School is a place of people teaching other people about different things they need to know. It is a place for people of all different ages to come together to learn and teach one another about the basics of life. Learning is extremely important to our mind and soul because it helps us better ourselves by showing us things we didn't know and helping us achieve our goals. Whether it’s learning a math equation or just how to speak better, everything makes a difference. Our unalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In The Rights That We Deserve, we will be diving deep into the rights we as Americans have as well as looking into current events that use these rights and the rights of different countries. All around the world there are places that have no rights or rights that are not being recognized by the government like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Syria and many others. This class will show us that we need to take into consideration our rights that we have and how we as Americans are lucky that we have any rights at all. Our rights at GCE are to be able to explore and learn things that will lead us in the direction we want to go in with our lives. GCE helps us become better people. Talking about current events is a way to better your understanding of what's going on and there have been plenty of cases having to do with people in power not recognizing other people’s rights. For example with all of the police shootings that have been going on, the police just took the lives of innocent people without hesitation and without warning. This is something that a lot of people have had serious discussions about that are worth paying attention to. If people don’t know their rights, this will continue to happen.

My guiding question for this course is when is it important to know our human rights? We as humans need to understand the rights we have and when it is important to know/use them like if we are in a situation with police they have to read you your Miranda rights or else you can not be tried, this can make or break a case. I want this to be a summer emersion class for outgoing juniors- incoming seniors so that they will be able to understand their human rights according to the constitution and the declaration and be able to explain them so they can prepare for their senior year humanities classes. If someone is passionate about something, they should be able to speak freely about whatever it is without worry of restriction. For this class we can partner with a lot of different organizations that specialize in human rights such as International Federation for Human Rights, International Foundation for Human Rights and Tolerance International, Freedom of Expression Exchange, Heartland Alliance, The Human Rights Watch etc. These organizations can explain to students about the fight for rights in America and in different places around the globe. The Human Rights Watch (based in Chicago) hosts annual trips to different countries that are struggling to help them get back on their feet. This would be a great opportunity for the students to experience some things first hand.

For the first unit of the course of The Rights That We Deserve, I want to focus on America's rights, for the second I want to focus on the rights that other countries around the world may or may not have, specifically The Congo, Syria, and Palestine. The third unit would be a comparison of the rights we as Americans have and how they differ from other countries. One of the action projects could be protesting something or declaring something they are passionate about while another could be envisioning what it would be like to try to protest something in another country that may not have the same rights as us. . I want the students to do some research on current events having to do with human rights and find a way to let a big group of people know about it. I want the students to have a chance to get up and talk to a group of people about something they are passionate about. There are many documentaries about human rights such as Call Me Kuchu, The Farm: Angola, USA, The Thin Blue Line, and many more; these are all available on netflix.



I declare that we should have a class on human rights. We need to understand the things that we have a right to and how we can access those. We need to realize that even though our rights are not noticed all of the time, there are some countries whose rights are never noticed and I really want to shed light on that so students can understand the rights that we have and how we are fortunate to have them at all.

Pinhole Camera

For the first action project in the Light, Sound, and Time class, we were asked to create a pinhole camera and take an image with it. The first unit of this class was called Light. We focused on different light waves and how they work. We went into depth about what kind of light waves there are in the universe and the math that goes along with it. We talked about the electromagnetic spectrum and the different waves you can measure using it and the way colors work. When it came to colors, we focused on the way colors are absorbed and reflected. I learned a lot about waves and the different parts of them and how to measure those. We covered a lot of math and it was all very helpful and useful and I think that I understood it all. This action project is about the way light can be used to take an image and the way that a dark room can create an image itself. The camera itself is just a cardboard canister and it can take an actual picture. I am very proud of the way my camera turned out.
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Pinhole With Cover. MF, 2016.

Pinhole Without Cover. MF, 2015

My pinhole camera captures light through a small hole in the aluminum. Depending on how big the hole is, the more light will go into the cardboard canister. The light will reflect the image onto the photo paper inside and the paper will show the photo once we develop it. While it does capture light, it is not an example of refraction. This is because as the rays pass through the lens, they don’t meet and come into contact with another medium so they are not refracting.


