ER GCE Portfolio

     In our combination math and science STEAM class called ‘Cure’ we previously explored the magic of how allopathic or alternative medicines work within the body and stop certain natural processes to make you feel better. This unit we are in now is called: ‘Prevention’ in this course we learned all about the history and evolution of vaccines. We learned how in the very beginning different forms of vaccination like variolation and inoculation were a lot more dangerous to administer because of the use of live viruses. We then learned how as we got closer and closer to the fully fleshed vaccine, along the way we discovered that once a certain amount of the population gets vaccinated even those who aren't vaccinated are protected by those around them. This phenomenon would eventually be called herd immunity. In class we heard a lot about the importance of this phenomenon but what really hit it home for me was the largely difficult yet eye opening herd immunity lab that a...

       This term in our elective 'Intro to Calculus' class we moved on to learning about the reverse power rule and the antiderivative.  It was kind of eye opening and trippy when finding out that the you can get from the derivative and anti derivative and back using the two power rules.  It was just simply interesting that they both go into one another in somewhat of a loop.  It was difficult following all the different formulas but once you had them memorized somewhat it was quite simple and ingenious.  For our action project we were given two numbers that we had to turn into a function of are own.  We took that function and graphed it so we could first create an estimate before doing the definate integral formula to get the exact area of our function. Here's how it turned out. After finishing THE LAST 'Intro to Calculus' AP I feel both relieved and ready for Junior year with a solid foundation in calculus.  I feel like the best way ...

In our humanities class called Drama we entered a unit titled: Matriarch. This unit we read continued our streak of reading famous plays that had a massive impact. This unit we asked the question of what is a matriarch? As we made guesses of our own as to what this word could really mean we began to read a book that we could use to put the word into context. The book we read is called ‘A Raisin in the sun’ by Lorraine Hansberry. ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is a play about a black family living through a segregated Chicago sometime in the late 1950s. They struggle through much as a family and even more through the way they were treated racially. The book hints at many issues of the time including: societal gender norms, blockbusting in black neighborhoods and Uncle Tom’s’      While reading this book we also attended workshops at the Goodman Theatre right down the street from GCE. We came here to learn from people whose job it is to understand, interpret and consider these...

                  This week in our STEAM course called 'Cure' we took a very different route and delved deep into the question: How do our OTC and prescription medications do what they do? First, we took a look at the inner workings of different compounds and chemical equations. At this point, we learned to balance chemical reactions, name ionic compounds, and identify organic and inorganic compounds. Next, we learned that many medications work by halting a certain chemical or process to provide results such as pain relief. We explored this idea by further researching the effects anti-inflammatories and antihistamines have on the body. We learned that both are inhibitors that block a reaction of a bodily process by either shutting it down completely or taking up room within it thus blocking anything else from doing the same. The most interesting part of this was an experiment we did to simulate the shutting down of a bodily process....

      This unit in our humanities course Drama we asked ourselves the question: What does it mean to be called a doll.  At first this seemed like a pretty simple question.  More than likely you would have heard a gruff man with a funny accent call some woman a doll.  like "You look pretty as a doll" or "Hey, be a doll and grab me a _______."   This old phrase would be one to stick with us all throughout our unit.  Usually you might characterize a doll as pretty, young, unintelligent or completely without a will of its own only to be played with.  If you pictured barbie the idea moves to a doll for little girls which is controversial because of the hyper realistic beauty standards it insinuates.  Basically any way you cut it the phase is a bit of a red flag.        This question was the best thing to get us thinking as we began to dig into the play 'A Dolls House' by Henrik Ibsen.  This book was set...

  This unit in my Spanish 2 class we talked a lot about food and cooking food. One might think that's strange for a Spanish class but it was quite on topic because topics like preterit tense of -ar, -er and -ir verbs or tú commands fit well in the format of (insert drumroll) a cooking tutorial.  As we learned these things we practiced everything separately before putting all together.  We enjoyed practice by COMMANDING people to go here or do this.   ER - 2023 "Spanish Menu" In conclusion this was a fun way to put everything together, cook a fun meal and learn more spanish.  The hard part for me that I really struggled with was writing the script because the commands are still a bit of a pain for me.  I overcame this with a little help and advice that set me on the right path towards understanding and perhaps mastery.  

 The last few weeks we have been learning and drilling the basics of calculus.  We learned about using the derivative and power rule to uncover the proper function to graph. This was definitely the most difficult AP ever.  I thought I had the main concepts down well enough but figuring out the steps was like pulling teeth.  To get though it all I had to receive some help but once I got it I felt a bunch better about the whole concept in general.

