Jay's Blog

In recent weeks we worked on the portfolio for the Importance of Being Earnest and it has taken a lot of my energy and it contains my passion in it. I started with the mind in my head that I am going to to have my portfolio different from others’. I think at the end I achieve the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the project. For the cover I made it myself on the website, also I changed the stripe in the front and I used the color of gold and silver to match the theme of Victorian era. Also as for the inside I used a gold decoration for each two pages. In order to create a feeling for the readers to feel like reading a historical file. When thinking about the unique costume design I tried to fit the characters’ personalities into the costume. For example when I designed the costume for Jack I designed two of them one white and one black so that when he “killed” his brother Ernest he could wear the black one. It has been a great experience working on this portfolio because it feels so great to concentrate on doing one good project and present it to other people. I feel really happy to have a chance to make a good portfolio like this one.

Literacy week had taken place in LIS last week and all the students participated in it. It was really fun and I noticed how weak I am in the term of English literacy. Those quiz that we took at the morning was king of hard for me, and it make me to doubt my ability. In the Language Art class we have read one chapter of The Impotence of Being Earnest. Once we started reading the text, I realize the play was not that hard to understand, since I was expecting old English words instead of these words that I have been already familiar with. About the passion project, I have decided that I should stick with my original play which was to make a model of my future home. I reconsidered the suggestion of Mrs. T, and I decided to make both the structure and decoration of my home. In order to have a view before I actually build the model out pf Lego, I am thinking of making a house i the Minecraft first. However I have to buy it which cost about 25 US dollars. I don’t think it is worth it to do that.

This week we’ve working on the presentations about dramas we picked. All the classmates gave the information that are really useful to understand those dramas which are Waiting for Godot and The Importance of Being Earnest. As for me, I had the topic of discussing the art of tragicomedy. Tragicomedy is word that is quite easy to understand. Tragic and comedy, The whole word is made out of these two words. However I found quite tricky to connect this to the show: Waiting for Godot, since this show is about nothing, nothing was happened at the end. I thought preforming part of it might be a good way to give the audience a brief glance of the show, so that is way I preform a little part of it when I was presenting.
I am quite confused about the passion project because Mrs.T told us to think bold and try to do a big project. However my original plan was to make a LOGO model for my future home and select all the furniture myself, also calculate how many years would I need to make money to have that house on the depending on my ideal career. It is not a huge project and it is all about myself instead of the world. So I am really confused should I stick with my old plan or should I think of another one.

For the last few weeks, I have been reading A novel form Gary Paulsen called The Crossing. It is a small book. I think the primary reason I chose it was that the cover of the book was nicely painted and it seemed that it was the last one. So as a normal people that values the “limitation” I chose this book.
The topic of this book is really attractive, It tells a story about a 14-year-old boy trying to make his way form Mexico to America through a bridge. It is rare to have this king of topic. As long the topic is fresh, people would be willing to try to read it. This book has two story line, one is the 14-year-old who wants to go to USA, another one is a old military surgeon who can’t forget wars and wants to go to Mexico. These two guys haven’t met yet as far as I have read. It would be interesting to see those two guys meet each other, I’m curious if they will help each other or not.
This writer is really good at writing about details. When talking about the surgeon, he used multiple detail description of the room to show that this retired surgeon still live like a soldier. Also when the boy came to see a restaurant cook for begging food, the conversation was perfectly written. The greatest pat so far is when the boy went down the bridge to beg for coins thrown from the bridge. The writer even talked about the tools that our boy used to get the money–A wood stick with a cardboard cones tied at the top.
The plot is really impressive so far, and it seems that this novel will be a good source to make a short film.

