Equity and Advocacy Summative

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Our equity and equality unit focused on a specific issue that a character in novel (for me, The Defense of Thaddeus Ledbetter) faced. We had to advocate for the issue whether it be by creating a speech, a poster, a video, whatever it is, we had to be able to make people care about the problem. Since my topic was about ADHD, I made a poster that was supposed to represent a kid with ADHD and his mind was racing with all the statistics about the disorder. I had some spare time left, so I also decided to make a speech that went into more detail about what it actually is, what problems surround the issue, and what can be done to help.

Poster:


Slide:

 

Speech:

During the unit, we also worked on TIEAs. We learned more about what exactly goes inside a TIEA and how to write one. This is my TIEA on how people stand up for others even though it’s not always seen.

TIEA:
In the book The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter, John Gosselink conveys in Mr. Cooper’s note that although it’s not always seen, people do stand up for others to make sure everyone is treated fairly. Although Mr. Cooper has not been Thaddeus’ biggest fan, he listens to what people have to say about Thaddeus’ positive influence on the school, so when Mrs. Dixon complains about Thaddeus correcting her in class, he says “Let’s give him a chance. And Jane, with all due respect, maybe you should listen to some of his suggestions.” (228). Gosselink’s choice to include the note that shows him standing up for Thaddeus conveys to the reader that often, people do stand up for others, but it’s not seen publicly. Mr. Cooper doesn’t show any sign that he likes Thaddeus throughout the book, so readers would not believe John Gosselink if he’d just stated that Mr. Cooper would stand up Thaddeus. Throughout most of the book, Mr. Cooper uses an exasperated tone in his letters to Thaddeus. However, in his note to Mrs. Dixon, you see that he does believe Thaddeus has a good advice in his suggestions and that Thaddeus isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary from how a “normal” kid would behave. After listening to kids and teachers about how Thaddeus is a good contribution to the class environment, it helps him to realise that Thaddeus is just like any other smart aleck kid. In the note, Mr. Cooper starts to understand that he can treat Thaddeus like how he would treat any other student; by giving him a chance to prove himself. The only people that know Mr. Cooper is standing up for Thaddeus is Mrs. Dixon and himself because Mr. Cooper does not feel like flaunting the fact that he’s doing the right thing by giving everyone an equal chance to prove themselves. Gosselink implies that standing up for others occurs, whether it is done publicly or done in private, there are people that work to ensure equality for everyone.

MLA citation:
Gosselink, John. The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter. Amulet Books, 2010.

 

After we had finished reading our books, our whole group got together for one final discussion on the whole of the book after our 4 practice discussions. We talked about things like how felt about the book, what techniques the author used that we like, and our general thoughts on the events in the book. So here is the video of that discussion:

Discussion:

 

 

Art Ceramics

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For the ceramic portion of this art semester, we had to create a ceramic piece of anything we felt like, (lantern, cup, bowl, etc) we just had to incorporate patterns into the design of our ceramic piece. After we were finished with creating the shape of the ceramic, we glazed it over with what colors we chose. This was my final ceramic piece: 

