Just ART ProjectProject Reflection
What was the purpose of this project? What did you learn?
The Just ART Project was about different social injustices around the world, hip hop, different mediums of art, and how to incorporate everything in our exhibition. In addition, we also learned that waves are everywhere, how to create a musical instrument, and hot to find the slope intercept using two coordinate planes. This may not be all I learned, but these are the most prominent to my mind.
Different social injustices were incorporated with the Just ART Project because this was the main topic for the humanities portion we had to incorporate. It was also to assimilate our newly found knowledge of the world around us. We learned about mistreatment of other living things, people misusing the power they had, and that everybody was not as fortunate as we were. We also learned how others were trying to fix the issue by taking popular images well known by society and changing it in a way that it would represent the cause they stood for, this was how hip hop was incorporated.
Hip hop is well known for their music that takes another artists work and changing it in a way that it is still recognizable but with a twist. Some people call this borrowing the original artist music, others call it stealing, just as the people wanting others to know about the injustice take a popular icon and change it for their benefit. This was the main reason we learned about hip hop, because of their 'copyright infringement' as lawyers like to call it or the way they express themselves for the benefit of someone. We also learned about how hip hop was a way of life, with their own style, their own cultures, their own music. This is the way they live, and some of what we learned of what we learned about them.
The other main purpose of the Just ART Project was to learn different art mediums and that art can be anything and be defined anyway. We learned about this throughout the project with the help of all the work we did in the classes, we composed music, created symbols of a specific injustice with print, stencil, and coordinate planes, and implanting the image from the coordinate plane on an item that can go with a certain theme. We also learned about art itself, and tried to define art using our own terms, for example, my definition of art was that it was an idea. I say art is an idea because everything created that is art had to start somewhere, and in my opinion ideas are the beginning of almost everything.
The last main idea of the Just ART Project was incorporating everything into exhibition. Exhibition is something that occurs in all High Tech High schools, it is similar to a normal high schools midterms in a way, but not. It is when each team, which is two to three classes of students in the same grade and there are about two or three teams in one grade, comes together to create a room that shows what you have learned in an environment all its own, especially with the project they made. This is also when the community outside of the school can enter High Tech High and learn more about what content the children are learning and more about the High Tech High system. To further explain how exhibition is about creating an environment about what you have learned, I will use the exhibition my team created. The previous main points were incorporated in our exhibition with the environment being an urban city, we incorporated different social injustices by having the symbols we made on various items scattered in the room and by having performances about a social injustice. Hip hop was incorporated with the urban part, it originating in an urban city, and with the graffiti on the walls, the graffiti also being our symbols. The different mediums of art was incorporated with the whole exhibition, everything we did, the performances, the buildings made, the mural on the background, was a different medium of art. This was how we incorporated everything in our school exhibition.
When learning about waves, and that they are everywhere, we learned that this was so because of sound and light. Sound and light are transferred using waves, such as transverse and longitudinal. The difference between the two is that one wave, transverse, is perpendicular to one another and only consists of one line, while the other wave, longitudinal, is parallel to itself and consists of more than one line. This was also used when creating our musical instruments because we had to find out each note of our instrument depending on if it was open tubes or closed tubes. I learned that with music, each chime is not an exact amount to the next note, and that one needs to be precise when cutting the pipes or else a different sound will resonate an it will change the tone. Another thing that changes is the slope of a coordinate plane, and we could find out the slope with only two coordinate points if necessary. This can be done by subtracting the first coordinate point by the second coordinate point, subtract the first x by the second x and the first y by the second y, and put the answer of the two in a fraction, with the x above the y, which is the slope of the two points.
What did you enjoy most about this project? Why?
The part I enjoyed most about this project was working together as a team and meeting people I have only seen from a distance because many of us didn't interact with each other due to the difference in schedule. However, when we were working on this project, we had to correspond as a whole team and work with people we hadn't even spoken to before. Some people did not work well with one another, while others made new friends through working on performances, creating structures, and/ or sitting somewhere new. Another thing I enjoyed most about this project would be the knowledge given to us. We learned so many new things about the world around us, how people stereotype others, and the difference one person could make with determination. We learned about the injustices countries are facing and how everything around us isn't the same throughout the world. Even if we have our own ideas as to what something is, such as hip hop, it doesn't mean it is true, because others stereotyped hip hop with teenagers doing drugs and savvy pants when that is far from the truth. We also learned about the difference one person could make with determination, this is so because hip hop was started by a man with his own definition of music, and there are all of these organizations that are made to help others that started with a single persons determination to change the world.
What was the most challenging part about this project? Why?
The most challenging part about this project was performing on stage and getting everything for exhibition done because it felt like we didn't have enough time. The performance, we had to rehearse several times, and on some occasions, not everybody was there. This became an issue because not everybody rehearsed, and we needed to change things that needed to be changed to improve our performance. It was also challenging because we had to perform in front of many people, some we knew, some we didn't know, which made many people in my group worried and stressed out. This is so because one of the people in my group was afraid of embarrassing themselves in front of an audience, so they wanted to make sure the performance was as good as it could be. The other challenging part in this was getting the whole exhibition ready, because even though we were one of the first teams to start on this, we were behind on the building portion. This mainly worried the teachers as exhibition day began to creep on all of us. To fix this, many people stayed after school to work on exhibition and try and finish what needed to be done. Also, we managed out time wisely in class, and the people that were not giving it their best slowly began to work with others to accomplish an exhibition we could not forget.
If you could do it over again, what would you do different? Why?
If I had a chance to do this project over again, I would do almost nothing differently because of the experience and knowledge I received from this event. Somethings that occurred here might evade my memory and it might be impossible for me to remember what occurred, but having this happen for the first time, it will always bring me a warm feeling. However, if I absolutely had to choose something that could be done differently, it would be the way I painted the chalk talk my group made. The chalk talk was created so that people that came to exhibition could write down their thoughts about the question stated and so we can learn about different views people had. To make the chalk talk match its surroundings of an urban city, we decorated bricks on it to make it appear as a brick wall. However, one of our products were made incorrectly, so the bricks were going vertically instead of horizontally. This would be the thing I would do differently because it stood out from the rest of the exhibition unintentionally.
Annotated Bibliography
An annotated bibliography is a bibliography of different sources with a description of what the source provided underneath, it is usually a paragraph of more long, and when creating my annotated bibliography, I had encountered quite a bit difficulties. The first thing that had occurred that did not agree with me was the making of the bibliography, I had tiring time going through the list provided, and looking to make sure each bibliography created was in the right order and created to the exacts of the list. When doing this, I had to ask one of my classmates help several times to assure myself that I was doing it correctly. I then proceeded to write paragraphs about five sentences long because that was what I believed to be required. It wasn't until I had finished about two or three that I found our the minimum amount of sentences were a little more than double that. With this in mind, I had to redo the paragraphs I had already done, and make them longer, further explaining what the resource had and how that would help me with the project. When I was done with that, I had my annotated bibliography critiqued by others to see if I had done anything wrong, and if so, I had to fix that mistake.