Claire's views of the Skype eventDiana was in charge of the group in the Peer Tutoring Center and her Japanese contacts were Miu and Rensei. I led the group in the Quiet Room and we skyped with Shikoh, Momoko, and Himari. I had met these students at the High School Diplomats program at Princeton.
HSD is a 10 day cultural exchange program each summer for sophomores and juniors. The goal is to share our cultures together. We teach them about American holidays, everyday life and they do the same for Japan. We all made several presentations about our nations, during the program. Categories included government, education, social issues, and regional characteristics. The students we Skyped with were among the 40 Japanese students who came to the US to participate. I learned about the program when I went to a lunch event at WAHS where several current students presented about their High School Diplomat experience. After I participated in the program, I planned a similar event to tell others about it. I put an announcement in homeroom messages and made a slide show to present during a lunch event. About 15 students came and 2 have applied for this summer! Some of the topics in my Skype group:
Several Japanese students talked about how their schools are more heavily academic. They don’t have Spirit Week, but they do have sports festivals, where everyone participates and grade-level teams compete. Once they answered the questions, we had a broader cultural discussion. They talked about the differences between Christmas here and in Japan. It is a holiday, but mostly not a big deal. People work and for many people it is not a religious day. Christmas eve is a huge night for couples. It is aa time to reserve a fancy restaurant, and spend time with your significant other. New Year’s Day is their big holiday. It is Jan 1st and it is a day of celebration, usually with cake. Valentine’s Day is very different there. Girls give guys chocolate and the on White Day, March 14th, guys give girls chocolate. The Skype meeting was fun! It’s so valuable to see my peers interact with these students and learn about their lives. I wish we would seek out opportunities more to interact with people who come from different cultures. Schools need to make it a priority. In the real world, it is really important to be able to collaborate and learn from people who are not the same as you. We need to combine our differences and have a greater understanding.
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Diana Kim, Multicultural Club FounderWhen I first started the WAHS Multicultural Club, the primary goal was to make WAHS more culturally aware. We’ve been going through ideas for events and activities, to keep the club more active. In school, we’re given technology to use, and I think we should use it to our full advantage. I began to research how to use technology at school to learn about culture and one thing that popped up was videochat. Then I looked into how to connect with international classrooms. I talked to Claire Aminuddin, our club VP.. During the summer she had gone to High School Diplomats, a cultural exchange program at Princeton, where she met Japanese students. We decided to connect to the group chat they had.
We picked a date to meet, Feb. 1st, and we skyped with five Japanese students, three on the screen in one room, and two in the other. The best way to adapt to the time difference was to get to school early. 8am for us is 10pm at night for them. Claire developed conversation starters as a plan B in case we didn’t know what to ask. I thought the conversations flowed really well. We had a lot of things to compare. The Japanese students all speak English really well. English is part of their curriculum. I think they start learning English at a young age. There wasn’t much of a language barrier, and we were grateful for their ability to speak English. Topics included:
Diana Kim is a WAHS sophomore. She is active in band,and interested in politics and international relations. In addition to founding the Multicultural Club, Diana is a part of Model U.N., We the People, is an officer of the Crozet Library Teen Advisory Board, and is an intern with the Downtown Crozet Initiative. Read Diana's post about Over The Moon Bookstore for the DCI here. I was in the Virtual Reality lab last year, and Mr. Osborn described A Tech in a way that interested me. I go there and WAHS this year.
I've always done art, but not in a serious way until sophomore year. My mother bought me some watercolor paint and I started with portraits. I didn't have a lot of experience with watercolor and I wasn't happy with my first results. I discovered a technique that made for a more complete look. The color blending was tricky, but I was fiddling around and tried drawing on top of the paint. I wanted to find a method to make clear crisp lines, to highlight the different shades. I drew the shapes with paint, and then outlined them with a black Micron pen. I love Micron pens! They come in a range of sizes and colors and are great for drawing over paint. For the makeup on one of the portraits, I needed a sparkle effect, so I drew circles with a white gel pen on top of the watercolor paint. Then I outlined them with a Micron pen. I like the bright white of the gel pen, it's a pure white. This method allows me to create highlights anywhere, as opposed to using white paint or planning for the paper to be the white element. I had an idea for a digital piece: Checkerboard World. I wasn't sure how I could produce it. I had learned some things in Digital Imaging class with Ms. Burnette, so I looked for an alternative to Photoshop. I ended up downloading PhotoscapeX; it has fewer tools, but it's free. For digital drawings, I use the touchpad on my Macbook Air. I have some of my work up on Depop. It's not an ideal platform, but the tax side of Etsy looked complicated. Etsy seems more for people with a business who are looking to have more reach. After a summer art program in Philadelphia, I decided that I didn't want to go to an art school so I had to find a new career path that included art. I've always been interested in psychology and mental health issues, so when I heard about art therapy as a field, I thought, "This is exactly what I need to do." Macy Baisch is a WAHS/Albemarle Tech senior. In the fall, she'll be studying Art Therapy at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC Guest post by Diana Kim, WAHS Multicultural Club President and Crozet Public Library Teen Advisory Board officer The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center presents the soil from John Henry James’s lynching at the Crozet Library. The display features a digital presentation next to the display case where people will be able to learn about the history and the lynching of James. The exhibition provides pictures of documents, and guides the people through the events of what happened. According to the Daily Progress, the display case used to hold the statuette of Robert E. Lee; however, it now contains a jar of soil with history. The day James was lynched, a mob of white and black people stopped the train. He was heading back from Staunton, awaiting his charges of criminally assaulting a white woman in Charlottesville. The African Americans were there hoping to prevent the lynching. However, they were unsuccessful. James was lynched on July 12, 1898. To learn more about the lynching, visit the Crozet Library to see the display, or check out the Daily Progress article here. As part of the Cville One Book project, Angie Thomas Skyped with an audience at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Here is intern Lexie's thoughtful reporting. I attended Angie Thomas’s Skype session with Charlottesville about her debut novel and instant success: The Hate You Give. Angie was up on a screen and the crowd below had the opportunity to ask her questions.