Art Perspective City

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Perspective City Reflection
Paula Hsiao
The first thing I had to do when I got the paper was to decide whether I wanted to draw my city in one point or two point perspective. I didn’t really have any idea what I was going to create at first, so I just randomly picked two point perspective because I liked giving the illusion of 3D buildings. I thought that making the buildings 3D would help them to look more realistic since they wouldn’t just be boxes anymore. After that, I had to decide where my horizon line would be and place my vanishing points on the horizon. Since I had a slight idea that I didn’t want to have my vanishing points super high because I had tried that in one of my rough drafts and I found that it was way harder for me to draw when my vanishing points were higher, I decided to keep the eye level fairly low. Now since I was doing two point perspective, I had to place the vanishing points off the paper onto an attached scrap piece of paper because if the two points were too close together, the city would look like it was being viewed from a fish eye lense, so I extended the horizon line onto the attached scrap paper and placed my two vanishing points on there. So it was time for my to actually start drawing my city. Obviously, you have to start with the foundation (an important structure/thing that you base the rest of your drawing off of) or your bigger buildings. I was inspired by a picture Ms. Oda had showed us of a corner of a street. It was interesting to be able to see both sides of the street like that. This is why I decided to start drawing my street corner first, that way I knew how the rest of my buildings should look and where they should be. The street corner would be where the buildings stemmed from. So from the vanishing points, I drew a diagonal line towards the center left of the paper. The point at which they intersect became the corner and the diagonal lines became the sidewalk. Since I had the foundation of my drawing, I started to work on the buildings next. I knew that the shop on the corner of the street obviously had to be the most important because it was the only one that was on both sides of the street. To portray the importance of the building, I had to make it bigger than the others by drawing the perpendicular lines to the horizon line longer than the rest of the buildings. I also made the building’s width wider than the other buildings so that it was the main attraction in the piece. After the main building, I now had to place the “supporting” buildings that were going to be next to the main building. The placement of the supporting buildings was really important because I needed to place the right amount of buildings and make the buildings the right size so that the piece feels balanced on both sides (so that there’s not a giant building on one side and no building on the other). I repeated the process I had done to make the first building (draw perpendicular lines to the horizon to create the base of the building and then create the roof by drawing connecting lines to the vanishing points). I decided the size and width of these supporting buildings randomly. There really wasn’t much planning that went into deciding, I just drew until I felt like the buildings looked nice and adjusted if I didn’t like the size at the end. The supporting buildings were also supposed to give the drawing a more city-like feel because cities are often very busy and filled with different buildings/structures. I went back to add smaller details like the windows and doors once I was done with an outline of where my buildings were and what they would look like. Since I had an idea of where everything was, I was able to add more buildings or more windows based on what would make the drawing look more unified. I made sure to all a lot of windows on the taller buildings because when I think of a city, I think of tall skyscrapers that light up at night. After taking a second to look at my drawing, I realised that I still had a lot of empty space at the foreground and background of my drawing. I knew I had to add more buildings because the empty space made it feel more like a suburban city as opposed to an urban city (what I was going for). I added buildings in the back of the bigger buildings because the feeling of more buildings even far off into the distance made it seem more like a building. To add cultural elements was next on my list of things to do. Things like signs and landmarks are the things that usually make a city feel like it represents a culture. At this point, I still only had a small inkling of what I wanted the city to look like. So I focused on the kind of mood I wanted to create (a city frozen in time at night). I thought it would be a cool idea to capture a usually busy city when it was calm in the dead of night, so I picked New York, a city famous for their everyday hustle and bustle. I then added in signs like “New York Pizza” and the statue of liberty poster because these are the things people think about when talking about New York. Once I was done with the drawing part, I could start to paint. Like mentioned before, I knew I definitely wanted to show the city at night, so using the wash technique, the first thing I did was to add a light layer of blue to represent the sky because I know I can add color, but I can’t take color away, so I started light and worked my way darker, gradually adding more blue and purple (at the top for value). As I looked over to at Yvonne’s painting and saw the highlight she had in her sky, I decided to add a layer of yellow paint near the top of my buildings to show the light that illuminates off of a city. I think it really added a nice aspect to my painting and made it look like it had more depth. So using the wash technique, I went back and tried to paint the biggest buildings first since I knew I didn’t have much time left to finish. I decided to make the buildings a bolder color like red in order to contrast the chill night vibe from the sky. I spent too much time trying to blend different colors together in order to try and find a color that I liked, which is the main reason I ran out of time to color in the rest of my drawing like the posters and windows. However, since I made the decision to color in the biggest buildings first and work my way down, the painting didn’t look that barren even though the posters were white.
One of the biggest differences in my work and my peers’ work was the quality of value. In my painting, the value was all over the place, it wasn’t dark where it was supposed to be dark and it was light where it wasn’t supposed to be light. The value just looked really off in the whole painting and the value didn’t look right (very poorly executed). However, the value in Claire and Yvonne’s paintings were very well done. They did a great job of knowing where the building should be darker and painting it in a way that didn’t overdo or overshadow the actual building.

