My Eightfold path to waffles

                Today in Human Geography we continued the culture unit by starting a PowerPoint on world religions. Of course, the first religion we covered was Christianity. I had no idea there were so many denominations for Christians! I did know all the names presented, but I had never really thought about how many there were until I saw the list. The second religion was Islam. The two main denominations of Islam are the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Sunnis outweigh the Shiites in about a 3:1 ratio, and in the Middle East they actually bomb each other and fight against each other because of their religion. You usually don’t hear about this because you don’t generally get news about stuff like this unless it affects you in some way. There are a lot of contradictions in the religion, and it has a lot of tradition involved that affects how their society works (the role of women for example). Their main basis of teaching is the Five Pillars, being testimony, prayer, alms-giving, fasting, and surprisingly, pilgrimage. The third religion we covered was Hinduism. Mostly all Hindus live in India (for whatever reason, I’m not sure). Hindu teaching consists of thousands of short verses meant to be memorized and sung, and all composed in a book called the Vedas. Hinduism isn’t really a religion, it’s actually more like a set of principles or philosophies to follow. The next religion was Buddhism, with the largest stretch of possible numbers on the list. Buddhism is similar in the formatting to Buddhism, in the ways that it is very philosophical. However, Buddhism is more strict and more like a religion than Hinduism. Buddhism has its own set of rules called the Eightfold path. These eight principles tell you how to have a better life. Buddhism has a large area in Asia, being concentrated in China, Japan, southeast Asia, and Nepal.

Soda bath for the elderly... The Fountain of Youth!!!

Today in Human Geography we continued our culture PowerPoint. The next slide we went what language meant. It was mostly like last time but even more deep into it. The slide said that language can unite regions in some ways, even if they are not legally bonded. There were two examples given, and I think one was about the Middle East and one about somewhere in Europe. The slide also talked about how language can also divide a region, where two different languages can be spoken in close proximity, creating a sort of divide between two areas (language barriers, anyone?). Cultural characteristics are a part of everyday life, and Mr. Schick had put in a map that showed the different amounts of people in the U.S. that call soda different things (pop, coke, soda, other). It was interesting to see the regional influence on the culture, and also interesting to see how the 100^TH monkey theory proved to be correct in some cases. An example was Florida at the southern tip. You would normally think, “Oh, it must be the influence of Cuban immigrants!” but you would be wrong. The change in the regional soda-naming was actually caused by a large number of northern retirees moving to Florida (In that specific area) which caused the regional name to change from one term to another.

I came back better than Arnold Schwarzenegger!

                Today in Human Geography we started a PowerPoint on cultures. We first went over the definition of culture. Mr. Schick, as usual, went out of his way to get three sources for the same definition. Overall, a summary of the three definition is that a culture, or culture, is a behavior or knowledge shared by a group of people, that are usually passed from generation to generation. There was a long list of points on the next slide that covered what culture could be and then some. However, there was another slide with the key elements, being language, values, norms, and beliefs, social activity and interaction, and the arts and sciences. Language, by definition, is a set of symbols used to assign and communicate meaning. Language can be represented as the spoken word or written symbols. Language also enables us to find meaning for the things in and around us, and communicate about it. Beliefs can be represented by religion, faith (which I thought was the same thing as religion), or family. Norms a behaviors or activities that are considered to be ‘normal’ by the culture there. Norms can be anything culture related, as long as it is present in the way a society acts.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Mr. Schick!

                Today in Human Geography we had our world leaders test. Of course, I played MLG airhorn noises (I got some pretty funny looks from some people for that). When we got to study time I was actually watching videos about LEGO replicas of video game guns, and there are some really good copies of them. I eventually did study, but it was only for a couple seconds to re-review the information. Mr. Schick had us do our pre-test prayer, and then talked about the test a little bit. He said that he wanted all capital and legible letters, and that after the test we could do stuff, but not to distract others with what we’re doing. When I looked at the test, it was relatively easy, and most of it involved elimination. I turned my test in first from my knowledge, and Mr. Schick using his X-ray vision automatically knew it was an 89, which he promptly wrote on my test in pencil. Once I got my test done, I did this blog.

Captain America destroys communism!