In the previous few weeks, in Language arts class, we started to have projects about environmental commercials. I became teammates with Mert because we are sitting right next to each other. We could not find the things we wanted to research about at first , but Mrs. T came and gave us the idea of bees and we chose that as our topic.
In our projects, three sub-projects are included. First is a short video, the second is a poster and the third one is stickers. In many ways I think our project is quite successful, the video is short but effective so we could put it on the moments of Wechat; the poster has all the information on it and it shows the details of bees’ importance; stickers are popular among classmates and they are cute. However our project has things to be improved at the same time. We actually only showed that bees need to be saved but ignored to tell the ways to achieve this goal. Also when we were working on the stickers, we did not think about copyright at first, instead we just took the pictures online and PS it. Mrs.T told us that we have to used the pictures that are allowed to be reused, so we spend a bit time finding the pictures. I think this process is important since it tells me to take copyrights seriously.
This media campaign is really educational and interesting and I like the feeling of working with classmates.

Last week we started a new project on environment, and we watched a movie called An Inconvenient Truth.It is a really good documentary film and I knew how the world is on its edge. Last week I went to Beijing, and the air pollution there is horrible. The PM 2.5 was over 1000in Beijing, and the air is actually toxic. So I find the pollution is really serious in China, and it would be a good project to carry on. So in the ted talks I chose The Tough Truth about Plastic Pollution to watch.
It is a talk given by an artist who make art work on plastic called Dianna Cohen. After eight years, some of her works began to break down into small pieces.It is a bad thing because plastic is till plastic, it just turned into smaller bits. She then wanted to clean up those plastic in the ocean, what she did its that she took the plastic and mixed it in the bricks to use again.But she sooner found out that these things she had been doing is just a little drop of the bucket, int he bigger paper of the world, plastic pollution is somehow destroying the planet.
I enjoy this talk because it gave a lot of examples and pictures of the pollution, Instead of just telling me “this is the truth” it gave me a lot of evidence to let me believe. It was really shocking when I saw the dead bird with so much plastic materials inside of its body.

I’ve known about the conflicts happened in Burma for a long time. Since Aung san suu kyi came out from the jail, my father had told me to pay attention to this event. Consequently I look up to the revolutions after Aung san suu kyi cane out of the jail and really did some research on the internet( I wasn’t thinking about going to LIS at the time so I did it in Chinese) I was really excited about having a project that can challenge the perspectives of myself. And during the research in school I found out other things that attract me that ,the father of Aung san suu kyi, Aung san is also a revolutionary person in Burma’s history. I didn’t expect all the information I explore next, it feels really good to follow the idea of mine. As time goes by, I gradually find out that these people always have students on their back, so I developed my path to the student’s power and finally student’s power in revolutions. The challenging thing is, I kind of lose my topic in this path of thesis developing, so I tried to turn the focus from the revolution back to power and leadership. It is really hard to turn the ideas down and focus on the topic, somehow I think I made it at last.I used to think this project would be really easy for me because I’ve done quite a few researches on it , now I think this is the rock that blocked my way in the topic focus, because I am always trying to connect the project with my researches which is out of the topic.

This is the first time that I use Prezi as the form to contain my work.Prezi is basically a application that is used to give a presentation but I put my small essay in it. I divided my passage into different parts and put it into individual pops in the work.(you can check it out in my last post). Actually it is a blog post but in the Prezi it could be more fun.However I found some problems in this work.
First is the back ground music.I chose a swing song but I didn’t expected it to be so sleepy because when I hear it, it was good enough to let people get into the mood of studying.But the fact proves I’m so wrong because everyone in my class said it was so sleepy and they almost fall asleep.(part of the reason is that we watched it with lights out)
Second one is that I didn’t put enough pictures in it because the original thought is that it’s a passage,so I just put 10 pictures in it, I think I should have put more in that.
FRO THE PEOPLE WHO HAD NOT SEEN MY WORK YET

Next time I might also do it on Prezi because it gives me a feeling that I’m creating something instead of just copying information online.

This is my Prezi work of Power and leadership, and in this work I explain the power of students in my perspective. Hope you enjoy it.