          This term in our humanities class called 'Forbidden Books' we learned all about religion and the history of book bannings.  During this time we read two books.  One was the 'The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian' and the other was a book of our choice.  Both books were banned somewhere and at some point in time.  These books helped us to better understand the ideas, dogma and motive of those who want to ban books like these.  Through this we took a step into their shoes whether or not we agreed with them.  Exploring points in the book that could be considered controversial helped us to later take stance on the controversial statements and decided if those things warranted a banning.  Personally in my read through of these books I found that such small misdemeanors could not possibly outweigh all the good the book offers to a reader or class of readers.  In most cases the 'bad' parts of the book wer...

       This past month or so in my STEAM class titled 'Disease' we entered a new unit called World.  In this unit we explored how a disease spreads and defined the terms to describe the spread.  In this way we are now able to classify the severity of the disease through words like endemic, epidemic or pandemic.  In addition to all this we learned a lot from epidemics in history such as the black death and the current Covid-19 Pandemic.  we learned read about the spread of these diseases and about the experiences of living under such conditions.  Lastly we watched contagion which was a movie that scarily predicted what the Corona virus would be like.  This movie was interesting because it went over the governmental response to a disease and talked about the R0 and how the infection spreads.  After this we worked on the Action project.  We had to pick a disease to research and write a phony news article about.  Heres how it ...

           In this term of our Spanish 2 class we've been learning about how to use direct and indirect object pronouns in sentences.  We can use these types of pronouns to refer to something without directly using it's name.  With this new info we can now use sentences like: es el favorito de mi papá. él se lo comerá. which mean's 'That's my dad's favorite. He will eat it.'  This concept is important because it makes it so we don't have to keep saying the persons' name after it's already been established.  Aside from this, we also learned to use and conjugate -er, -ar, and -ir verbs in the present tense and present progressive.  We took these concepts and made it into a little matching game or 'Juego de Pareo'.  We made the matching game based on sights and activities from Buenos Aires, Argentina. On top of this we included vocabulary of common neighborhood spots such as churches, banks, schools, libraries, and bookstore...

               As we entered Unit 2 of our disease class we turned a corner and switched from learning about body systems to focus on the brain, and more specifically the illnesses that might plague it. Our unit began with us exploring brain waves. Before we could talk about mental illness we had to carefully consider the way our brain works. Our brain uses electricity to communicate signals between neurons. We call these electric signals brainwaves. Did you know we experience different types of brainwaves depending on the task we are doing? For instance when concentrating or learning we use ‘beta waves’ and when in ‘Theta waves’ you are in a dreaming or flow state.                The next thing we explored was autism. We explored everything from what autism might look like to how an autistic person might view the world. It was interesting to learn what life is like for these individuals, ...

    During the winter term of our humanities course - 'Banned Books'  we studied the intricacies of being censored and what it means to be censored.  We learned lot's about how many types of media such as book, comics,movies and songs have been stolen from us through censorship.  We learned about how librarians and teachers are trying to fight to keep banned books on shelves for children to read while many parents choose to complain about these books for reasons like violence, sex, language, sexuality or even touchy concepts such as the holocaust that they fear is too much for their children.  During this time we did two major things to immerse ourselves in this idea of censorship. FIrst we began to read a book thats been banned in many schools across the US - 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury, and visiting Quimby's an Indie bookstore offering offbeat titles, graphic novels & magazines, because graphic novels like the ones Quimby's sells have been a hug...

Disease Class -  Winter Term - 1/29/2023     In our Winter term course titled "disease" we learned all about how to classify a disease and all the different ways to identify them.  We then learned about the different body systems and what body parts fit under those body systems.  To really visualize and make things really click we visited the Museum of Science and Industry to see the 'YOU!' exhibit.  It was really cool to see.  The 'The Exploded Man'  specimen in particular was incredible. The 'Exploded Man' is a real human specimen that had all its body systems separated from one another so you can easily visulize what was what.  We saw all kinds of technology and specimen just like the 'Exploded Man' that really knit our whole class together.  Following this we began wok on our Action Project (AP).  A project that will encapsulate all we learned this term and prove that learning all in one sussinct presentation.  For this AP ...

          This civic term at GCE has opened up new and interesting opportunities in learning for me. We explored all things space in our class titled Rocket Science. We explored the ins and outs, the math, the history, and the people who made this scientific field what it is. We first explored parabolas and how to calculate the different data that goes into graphing a parabola. Then, we wrote up biographies for people prolific in the realm of rocket science. We would even learn about Binary/ASCII code and how it was used on the Golden Record, which was shot into space for some alien lifeform to hopefully find. Next, we got to experiment firsthand with how the design aspect of a rocket comes into play. We created our match rockets from match heads, aluminum foil, and wood skewers. We messed with our designs, firing them over, and over. Until one would finally get off the launch pad. Lastly, we took trips to places like the Museum of Science and Industry...