                Today in Human Geography we continued our world leaders PowerPoint. For the first couple leaders I already had their information, because I went through the PowerPoint a little bit ahead of where we were and copied notes when I was done with what we were supposed to do. We looked at more corrupt leaders, more morally wrong leaders, and Trump (He gets his own section for reasons already obvious). While we went through the PowerPoint and we were on the slide about Syria’s leader al-Assad, Angela asked why didn’t the lowly Syrians rise against Assad and take power? There is a lot of complex politics that take place around this, so it’s very hard to explain to someone who has never really thought about it before. Luckily, due to Marvel comics and some other sources (but mostly Marvel comics) I learned about how this works. You’re probably thinking “James, how would Marvel comics help you learn politics”. The answer to this is quite simple. Back when communism and other such governments had more power (and do mean more power) comic books were printed during wartime to boost morale and help explain why the way other countries do things are bad. Sure, there were some stretches in the storyline to make it more interesting, such as a human-impersonating robot that was strong enough to take on the Avengers single-handedly, but the main ideas remain the same. Tyrants with big weapons create a sort of elite group of people with power. Those people get guns and resources from the tyrant, and they make their own groups. Each time the amount of power given out is lower, until you reach the common people. This system is mostly based on a lost and greed for power, or simply because an underling wants to stay on the good side of the local leader who has everyone else with him and against you. If do or say anything that displeases the higher parties, they will most likely threaten or destroy you (in the case of Syria) so that you can’t influence others. There are other factors that go into this, and they can get very complicated, but this is the basics of it. Another point that came up was about Vladimir Putin and nuclear war. It was a short conversation by our standards, but I believe that as long as nuclear power can destroy a world, no one will use it, simply because everyone would start pushing buttons and everyone would die. After that, there would be nothing to rule, and there would be no point in firing the missiles in the first place (or there would be no one left alive). Just for reference on that Marvel comics politics thing, all of this occurs in Avengers issue #18 (You should be able to see it on Marvel.com with a free preview).

20% more jump scares than the leading brand....

Today Mr. Schick was absent from class so we had a sub. I didn’t know who our sub was, and I also didn’t figure it out for the whole class. However, he seemed like he was a tech guy because when we were in class he was talking about the class feedback graph. During advisory the when everyone tried to get on the site it worked for basically no one because the servers couldn’t handle the amount of people trying to access it all at once. During the class he had us do the survey for, and it worked. Since Mr. Schick wasn’t here we were left with the Google Slides presentation that we were looking at yesterday. During our sort of study hall I used the Google Slides presentation to fill in the incorrect slides on my own Google Slides Presentation. I was pretty surprised when I saw that Mr. Schick wrote in the corrections in red, but it wasn’t too hard to finish it up correctly. I had lots of fun filling in the correct or missing pictures with some choice pictures I found on Google, so my Google Slides presentation is now filled with 20% more creepy pictures of politicians.

My PowerPoint?

                Today in Human Geo we continued learning about world leaders. Everyone looked at my world leader PowerPoint while I was in NYC, which seems pretty weird. I asked Kate what everyone thought of my picture of the Queen, and she said the class talked about it for a long time. The PowerPoint we looked at contained the leaders of each country, their government, and a picture of them. This was the same as last time, however for each leader there was a second slide that contained extra information on the leader. In class we went through the slides for Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, and Israel. It was interesting to look at leader’s backgrounds, as many of them had something or other about them that was corrupt. It was also interesting to see that multiple leaders are basically geniuses. What was really funny is that the current president of Brazil is under scrutiny for corruption, while the previous president was impeached for the very same reason. I also thought the Israeli president interesting, especially his quote about the state of Israel and the Holocaust.

