ER GCE Portfolio

 During this unit, morosely titled 'Death'  of our Food For Thought class we looked into the past to see how food and and food production had its negative effects on the world.  We explored things like the Irish potato famine, slavery, wage slavery, and even more recent topics like baby formula shortages and industrial farming.  For this unit we made our own model version of a UN position paper that focused on SDG 2 zero hunger. We all chose our own target to report on, I chose SDG 2.4 - ensure sustainable food production systems. Here's my video on how we can start making agriculture more sustainable. Script: Did you know agriculture is responsible for 10 to 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Ironically, according to the University of California, agriculture is also quite sensitive to the changing climate that has followed. The target of SDG 2.4 is to ensure sustainable food production systems. This target's focus is on the farming techniques used b...

    During our second unit of our Food class titled Sauté where we talked about math concepts like logarithms, proportions, and more graphing we simultaneously took on the question of what makes us human? We learned about the food hypothesis. The idea that human brains evolved with the help of cooking and denaturing our food. Through this process its believed that people got access to more of the nutrients our brains need allowing for us to become smarter, walk on two feet, and become less ape-like. This unit we learned about leavening and how humans learned to use this. We talked about the various things involved in chemical and biochemical leavening. We even tested to see what would happen if we substituted the ingredients necessary for this reaction with something similar. For example we swapped out the eggs in brownies for flax seed or yogurt (independent variable). We did this to try different emulsifiers to see if it will still leaven(Dependent variable). Another t...

Welcome to this units AP - the quitapena doll. This unit we worked on topics such as colors, clothes, and new verb conjugations including things like o-ue and i-ie. We also furthered our investigation into Spanish food and culture. This is where the idea for the quitapena doll comes in. The quitapena doll or the "worry doll" is a small handmade doll originating from Guatemala. It's purpose is to give you something to whisper your worries to. In this action project we made our own! E.R, quick sketch of quitapena doll, 2022 E.R., quitapena doll, 2022 La muneca quitapena lleva una toga roja y zapatos azules y rojos Juega baloncesto come tacos limpia el piso escribe libros prefiere dormir esta cansado, nerviouso. La quitapena no esta cansado y nerviouso. This project was more fun than the others since most of the time spent on it went towards the making of the quitapena doll meaning I got to do less writing. It was, on the other hand, difficult to do the conjugations we ju...

 Welcome as we finish up our first unit of our Food course.  A course on how food is grown scientifically and mathematically, and explored the ideas of people like Fukuoka and Charles Darwin.  We broke it down to the very micro nutrients involved in growing crops and even how they got there. One example is the nitrogen cycle, we learned how nitrogen in the air is taken in by plants during photosynthesis, which is eaten by animals that are broken down by bacteria when they die which brings it into the earth.  During the course we took trips down to the Plant Chicago where we explored some decomposers -  mushrooms and how to grow them. There we took our own cultures of blue oyster mushrooms and transferred them to a petri-dish to grow.   Spoilers the incubator was set two high and they didn't really grow that well, but i'm still trying to grow mine here at home.  Once we got back to school we tried to grow our own beans. they still need some time as...

Papaya Pete Welcome to our first unit of Food For thought! A class where we talk about the Anthropological and historical ideas that food takes us including where it came from and how that in turn informs us about ourselves. Did you know that corn has domesticated us? It turns out that what was once a grain has evolved and grown along side us to be more useful to us, because it turns out that being useful to humans has become the greatest evolutionary advantage ever! To add insult to injury corn is in just about any food you could think of now. Don't believe me? check the ingredients on the back of your Cheetos. Its in just one form or another.  During this class we traced back our roots as far as we could go to see what the different foods could teach us about where and who we came from.  We put all this info together in a colorful family tree. We also put together a map with the center of origin for almost every food crop with trade routes and the ancient civilizations that ...

This unit in our core class ’Who Am I’ we learned about doubt and dream. We talked about the meaning of dreams and how in many lines of work you have to deal with doubt especially when considering the risk involved. We learned about Freud and the surrealist art movement. We also picked up new psychology and surrealist vocabulary like the Id, ego and superego to better understand the way we dream and the way we think. We talked to a few people with some more experience on the matter. First we spoke to pastor Matt Fitzgerald who talked to us about doubt and how we can better interact with those around us. Then we spoke to Jason Bender a black belt in Jiu Jitsu who taught us to mitigate risk and doubt by learning to protect ourselves better in a corporeal sense. On the flip side of this we lastly talked to financial planner Andrew Lisi who explained how the best way to decrease doubt and risk is to diversify or spread out the risk. Lastly we wrapped up the unit by learning about the Oj...

 This most recent unit was a very short unit for fuel. It lasted no more then a single week.  We learned all about how batteries, electricity, and motors work.  We get to watch our teacher, Will, smash an electric pencil sharpener with a hammer to retrieve the electric motor from inside. With the electric motor we identified each components - stator commutator and rotor. Seeing these components firsthand really helped solidify my understanding. Then using a multimeter we were shown that electricity can flow both ways ways by placing the prongs to the bottom where the battery goes and spinning what is usually the drill piece, we got minimal results with around .2 volts being put out.  Lastly we learned of our action project. To build our very own battery with the electrode and electrolyte of our choice.  I chose bleach and rice wine vinegar for mine and used pennies and some really heavy screws as my electrodes.  Please enjoy my lab report as well as a few p...