The camera I created was based on an experiment where the camera was as big as a wall and the room was completely black. The inside is black so you can control how much lights goes into the cardboard canister.The color black absorbs light while the color white reflects it. This is important because the photo paper is very light sensitive so in order for the image to come out, there needs to be no light getting in until you open the shutter. This camera ties into a lot of things we learned in this unit. It demonstrates the wave vs particle idea because it has light waves that pass through the small hole in the tin while it also leave particles behind in order for the image to show up. The light coming into the hole makes an image which uses energy. The electromagnetic spectrum is used because there are a lot of different light waves that come in through the hole.


The distance from my lens to my photo paper is 3.5 inches, the height of my pinhole is 4 inches. I decided to photograph my water bottle and the height of that is 10 inches, and the minimum distance away my camera can be in order to take a good picture is 5.25 inches.

Similar Triangles

My picture did not end up coming out but I still think that it was a great experience and I'm happy I got to try out creating a pinhole camera and developing a picture from it. I think my camera was not 100% light proof. I don't think that I painted the black on thick enough so a little bit of light was getting into the sides. If I were to do this again, I would want to make sure that my canister was completely black inside and that no light could get in except through the pinhole.

Pinhole Fail. MF, 2016.

Works Cited:

Theme, Pinhole. "The Pinhole Gallery." The Pinhole Gallery. Wordpress, 2016. Web. 16 Feb. 2016.

Giant Pandas!!

For the digital media class, we had to create a presentation about something that we really loved. In this class, we focus on learning how to navigate and use many different social media platforms. For this project, I decided to research pandas. I think that my presentation came out looking very good and I really like my pictures and video. It was difficult to find cute and nice creative commons images.

Chen Wu. 贪吃熊. (2008) Source: Flickr

The Wave of GCE

For the third action project in If These Walls could talk for Elective Term, we had to create and install a mural in our new space. All of the action projects in this class have been leading up to this moment. The other two were simply preparation for the installation of the mural. This unit did not have an internal or external because we needed all of the time to create these murals. We had to use the image that we had created in the previous project and blow it up to scale so it would fit on our set wall in the new space. There were a lot of challenges my group faced starting with not being able to get into the space when we originally thought we would be able too. This caused us to change our entire idea. We originally wanted to paint directly on the wall but with this setback, we had to paint on paper then eventually wheat paste it onto the wall. I am very pound of how our paintings turned out and I know they will look very good once they are put up onto the wall.


Our mural is titled “The Wave”. The mural is a huge wave crashing into a boat. The wave represents traditional high schools and the boat represents GCE and how we are overcoming the conventional high school's’ mission and style of teaching. For this mural, we decided to use acrylic paint, soft gel glossy medium, stencil, and spray paint. Our space is right in the entrance, there are four panels on the wall that we have to fill with our image. Since we couldn’t get into the space right away, we had to cut and trim sixteen pieces of butcher paper and then tape them together in three groups of four. To get the image onto the paper we had split our image into sixteen equal parts and traced the image onto the paper. We then painted the image with the colors we created so it could be hung on the wall. Our color scheme mimics the ocean. We used blues, greens, and whites for the main part and then we used gold spray paint for the boat. We mixed all of those colors together to create the perfect color for the sky, the wave, and the foam of the wave. I think this mural will transform the space because our main goal was to show how GCE is as a community and how we are overcoming the way traditional high schools run. We have decided to put our mural right in the entrance so it’s the first thing everyone will see when they walk into the space everyday. I think that the mural will enhance the space by giving it a sense of community. The boat in the image is representing us as a school and how we are overcoming the traditional way of teaching. I think that it will give an essence of nature with the way the skylight works with the water and the lighting will reflect off the colors to make the room seem brighter. I feel like this mural will make a very big impact on the students because it will let everyone see let everyone see that even though we are still a small school, we are making a huge impact.

The roles that I claimed were documentarian, director of operations, artistic director, and mule. Each person in my group had a different role every day. My favorite role was either documentarian or the director of operations. I was good at documenting because I really enjoy taking pictures and my phone also lets me take time lapse videos which will be a very cool addition to the resulting video. I didn’t really enjoy being a mule because the point of that job is getting what everyone needs but I was always so focused on the mural so I would be too busy to drop what I was doing to go get something. If I could change anything about the process it would be having more time in the space. Once we found out that we wouldn’t be able to get into the space, it was a major setback which caused us to have to change how we will create the mural. Instead of painting directly on the surface, we had to paint on large panels of paper which we will wheatpaste onto the designated wall space. I feel like the mural won’t look exactly how my group had envisioned it to look because we originally thought it would be painted directly on the wall rather than painted onto paper which was pasted to the wall. Even though it’s set back, we worked through it and I think that it will still look good. Our mural has still not been put up due to problems in the space but we are hoping it will be up soon.

