Nicole Mendez

Humanities

 

In humanities we have Mrs. Neder, as our teacher.  In this class we were taught the basics of human geography,  read many global current events, studied film production, types of writing, and much more!

 

The interview narrative was meant to teach us how to form a story from pieces of information. Each student had to interview a family member from a different generation and then turn it into a story. This was pretty helpful to see how to turn short answers into descriptive paragraphs and it helps you ask better questions.But I'm not going to lie, it was pretty weird interrogating a family member. Here is the one I had made about my aunt. 

 

  As part of a project I was assigned to read a book called Cry, the Beloved Country. It was about a pastor named Stephen Kumalo and his journey to find his family in a large city called Johannesburg. The book is set in the 1940’s in South Africa around the time the Apartheid happened. I highly enjoyed this book for it various and lively perspectives.

 

But reading wasn't all of the project, its main goal was to write a research paper about any topic you would like to fix or protect. Me and my partner decided on education in the U. S. since that is a problem that affects us directly. We first researched a lot of facts on education and wove those into a paper that speaks out about the problem. I have to say it wasn't great looking up a bunch of facts on google but I still felt like I was learning something by reading about it and I also felt like I was doing something good for fellow students by teaching them about our situation. And I think in the end all of the hard work put into this project was worth it.

 

   The Inside Out Journal is an all-year project in which you write entries which contain notes of anything you learned in class and observations you did outside.

 

 In Humanities we each wrote screenplays, picked 6 of them to read, and later picked 3 to film and produce. It was a good lesson in how important visual writing can be. I felt really excited about writing a film and I was also really excited by my own idea for the screenplay. It made it to the top ten for reading, but of course there were much more interesting films that won instead. And from those films we produced the scene we had a table read for. My part in the production was Production Designer. I basically tell everyone how the scenes will look like, where they'll be filmed, and even what the actors will look like. From start to finish I really enjoyed this project and hope my teacher will do it again next year for the new freshmen. 

 

The PATH project is a research progect in which a group of students pick one place in the San Diego area to research and build an exhibit on each exhibit will answer one main Humanities and one main Physics question and the exhibits will be shown to a museum to be shown as a complete exhibition. My own group has chosen to research Belmont Park where we'll record sound coming from it and how it affects the surrounding neighborhood. Our exhibit will be a large map that when you pinpoint with a figurine will trigger the sound dome above to show how much you would hear the from that area on the map. Apparently the park is quiet mostly and help attract many tourists, though parking is an issue during weekends and the summer. My job is the creative director so I write all of the narratives and overviews for our exhibit, I have to make sure to be very detailed so I can help paint a better picture to does who see our exhibit.