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter – Sketchnoting

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Sketchnoting is a great way to take a large amount of information on a topic and to condense it to where other people can easily understand what’s being said. For this assignment, we had to take the books that we read (for me, The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter) and turn things like theme, character traits, conflict, and story arc into an easy to follow sketchnote poster. I mainly focused on the story arc of the book as well as the change in people’s opinions of Thaddeus in my sketchnotes.

Pattern Tile Design

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As our art summative, we each made our own tile patterns based on different patterns. Here is the photo of my finished tile design and the reflection I did on my patterns.


For our summative pattern design, we were asked to create a coaster that used patterns to create shapes and value. We could use any patterns we wanted and any design we wanted, but we just had to make sure that the coaster was using patterns and that the patterns were balanced between all the different values; not too dark, not too white, some ‘gray’ areas. It had to look unified and balanced.
At first, I had no idea what I wanted to create. We had already looked at a bunch of examples in class of what people did last year and what professional artists did. I thought some of the examples were too intricate and that I couldn’t recreate it or that it just didn’t quite feel like my style of art. I was really scared to start my design because the thought that it was a summative project lingered in my mind. With the other assignments like the practice pattern design, I just drew whatever patterns I felt like drawing because there was no pressure to make it perfect, but no matter how much I tried to convince myself that this summative project was no big deal, I still could not get over my fears of messing it up. I had a few concepts that I was messing with in my mind at the beginning and the one I started out with was to have a coaster that ‘flowed’ between all the 4 squares. So instead of having 4 separate squares with different things going on, I would have one shape that was weaved through all 4 squares so that the 4 squares could all look different, but you could still tell that they were supposed to come together and make a coaster. The idea was that I could have 1 or 2 big geometric or organic shapes that went through 2 or 3 squares so that the squares were all tied to each other. I wasn’t really sure what shapes to put though because putting both organic shapes and geometric shapes together was hard to place on the squares since they kind of looked odd together. I eventually decided on putting about 3 curvy, plant like shapes on one side of the paper, and a rectangular strip going directly diagonal the opposite way of the organic plant-like shapes because they helped balance each other out. This concept for my design helped me to show the contrast in my 4 squares because I made them all very different from each other, but the organic and geometric shapes tied them together. Up until this point, I had drawn everything in pencil to see what it looked like before cementing it in pen. However, just having the organic and geometric shapes running through the 4 squares still didn’t make the squares seem unified, so I decided to draw lines stemming from the center, which made rectangles around the edges of every square. This time, I the coaster looked more together and I felt like I could trace it in pen without regretting it.
So after the general outline of the big shapes my planning of how the coaster would look was done, I started to work on the individual squares. As I said before, I planned my coaster to have 4 squares that each had a different vibe/movement. These squares that would normally look odd together because of the differences in pattern/movement are unified by my big shapes. So I started first with my bottom right square. I had no idea what I was going to do with this square, so I began by drawing a bunch of lines that I thought I could fill in with patterns. This is how I decided that this square would be one that’s very chaotic and very “loud” because of the all the different patterns that I would put in shapes created by the lines I drew across that square. I started out with drawing a pattern that I saw in one of the example videos that were shown in class. It looked pretty cool in the square by itself, so I kept adding more and more patterns in the different squares. In order to add more variety to the patterns, because since these squares were more black and white than somewhere in the middle, sometimes I would switch up the pattern, like in the half circles, I switched the coloring so that instead of being white striped the whole way, it was also black striped. So in that square, I wanted the colors to be mostly dark blue and white, not a lot of ‘gray’ because geometric shapes are more sharp, which is better represented by very contrasting colors (dark blue and white). So for the square next to it, I decided for more organic patterns in order to balance out the geometric square. Since this square was also the one where the curvy plant shape starts, most of the organic shapes I put, I tried to make them somewhat related to the plants. A lot of the patterns in this square were more gray than either dark blue or white since I tend to think of soft, harmonising patterns when I think about organic shapes. I also mixed in some geometric shapes in that square to emphasis that the 2 squares are supposed to come together, but are also completely different. For example, I put arrow shapes (geometric shape) in the curvy part of the square (organic shape), and I made the proportions of the arrows get increasingly smaller as they go up to create rhythm/movement and in order to lead into the top square. I did this because I needed to somehow move the audience’s attention into the top square, but I didn’t want to make it too obvious, so I used the movement created by the arrow patterns to guide the audience’s eyes. Since the last 2 squares I drew were very dark due to how close the patterns were to each other, I decided to make the top 2 squares more white by using less patterns that were more spaced apart. I really didn’t have a plan for those last 2 squares, but I decided to keep one side containing geometric shapes and one side containing organic shapes. This time though, the organic shapes and geometric shapes were supposed to be on both sides of the squares because it kind of represented how these 2 squares were more “in the middle” like how the values of these 2 squares were supposed to be more “in the middle” of dark blue and white. These 2 squares however didn’t really have a concept behind them, I just looked around at some other people’s artwork and got inspired by what I thought was cool (like I thought Hiram’s city concept was cool, because he used all types of different values and it was cool to see how he added patterns into the drawing, so I also drew some buildings, and then added patterns in wherever I wanted). Most of the patterns I used in these last 2 squares were repeats of patterns I had already used in previous squares in order to try and add harmony to the piece as a whole. I wanted to audience to see elements different squares being used all over the piece, not just in that square.
When I started this pattern design, my concept for the coaster was clear cut. I thought this square had to be geometric, this square had to be organic, they have to have different patterns to emphasis the contrast in the squares, they have to be either dark blue or white. However, as I went on, I discovered that you can use the same patterns and still have it look cool, and it’s not always “black and white,” there are grey areas, there are repeating patterns, and that’s okay.