Best of the Best

For the action project in my Book Bound class we created a portfolio with the main projects we completed in this class. Each of the projects shared a common interest in getting ready to move to the new space. All of these projects will have an impact in the new space. In this unit, we focused on different things relating to literacy. We did a lot of work on the library and books in general. We read The Great Gatsby and worked with that book to begin our discussion of the cannon. We talked about the way that we learned to read and created a storyboard around that and we also focused on illiteracy and how it is affecting the world today. It was difficult to pick which 4 projects I wanted to do because i really liked all of them. I am proud of the work that I did on every project I chose.

Assignment 1:

For this assignment we had to create a storyboard that represented our history of reading. We had to include how and when we learned to read, who taught us, how we feel about reading, etc. This relates to the course because this whole class is about books and reading and this was a biography of reading for each individual student. I decided to pick this assignment for my project because I felt like this was one of my best projects and it is interesting to show how I learned to read. To complete this assignment, I just went to the website and just filled in whatever I could remember. It was difficult at some points to remember some exact details about my reading history. To perfect this project I fixed up some of the slides so that they looked better and made more sense. I also had to change some of the objects and settings in my slides so that they looked more realistic. Then to go over the requirements, I added some more text to a couple of my panels.

Assignment 2:

For this assignment we had to create a literary journal with different pieces of literature from everyone in our group. We also had to include some external submissions that we got from people outside our class. This assignment relates to the course because we learned a lot about different literary techniques and pieces so this was a perfect way to show the different types of literary work. I selected this because I feel like this was a great piece of work that I did and I really enjoyed being able to create this magazine. It was difficult at some points to figure out how to arrange everything but in the end I think it came out very well. I am very proud of the way this journal came out and I am very happy of all of my work.

Assignment 3:


We had to create a poster to promote literacy in different ways based on a question we came up with. My question was “How does reading affect the brain”. This assignment is good for this course because it focuses on literacy and how we can teach people that reading is good and worth doing since the literacy rate has dropped drastically. I decided that this was one of my best projects because I put out a lot of information about illiteracy and I decided to do my project digitally so I was able to make it very unique. I looked up as many facts as I could and I also found a study that a neuroscientist had conducted to test illiteracy in Brazil. It wasn’t very hard to find much information because there has been a lot of tests done on this topic. Illiteracy has become so big all over the world so many scientist have been trying to figure out why. Some of the changes I made were making the cuts nicer, and shrinking the image so that when I print out the image it will all be on one paper.

Assignment 4:

For this assignment, we had to create a slideshow about one of our favorite books and why it should be in the cannon. This course was focused around our new school space and we were in charge of the library. This project let everyone defend their choice book and why it should be in the cannon. I chose this project for my AP because I think it was very well made and the book that I chose to do is one of my favorites and I think that it is an amazing story that made for a good project. Once I had chosen my book, I focused mainly on the audio clip and found out that my book has its own youtube channel so I had a lot to choose from.  It was hard to find some things about the author and it was hard to think of a bunch of connections because this book is unique in it’s own way. Some of the revisions I made were changing some of the slides so that they made more sense. I also changed the video clip because the slide was not right so I corrected it, as well as adding another slide about the connections.

Overcoming the Wave

For the second unit of If These Walls Could Talk, we learned about revolt murals. We talked about all the different revolt murals that have been created after the Renaissance until now. For the Action Project in this unit, we were put into groups to think of a mural using some of the aspects from the images we all created in the first uni. My group decided to create an image titled “The Wave”. One of the challenges in this project was figuring out how to create an image and deciding a theme and a message. Something I think we did well was listening and deciding on an image and message together. I think that we worked well and we never argued about how the image should look.