 This week in our Stories class we finished off the quarter with the Heroes Journey.  We talked about how the heroes journey was not only applicable to fictional people but to real people and their lives.  We capitalized on this discovery by seeing it in different capacities at museums. We first went to the writers museum to learn about some writers and their life stories so we could practice using peoples life stories in the heroes journey model.  Then we went to The Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen to see the ofrendas in their Día de los Muertos exhibit.  This was to take a deep dive into symbolism and it's uses. Finally for our Action Project compared the heroes journey of a real person with that of a fictional character. For my presentation I chose Muhammed Ali and Rocky. Afterword: There were instances of symbolism that I didn't get to talk about in the video that id like to talk about now.  For each of the stages in the heroes journey I chose something...

Today we finished our last AP for our coding class, This time we learned how to use more reactionary statements that allow the computer to detect whether a condition is met or not and then execute a particular sequence of code or not.  To do this we use If - Then or elif statements. Our AP this time was to create a psudo-chatbot to talk and respond to you.   Afterword: This project was so much fun.  By this point in the course we learned enough that we could do a lot more creatively since we finally had the tools to pull it off; because of that this project became more of a passion project.  On the other hand though I learned that no matter how much coding you know you will always struggle with bugs.  I spent a lot of time especially because of the increased number of lines it took to make this.  It was confusing to decipher what was what even with the comments (The hashtag looking lines) which I used to make notes for myself.

 This unit in our population class we have been working a lot with graphing data based on things like human population which can be recognized as exponential, and using it to calculate future population.  Most of this unit took place in October, so it was only fitting that we took a trip to a cemetery (felt kind of strange/wrong in my opinion) to collect data of death years.  We used this data to examine and predict local life expectancies for different decades to compare.  We talked about how this could represent a geometric sequence and the common ratio which connects to this sequence.  Finally our Action Project was to make a slide show presentation, and video that expresses human population over time compared to an organism of our choice.  We did this so we could see how one might affect the other.  I did my presentation on dogs. Here's the video: Afterword: This project was an interesting way to show off the concept we've been exploring this uni...

This unit in our Spanish 2 course we learned a great deal.  We learned about new conjugations and how to apply them in conversation.  These new conjugations include -ar -er -ir verbs as well as ser and estar.  Learning these expanded our potential for sentence complexity, and allowed us to try more new and fun sentences.  We also learned about comparatives and superlatives to further describe something.  Finally this action project was to create a fake travel brochure for the country of our choice.  We had to apply what we had learned into it, and creatively present it. Afterword:  This action project was honestly not my favorite.  While it was interesting to apply what I had learned and to refresh my brain on the subjects; there was not much flexibility in how to apply my own creative flair.  Otherwise something else worth mentioning is the difficulty I felt with applying all the conjugations I learned in sentences in the slideshow.  ...

          These past few weeks in unit 2 of our Humanities course called stories we have been learning about the intricacies of fables. During this time we learned about the use of anthropomorphism, and dissected its use in various texts and film. Some things we dissected for this include Roald Dahl’s ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’, The Panchatantra from India, and Aesop's fables. Lastly we talked about different types of characters like static or dynamic, and symbolism in these stories. We went in depth on the utilization of all these things so that at the apex of our unit we could adapt them to our own Fables to teach a moral. My fable is about Mr. Bear who wants to repair his family name at all costs. I loved writing this story, and I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did.                                                ...

This second unit of our population class was rather uneventful as far as FE experiences so we stayed in and watched the Martian to see how one may adapt to an unlikely environment. We saw the main character survive the desolate rock of Mars.  We then learned a lot about data sets and ways to organize and visualize them. We even learned the difference between combination and permutation which we implemented in our action projects.  This action project was on picking an animal and changing something about its natural environment. Also we adapted what we learned this unit to a dataset related to the creature of our choice. Lifespan of serval dataset A- 19 B- 19 C- 19 D- 6 E- 16 F- 12 G- 20 H- 18 I- 18 J- 17 K- 2 L- 8 M- 16 2, 6, 8, 12, 16, 16, 17, 18, 18 19,19,19,20 Maximum: 20 Minimum: 2 Range: 18 Mean: 174.941176 Median: 16 Mode: 19 Box and Whisker Plot: The Box and Whisker Plot is a helpful graph that shows how the data is distributed. You will find that this plot is very comp...