The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter Booksnaps

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In the unit, we read the book “The Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter” in our separate books. During each week, we were supposed to annotate what we were reading using snapchat. You can add colors, stickers, text, whatever you want, just as long as it clearly communicates your idea! Here are some of the highlights from my booksnaps each week:

Week One Booksnaps:

 

Week Two Booksnaps:

 

 

Week Three Booksnaps:

 

Unit Reflection: Journalism

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In this unit, we learned all about how to analyze the style, content, and technique of a news article or news media. There were a couple of different activities we did in order to practice annotating news articles for those kinds of things including; watching CNN10 then annotating on its style of presentation, annotating a news article for both the author’s craft and content, and writing our own article about an issue that affects people like us (other students or people in our community). Here’s a reflection of what we did in this unit:

Unit Reflection on poster:

The Glue Times – Journalism Unit

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In our journalism unit, we were supposed to create a news article within a newspaper with our group and to compare to news articles at the end of the unit. So throughout the unit, we learned techniques that would help us to write our article and to annotate the 2 articles. These things include; author’s craft (technique and style), effect on audience, mood, tone, content, etc. In this post, you will see some of the things we did throughout this unit, like the final draft of article, the writing process, and annotation of the the news articles.

 

The Glue Times Newspaper:

Compare & Contrast 2 Similar News Stories:

Compare:
The articles “Texas Faces Major Flooding” and “Catastrophe in the Gulf” are similar because they both describe Hurricane Harvey as a historically large hurricane in order to grab the reader’s attention. Hurricane Harvey is a hurricane that hit southeast Texas, causing mass destruction everywhere it went. Many were trapped in the path of the storm and needed rescuers to save them from the flooding even though the storm had just arrived. In page 4 of “Texas Faces Major Flooding” the author quotes the National Weather Service, saying ““flooding​ ​ in​ ​ the Houston​ ​ metropolitan​ ​ area​ ​ is​ ​ expected​ ​to worsen and could become historic” while the article “Catastrophe in the Gulf” said “That has led to historic flooding, mass destruction…” In “Texas Faces Major Flooding” the author mainly focuses on the flooding in Houston and how the flooding issue caused by Harvey could become more severe and rise to historic heights. The author of “Catastrophe in the Gulf” focuses more on how the whole of the storm is historic including the amount of destruction it left behind, not just the flooding. However, both authors are using the word historic in order to keep the readers intrigued and interested in the hurricane. Both articles recognised that although the flooding was a major problem, the storm was still ongoing and could become historic, but is not historic yet. The authors of both articles know that in order to maintain the reader’s attention, they need to use key words/impactful words in order to keep the audience engaged.

Contrast:
The articles “Texas Faces Major Flooding” and “Catastrophe in the Gulf” are different because the first article is sounds more biased in its description of the hurricane while the author of “Catastrophe in the Gulf” lets the audience know that the descriptions are based off of other trustworthy news networks. Hurricane Harvey was an unusual hurricane because the storm stayed intact above Houston instead of breaking up once it hit land, and this caused massive amounts of rain to fall; many have died from this flooding. On page 3 of “Texas Faces Major Flooding” the author uses uncertain phrases such as “at least” or “though that number may climb.” The author of “Catastrophe in the Gulf” says on page 3 that the ​”breadth​ and​ intensity ​of ​this​ rain fall​ is​ beyond​ anything ​experienced ​before, the National Weather Service said in a statement.” In the quote from ​the “Texas Faces Major Flooding” article, the author is using phrases that makes the hurricane sound like it will cause a lot more destruction even though the hurricane is slowing down. The author does not take any quote from a trustworthy news site when saying that the number of deaths may climb, but instead is saying that from his own judgement and from his own opinions on the subject. Meanwhile, the author of “Catastrophe in the Gulf” takes a different approach to describing the hurricane in order to avoid biased/strong phrases like “at least.” The author tends to quote sources that the readers trust, like the National Weather Service, and in the statements from those trusted sources, there are impactful words and phrases. The difference is however, that the author of “Catastrophe in the Gulf” is using key phrases taken from sources that are trusted and sources the readers trust to give pure facts. The author of “Texas Faces Major Flooding” is making his own statements sound like bias because he doesn’t quote other sources, but just explains what he thinks the hurricane will destroy next. By quoting official sources, the description of the hurricane in “Catastrophe in the Gulf” manages to avoid sounding biased.

Annotation of news articles:

 

A Brief Overview of Mitosis and Meiosis

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In this unit, we learned about cell division and cell reproduction, mostly through the process of mitosis and meiosis. Mitosis occurs whenever more cells are need and can happen in animals during regeneration or during asexual reproduction. During mitosis, the cell is able to duplicate itself and make another cell that is exactly the same, including the same DNA, genes, everything. There are 6 different phases that occurs during mitosis in order for the cell to copy itself: interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, and cytokinesis. In interphase, there are 2 different stages that happen; the G1 and S stages of interphase. In G1, that’s when the cell gets bigger and the cell starts to prep itself. Then directly after that, comes the S stage of interphase, which is when the chromosomes all make an exact copy of themselves (called sister chromatids). These sister chromatids have the exact same genes and structure. There’s another growth phase in interphase called G2 that happens, but it’s not as important. Then comes prophase, which is when the chromatin condenses and you’re actually able to see the chromosomes. In interphase, since the chromatin wasn’t very tightly packed together, you weren’t able to really see the chromosomes yet. It’s also between prophase and metaphase that the nuclear membrane disappears, which will come in handy during metaphase. So in metaphase, things called centrioles will move to the opposite ends of the cells and microtubules will come out from the centrioles and attach onto the centromeres of the chromosomes. This is able to happen because the nuclear membrane has dissolved, and the chromosomes, which were previously inside the nucleus, are now just in the cell and no longer protected by the nuclear membrane. The microtubules will eventually develop into spindle fibers. The spindle fibers tug from the opposite poles of the cell in order to get the chromosomes to line up directly down the middle of the cell. Now comes the anaphase part of mitosis. In anaphase, the chromosomes break at the centromeres, and the sister chromatids are pulled to opposite sides of the cell. In telophase, the nuclear membrane reforms around each group of one half of the sister chromatids on each side of the poles. The nucleoli will reappear and start to decondense back into chromatin. The last step is cytokinesis. In this phase, the cytoplasm should divide in 2, creating the 2 new daughter cells.