Artist Statement:
MF
Overcoming the Wave
12/15
Measurement: 4 in by 5 in
Painting with spray paint and acrylic media

For our scene, we decided to create the japanese wave to symbolize traditional high schools and the ways that they teach and handle their school. We then created a boat that also acts as a banner with four ' of people sitting. The boat and the people in it represents GCE as a whole and how we are working to overcome the traditional education system and to create a new way of learning that we can share. This mural is both a tribute mural and revolt mural. It is a revolt mural because GCE is revolting against that traditional school ways. It is a tribute mural because we are paying tribute to GCE and how we can get past the traditional school ways and create our own unique way of teaching and learning.The final sketch we created compiles the different ideas from the sketches that members of the group created in the first unit of this course. The wave was from my image, the banner was from BKJ’s original image. We liked how the Japanese wave from my image looked, so we conducted research on what it symbolizes and learned that it represents strength and unity.In the beginning, we wanted to have the wave represent GCE , but after further thought, we added the boat and changed the meaning of the wave. For my medium I chose to use stencil and spray paint. I chose this medium because I thought that it would make everything very clean and crisp. The stencil would also keep the lines looking nice and better carry out the image we envisioned. I found that the stenciling would be effective in highlighting a specific part of the image, and not be used for the entire mural. I think the swatches came out looking good, using the stencil made it look very clean and crisp. I think the process of this was difficult because I had to be super precise when I cut the stencil out. The banner on one of my swatches was very intricate so it was very hard to make it look the way I wanted it to look.

For our final media, we decided to use acrylic paint, spray paint, and coarse pumice gel acrylic medium. We thought that the acrylic paint made a really nice texture for the sky and it will blend really well with the other color.

MF, 2015

MF, 2015

MF, 2015

The Wave

During this first unit of If These Walls Could Talk, we talked about murals in pre- history and the renaissance time period. For the Renaissance, we looked at multiple artists and pieces they created and how they contributed to the new era. For pre- history, we looked at the way cave painters created movement in different ways and how complex the art was even though it came from over 30,000 years ago. For the first Action Project in the If These Walls Could Talk, we had to research a neighborhood in Chicago and create a mural highlighting some of the needs that community faces. This mural would potentially be displayed in the neighborhood. I really like the way that my drawing came out. I feel like it really got the point I was trying to make across and I think my drawing are really nice.

Artist's Statement

MF

11/2015

The Wave 11” x 14”

Marker on paper

Uptown has always been a place full of culture. With its many ethnic restaurants and shops, there is always something new to try. While they do have multiple ethnic restaurants, they also have many chain stores/restaurants which is good for the majority if they just want to go to well known places. Since Uptown is one of the most known neighborhoods in Chicago, there is a serious sanitation problem. People will come and instead of throwing their trash away in the many garbage cans there are, they choose to throw their trash on the streets and in the parks. This is causing a lot of problems because it is becoming so dirty and unpleasant that people are beginning to move away. The people in the neighborhood have been trying to organize monthly garbage clean ups which never seem to work. It never seems to work because once they are finished, more garbage just suddenly appears like it fell from the sky.

MF. Mural Sketch. 2015

For my scene, I’ve sketched the outline of uptown with a large “garbage” wave falling all over the neighborhood. On the side you can see a sign that says “you are now leaving uptown” with people running away. My sketch is under the category of revolt. This is because the people in uptown are sick of all the garbage around the neighborhood and want to get rid of it. I chose the uptown neighborhood. The need of my community is sanitation. Since 2014, the people of uptown have been organizing garbage clean up days but nothing seems to be changing. The trash cans are still overflowing and people chose to just throw their garbage on the streets. My sketch references the garbage because you can see in the wave that there is a coke can and a starbucks cup flying towards the ground. I specifically chose those two products because there are a lot of starbucks’ around the uptown area and also there are a lot of convenient stores.

I decided to incorporate the Greek style by using a lot of greens and blues. Also the style of the wave kind of relates to the way the Greek painted things: very exaggerated. People have been moving away from the uptown area so I drew people running away from the garbage wave. Some people say that soon enough the entire world will be underneath garbage which is one of the main reasons why I created this. By just throwing things away in the proper places, we can help save the earth.

Once complete, this mural will be on the walls all around uptown. It will be used to show the people of uptown and the people who just come to uptown to visit that the cleanliness and the future of uptown depends on them and how they chose to keep up the neighborhood. Hopefully people will realize that by just throwing away some trash in a garbage can, they can make a huge impact.