NYC Trip

                Today instead of going to school today and attending Human Geography, I got to go to NYC and look at art. You may say, “James, isn’t skipping school bad? And don’t you just make fun of the art that you see the whole time you’re there?”. The answer to both of those questions is yes and yes. After getting up at 5:00, I got dressed and left the house. On the way to school me and my dad stopped at Wawa to get breakfast and bumped into of the guys that are in my art class and also attending the field trip. When I got on the bus, I sat around for a little bit and ate my breakfast while everyone waited for all of the attendees of our field trip to get on the bus. We got to pick our seats, and there was only one other guys freshman that I knew (who didn’t sit next to me) so I sat next to my chaperone for the trip. On the way there we organized our groups. I got asked to be in a group by a girl that I sit with at lunch, and I joined. Unfortunately, there was no guys in the group so I just spent the day walking around with two of the group members (both freshmen who take AP Human Geo. Sorry Mr. Schick.). This trip was supposed to be educational, and it was, but not to the extent of a normal field trip. The main idea was that you would go around and see art from different cultures, and learn something from it. We visited the Metropolitan Museum of art first. This museum contains lots of old art from a collection of cultures, and the first room was Greek art. There was a Greek bathtub in the room with a description that said Greek bathtubs were eventually turned into coffins for Christians during a certain time period. There was an Australian native room filled with large wood sculptures representing various things, such as avenging the dead. Once we left we went to lunch in a place called the Chelsea marketplace, and I can successfully say that if there were ever a place that can be for millennials, it was that place. The whole setting was intentionally made to look rustic, but had many modern aspects about it, such as tahini. Afterwards we went to the Whitney Museum of modern art, which I highly suggest you don’t go to. I thought modern art was weird, but they made it exponentially weirder. Some of the floors were OK, even if they were weird. One of them called the Dreamland floor, had a sort of virtual experience that seemed like you were dreaming. It actually seemed like a dream, and they had a whole floor below it devoted to the develop of the art in that section. Unfortunately, after this trip I think I’m going to have permanent ‘Nam flashbacks about it because of the things that were on that floor that I’m not privileged to write about on the Internet as a Christian. My group skipped through half of that floor because of how weird it was. After going through the whole museum, we had an extra hour of time which we spent walking on the elevated garden. My group dragged me to a coffee shop, and then we got on a bus and went back to school.

America's got talent Trump style

                I am relieved to see that today Donald Trump has won the election. Mr. Schick gave out prizes to only two people in our class, because only two people out of our whole class said Trump was going to win (against all odds). One of them got an American flag balloon, and the other got a jigsaw puzzle. After that, we discussed what we thought Trump was going to do in his first year in the White House. Turns out this is also a project. Yay. I think that the first thing Trump will most likely do in office is abolish Obamacare. There are multiple reasons why Trump would want to, one being that he dislikes Obama. Trump will most likely want to get rid of whatever ‘legacy’ that Obama has left behind, even if there isn’t much there. Secondly, it is a relatively easy thing to do on his to-do list. Trump will also be able to test his new power over the nation through this, and use it as a warming up for his bigger projects. I think Trump will not be able to finish much else in the coming year, mostly because everything that he plans on doing is a long-term plan. I’m mostly guessing that this will be mostly foundation laying and planning. One thing that I have almost no doubt about is that Donald Trump will find new and innovative ways to make his plans work. You have to remember, Trump didn’t get his fortune by doing what everyone else did. The fact that he’s president now shows that he thinks creatively and diversely or he wouldn’t have tried to run (or even gotten elected if he did). Trump is, and always will be, a businessman, and will most likely think like one throughout his term. The one thing that differentiates him from a normal businessman is that he has passion. This is what drives him to do what he does and how he thinks. This combination should make him an effective leader, even if he’s never led a government before. I’ve included a little video that should make you laugh (just in case you’re sad Hillary lost).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jbHgJUDUYg

Confirmation class in school....well.....that's interesting.

Today in Human Geography we watched videos and then discussed them. We introduced shadows, then Mr. Schick started the discussion. He discussed his opinion on who was going to win, and about an SNL skit where ‘Trump’ and ‘Clinton’ make up and go around and hug random people. Kiana pulled up some statistics, and we discussed those. Unfortunately, Trump is at a steady drop according to the polls, but I can still hang on to the hope that they’re wrong. After that, PBJ/bowling ball girl (The one, the only) Mackenzie Hopkins suggested we watch a video about a man who sued the school system for what he thought they were doing wrong. What was funny about this video is that it reminds of all these teen oriented videos that we watch in Confirmation class in the way that he presented his information. Some of the similarities are that he used lots of analogies, rhymed his sentences (I think?), and paused but spoke loudly. Watch a couple videos like I’m talking about and you’ll get it. After watching the video we had a discussion on what we thought about the video. I agreed with the man, that we should personalize education to fit the student and not the other way around, and improve the way we teach, but there are some things that you can’t get rid of in a traditional school system. It’s good to start kids out in a structured school system, because this helps build the ability to think in a structured format, which is an important thinking skill. Even with creativity, if you can’t focus long enough on a task to complete it (or even start) you’ll get nowhere.