 

Meiosis is slightly different because instead of wanting to duplicate the cells, you want to create genetically different cells. The process is still similar to mitosis although you will end up with 4 daughter cells instead of 2. The beginning is roughly the same. It first starts with interphase, where the DNA duplicates itself. However, now we go into prophase 1, where homologous chromosomes pairs (maternal and paternal chromosomes with the same length and genes in the same place, however, there can be different alleles for each gene) come together so tightly that they might switch genes. The process keeps going, metaphase, anaphase, telophase…but instead of stopping there, then the process starts again with the 2 daughter cells at prophase 2, then goes into metaphase 2, anaphase 2, telophase 2 and this is what’s able to create the 4 daughter cells. In males, each of the 4 cells will become a sperm, however, in females, only one chosen cell will become the egg. This is important because if you remember in prophase 1, in meiosis, the homologous pairs are so tightly wrapped around each other that the genes sometimes swap. So when anaphase occurs and pulls these new sequence of genes to the different daughter cells, there’s a chance that one of the new sequence of genes in chromosomes that carries an undesirable disease has ended up in the one chosen egg.

 

This unit was interesting to learn about because we were able to discover a lot about ourselves and why our DNA came to be the way they are. It was also really cool to see how certain people come to have a mutation or inherited disease through looking at the DNA and their parents’ DNA. We mostly studied using the different directed reading worksheets that quizzed us on what we learned in class/the textbook but there were also a few informative videos we were able to watch that really helped us to understand what was happening in the 2 processes of cell reproduction. There have been current advances in genetic technology and scientists are currently working on a method that will allow them to be able to take a mutation in someone’s gene that causes them to have a disease and to cut out that specific gene out and replace it with a normal one. This is way more advanced than anything before because it’s actually stopping the root of the disease and not just giving the people drugs that will help combat the symptoms of the disease. The future of genetic modification is rapidly approaching with the help of advancements in technology and this will help people, especially ones with life altering diseases to live, not just survive.

News Article: The Mystery Of The Disappearing Rats

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The Mystery of the Disappearing Rats

September 4, 2017
Paula Hsiao

On August 26, at around 8 pm Saturday, a rat was spotted running up the stairs before disappearing beneath the TV set and refrigerator. Witnesses at the scene say the rat was fairly small, compared to the other rats they’ve seen, but very quick. However, people at the scene during the incident say they could not find the rat after it’d ran under the TV, and that they are still searching.

According to the witnesses at the scene, they were just enjoying their dinner in front of the TV when the rat first appeared. One of the family members who first saw the ray way that the rat had been running up the stairs very fast when she’d seen it. That was supposedly when she screamed, which grabbed the attention of the others who were also there at the time. The screamed is said to have startled the rat, who ran underneath the television before any bystanders were able to catch it or hit it with a broom.

The family member who first say the rat says that “this is the 2nd time this has happened, so I think there must be a hole in the back door. There was another ray that had gotten in somehow a couple months ago and had run up the stairs the same way. So there must be a hole or something somewhere if they were able to climb up the same way.” The family is not too sure about where the rats were coming from though because they make sure to check that all their doors are closed every day.

“We waited so long for the rat to come out and we had even moved everything near the television away, but the TV set is right under the staircase so it’s a snug fit for humans. The rats have no trouble hiding there though,” claimed another family member at the scene. The rat was not able to be found despite their best efforts, so the family, who have said they’re going to set traps, says they have to take extra precautions with leaving doors open now.