The Truth Of Happiness Project
During this project we learned about what the truth of happiness is. We started off by reading a book called Brave New World. We read this book, because it showed us about a dystopia where people were tricked to think they were happy thought this fake world with drugs, sex and brainwashing. Next, we looked into the science and studies about why we are happy and what is making us feel this way. We read a lot of articles and watched a couple movies to show up different opinions to help us form our own. We also created happiness experiments. For a week we chose to do something that we thought would make us more happy, and took notes on how it was making us feel and how our happiness levels were changing. Finally we created a movie to show what the truth of happiness was to us, through the movie we contributed everything we learned throughout the project to make the watchers understanding even better.
Happiness Movie:
Annotated Bibliography:
Happiness Experiment:
Reflection:
- What have you discovered your truth of happiness is?
- What was the greatest challenge you faced in this project and how did you work through it?
- How have you grown as a group worker in this project? If you did this individually, why did you choose to and how did this choice impact your project?
- If you could refine any part of this project, thinking back through the entire project, Brave New World through experiments to videos, what would you refine, and how would you refine it?
Socialization and Mask Project
In the beginning of Freshman year we did the Socialization and Mask project. At first we learned about how people are socialized by their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, religion, and ability/disability. We learned about culture and different norms inside that culture. Also about targets and how they are who people look at as "bad." Then, we read and annotated the book Mexican Whiteboy, and had a sarcastic seminar on it. After that, we wrote essays on how we have been socialized, and made masks showing something that we are hiding. Finally we planed our exhibition, and had it.
My Mask:
Always Judging:
Project Reflect:
Throughout the socialization project I feel I grew the most as a writer. This was the first essay that I wrote that I feel I really connected with on a personal level. Everything I was writing about was true and happening to me. This was hard for me sometimes, because I knew that people were gonna read it. I never like to talk about my feelings and I always hold things in. I used this essay as a way I could talk about certain things. This is a quote from my essay. “We are told don't be stupid, don't get in trouble, don't get hurt, don't do drugs, don’t drink, don't do this don't do that. Do you think telling us this is really helping?” I feel this is a really important point, because I feel it is very true, and it shows how I am letting how I feel about different things out. At first I was scared to show my parents my essay, because I wasn't sure what they would think of it. I had to explain certain thing but they understood. I have never written an essay like this and i feel it helped me grow a lot. Now I know how to and feel I can connect to the essays I write. Also this was one of the longer essays I have written, i feel me connecting with the topic helped me to write more. For further essays I will find things that I can connect with and this will help power my writing.
The largest take away I got from this project was learning how media is affecting how people are socialized by media to think that their is a right and a wrong when it comes to gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ability and beliefs. This has really impacted me and how I look at the world. Before I was pretty oblivious to things like how some men will treat woman, how some white people will treat colored people, and most of all how in media they show that the “beautiful” people are all white, skinny, really exposed woman, and white, strong, men. I didn't realize how much media is affecting me and making me feel better in some ways but mostly worse about myself, my looks, and my beliefs. This project has been really hard on me in that way and has made me really aware of these thing which I feel is a good thing but has left me in tears some days. My Thesis from my essay shows how i feel I am being affected. “Being a female teenager society and media has affected me in many ways, feeling like I need to be a skinny, and curvy as a female, and immature, dumb, or bad as a teenager.” Media and people surrounding me has made me feel like this and I wasn't as aware of this until this project. I feel everyone should do this project at some point in their lives it has really opened my eyes to what is happening in our lives, and has opened me up to how I am affected by it.
I feel like I haven't really grown that much as a project worker. I have had exhibitions before and they were all different than this one but I have don't some similar things. For this project when I can to working on the project I was confused on what I should be doing so I would go mess around with friends. When it was the day of the exhibition i finally got my act together and worked really hard to finish up our room, but still when I had extra time I would go mess around. One time my partner left to go do something so I decided to go look at the different rooms and I just started to talk to people and ended up distracting myself and them. This is something I will work on for further exhibitions.
As a group member I contributed to my group a lot and took a leader role in the project. Some of my partners were messing around and we it was exhibition day so I took the role to make sure we had everything and were doing what we needed to do. When somebody wasn't doing what they should (sometimes it was me) I would give them something to do so we could get everything dont in time for the exhibition. We ended up being one of the first groups with a completely finished room. After school on the day of the exhibition it was only me and colton so we had to work extra hard. I would always give him something to do so we could finnish. If we did this project over I would make our room a little more interactive. It had things for the parents to listen to and watch but not a game or something hands on and interactive. I was a little difficult to find to so something to do that was offensive but I think if we put more effort into it I could have been really cool.
The largest take away I got from this project was learning how media is affecting how people are socialized by media to think that their is a right and a wrong when it comes to gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ability and beliefs. This has really impacted me and how I look at the world. Before I was pretty oblivious to things like how some men will treat woman, how some white people will treat colored people, and most of all how in media they show that the “beautiful” people are all white, skinny, really exposed woman, and white, strong, men. I didn't realize how much media is affecting me and making me feel better in some ways but mostly worse about myself, my looks, and my beliefs. This project has been really hard on me in that way and has made me really aware of these thing which I feel is a good thing but has left me in tears some days. My Thesis from my essay shows how i feel I am being affected. “Being a female teenager society and media has affected me in many ways, feeling like I need to be a skinny, and curvy as a female, and immature, dumb, or bad as a teenager.” Media and people surrounding me has made me feel like this and I wasn't as aware of this until this project. I feel everyone should do this project at some point in their lives it has really opened my eyes to what is happening in our lives, and has opened me up to how I am affected by it.
I feel like I haven't really grown that much as a project worker. I have had exhibitions before and they were all different than this one but I have don't some similar things. For this project when I can to working on the project I was confused on what I should be doing so I would go mess around with friends. When it was the day of the exhibition i finally got my act together and worked really hard to finish up our room, but still when I had extra time I would go mess around. One time my partner left to go do something so I decided to go look at the different rooms and I just started to talk to people and ended up distracting myself and them. This is something I will work on for further exhibitions.
As a group member I contributed to my group a lot and took a leader role in the project. Some of my partners were messing around and we it was exhibition day so I took the role to make sure we had everything and were doing what we needed to do. When somebody wasn't doing what they should (sometimes it was me) I would give them something to do so we could get everything dont in time for the exhibition. We ended up being one of the first groups with a completely finished room. After school on the day of the exhibition it was only me and colton so we had to work extra hard. I would always give him something to do so we could finnish. If we did this project over I would make our room a little more interactive. It had things for the parents to listen to and watch but not a game or something hands on and interactive. I was a little difficult to find to so something to do that was offensive but I think if we put more effort into it I could have been really cool.