Octopus Electoral Ballot

                Today in Human Geography we did election predictions. We had two shadows that were introduced (I knew neither of them) and then Mr. Schick gave us our class assignment. Our assignment was to gather information to form an educated guess on who was going to win the election. Whoever got the exact numbers would win a prize (Bet you it’s a bumper sticker that is themed with some sort of election joke). We had to get four answers, who we thought was going to win, the electoral votes for each candidate, and the popular vote percentages. I was originally just going to use whatever an octopus thought as my answer, considering there’s one that predicts the Super Bowl winner, and the president accurately (Hey, octopuses are really smart). Unfortunately I couldn’t even use it as a tiebreaker because the only octopus predicting an election predicted Raila would get presidency in some overseas country. Instead, I used my second best formula. I took all the numbers from the polls for each candidate and averaged them out to figure out the best number for each statistic. Unfortunately, my computer was having trouble loading and maintain the pages, so I only got through the electoral votes and didn’t get to the popular vote section. Secondly, Hillary Clinton won on every poll, so I had to write Hillary on the board to win the election (Curse you electoral college voting system!).

Hawkmoon building instructions

Today in Human Geography we were supposed to have a sub. When we got to Mr. Schick’s classroom, we sat around a little bit waiting for the sub to arrive. When we finally realized there wasn’t one coming, the supervising teacher looked around for answers and told us we were taking a field trip to classroom 319. When we got up to the class, the sub took attendance and we were told to keep working on our Factbook project. It took me most of the class period, but I managed to get it done. When I got done, I went to the bungie website (a game making company) and looked around. The reason I was doing this is that you can get a lot of information about real time events happening in the game form the site, and I wanted to see if anything new was posted. I didn’t find any information about the Halloween event going on or anything else really important, but I found this really cool website (I’ll put a link down below for it). I spent the rest of class exploring this website, and I learned quite a bit on how plastics are used to create different objects through molds and all the interesting nerd stuff is on the web.

http://www.impactprops.net/

Bat-dawg!

                Today in class we continued on in our section using the World Factbook. Unfortunately, even though the Cubs won, we didn’t get a free period. For the first fifteen minutes of class we discussed the final World Series game (which I only saw 3 minutes of) and how it was such a cliffhanger of who was going to win. After that Mr. Schick discussed that even though we were getting through the Factbook pretty well, he still wanted to help us try to ‘connect the dots’ on it. Mr. Schick assigned us the assignment of finding more information about the countries that we recently researched about world leaders. What was awkward is that Mr. Schick forgot where we were work-wise and tried to get us to do something that we weren’t ready for (oops!). Once that was sorted out, we continued our research about the countries. Mr. Schick occasionally flashed more pictures on the board that he took while he was away (Bat-dog, anyone?) and started looking up pictures of the ‘hot Canadian prime minister’ with the girls. When I saw this I sort of just sat there and thought “What is this man doing? He really shouldn’t be feeding Kate Gromacki’s fantasies about Canadians!”. I managed to get a couple slides done, but didn’t manage to finish.

How the World Series really went

                Today in Human Geography Mr. Schick returned from his trip to the World Series. Mr. Schick wasn’t actually able to purchase tickets for spots at the game, but he was outside the park partying all night (Just joking Mr. Schick). Mr. Schick talked about how all of this is tied to his family because his whole family are Cub’s fans. Mr. Schick also showed us some pictures of him there, which were pretty cool. When he was going through the pictures, one of them was of just his face with the entrance to the stadium behind him. The smile on his face was clearly of pure joy, but I almost fell out of my seat from surprise (Still joking Mr. Schick). Mr. Schick showed us more pictures, and while he was doing so told us why he took the pictures and what was going on. Mr. Schick also showed us a video that a crazy man on his flight took of the man walking down the aisle while getting all the Cub’s fans to sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’. Unfortunately, the Cubs lost that night and the weird man’s video somehow never had Mr. Schick in it, which left me wondering if Mr. Schick was sitting in higher class seats than the weird man taking the video. Mr. Schick also talked about how odd the time delays were when he was watching a game that was occurring only a couple hundred feet away over ‘live’ television. People would cheer in the stadium, but everyone outside was just left wondering what was going on inside until the pitcher pitched the ball a couple seconds later. Mr. Schick also talked about the different places he walked to in order to see the game, and I thought that the whole story was pretty interesting (Teacher stories are always really good).