ER GCE Portfolio

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 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...

    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...

          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.                                                ...

In our humanities class 'Stories' we have done lots of writing work and metaphor analysis. This past three-or-so weeks we have been working a lot with figurative language, and etiology (the study of causation or origination) specifically in mythological standards.  For instance we examined Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology to find origin stories like the formation of earth through the dead body of the giant Ymir in Norse mythology.  Using this as a basis we moved on to our action project.  Writing our own creation story for something and creating etiology for how it got its name.  I personally loved this Norse story for the creation of earth or Midgard, so I wrote the creation story for Earth with my own twist.  Hope you enjoy...                In the beginning there is only MT (Em - tee), a vast blank place with nothing but a void. MT was created when the Gods breathed life into the void. From this came a cataclys...

       This term for the civic term we took a class called Ollywood where we learned all about the ins and outs of movie-making. We learned about everything that happens in pre-production, production, and post-production.  We met with experts in different fields like foley art, Film professors and even directing for our Field experience. My favorite of which was watching the new movie "Caged Birds" at the Siskel Film Center and getting to do a virtual Q&A with the director of the movie. This experience was so interesting to me because I got to ask questions about inspiration and creative choices from the director himself! How often does a person get to do that?  We learned about movie analysis and different ways to critique a movie using the correct terms.  For our Final Presentation or FP, we took what we learned to analyze a movie of our choice. I worked with Damian and we did 'The Matrix'.  After watching we chose to do a generic analysis o...

This week in our 'SDG's and you' class where we learned about issues without borders and how many of these issues encompassed by the SDGs are issues that have worldwide repercussions and are not limited by borders. We also learned a lot about fair trade and cooperation. We even went to a fairtrade pop-up shop where we saw tons of amazing handmade products that were made by people who were getting paid fair wages under a fair wage co-op. To put this all together we wrote an essay on any SDG of our choice about  how people and organizations are working to address this SDG. I chose SDG 6 because I feel like access to water is so important yet compared to the other SDG's it seems like it's taken as less important. Working together to Water the World       According to the UN between 1970 and 2015 natural wetland shrank by 35% which is 3 times the rate of forest loss, additionally, in 2014, the entire eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea had completely dried up and dis...

     This week (10/22/21) in our humanities class, 'Sustainable Development goals and You'. We learned about Gender Equality and more specifically what gender is. We explored the gay rights movement and the women's suffrage movement. We saw how discrimination for gender or sexual identity badly affects things like safety and access to quality medical treatment. To see this in a different light we took a field experience to Andersonville to meet H-Melt and Molly who are activists for the gay rights movement. Molly created a mural in Andersonville that displayed what an abolitionist feminist world would be like, and H-melt helped as a consultant for Molly's art. This experience gave me a great opportunity to ask questions on Abolitionist Feminism. To put this all together we created a comparative essay to see how different countries are working on gender equality. Eyten, Ted. " Virginia Delegate Danica Roem speaking at the Victory F...

   Pantoja, Julia." Children attend school near Manaus " 2008      In our class 'SDGs and you' which teaches about various goals set out to help guide humanity to a better future. We have been learning about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. This course taught us about a way in which our needs can be organized by how immediately vital they are to a person starting with physiological needs such as food and water and ending with find self-actualization and a sense of realization of your potentials as a person. In addition to this, we learned about the importance of foreign aid which includes what foreign aid is and the different ways its provided such as developmental aid and humanitarian aid which differ by the nature and scale of the issues they tackle. While humanitarian aid helps tackle things like providing education to deprived peoples or helping during emergencies, whereas developmental aid is geared towards building infrastructure. To help us better understand ...