First, though, Angie commended Charlottesville for being an example for the nation as how to properly combat hate with love. She answered countless questions, but one thing she said really stood out to me. A woman asked what Angie thought about white people taking charge of black rights movements, like Black Lives Matter. At first I thought to myself: Well, anyone of any color should be able to work for racial justice. You shouldn’t have to be black to do that. Angie paused for a second. Then she told the crowd about the black woman who climbed up a flagpole to remove the confederate flag, and how the police were going to send an electric shock through it to force her down. Then a white man stepped in and hugged the pole; if she got shocked, he would get shocked, too. The police relented. She explained that the people who have faced discrimination should have their voices heard and projected by the support of those with privilege. Angie also connected this with the Chris, Starr’s white boyfriend in The Hate You Give. Chris assisted Starr in her protest, while also allowing her voice to be fully heard. This concept helps me a lot when thinking What can I do? Angie also talked a lot about code-switching: changing the way you talk, act, even think to match expectations. She said that everyone code switches; you talk differently with your friends than you do with your teachers or bosses. This hits an extreme for Starr, who has to switch from her “black” mode in the rough neighborhood where she lives to her “white” mode in her preppy private school. People shouldn’t have to code switch - especially when it’s because one culture is more widely accepted over the other. Angie said she didn’t believe in color blindness, either. You can be blind to the skin difference of someone, but that’s being blind to their culture and heritage, too. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is equal, but yes: everyone is different. After Angie’s inspiring seminar, there was a student panel. Two of the students were biracial, and they said they struggled with being seen as only black or only white, too black or too white. People need to stop using cookie-cutters when trying to place others in specific categories. There is no way to “act black” or “act white” or “act purple,” for that matter. Those are colors. Not actions. You are what you are, and that’s not an act. - Lexie Farris Do you enjoy creative writing? Have you ever read a book and thought “Geez, I could write a better book than that”? Are you up for a challenge? If your answer to any of these questions is YES, you should think about participating in NaNoWriMo this November! NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every November hundreds of thousands of writers challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel, beginning at midnight on November 1st, ending at midnight on the 30th. Although this sounds like a daunting task, it breaks down to writing roughly 1,667 words per day. Okay, that still sounds daunting—but it’s totally doable. And the payoff? If you hit that 50,000 word mark, you have written a freakin’ book! Don’t think you have enough time to bang out 1,667 words a day? We can help with that! Ms. Phillips is hosting informal lunchtime write-ins for the whole month. Come to the Terracotta Warrior Room in the library during lunch, November 1st through 30th, and write while you eat! For more information, check out nanowrimo.org, or talk to Ms. Phillips in the library. The Library is hosting a book club on Thursdays to discuss The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The book club is sponsored by Ms.Archey and Ms.Laux and endorsed by the Big Idea Club. Copies of the book are free for students in the Library and book club meetings will include casual discussions and snacks. The book club is a result of a Cville One Book project to distribute copies of the book in the Charlottesville area.
Rosie Herrmann Diana Hale, a mail artist who had an exhibit recently in the Crozet Library, visited the Western Albemarle library to discuss her work. Mail art is a type of art where artists change or add to small items sent to them in the mail and send them to others. For her show at the Crozet Library, Hale sent pieces of vintage homework to mail artists around the world. (See her call for participants here. )The mediums used to create the resulting show were varied and often innovative. The artists used string, home-made stamps, paint, pens, and in one case a tool used to burn small holes in the paper. This was very interesting to me because I had not heard about mail art before and because it was very interesting to see all of the different mediums used to create the art. Rosie Herrmann While I am neither talented nor knowledgeable in the visual arts, I am fascinated by the idea of MAIL art, especially because it is proven to actually work well. I love drawing parallels with music, and I think this is one of those rare areas where music was ahead of art: musicians, in recording covers of other musicians' songs, have for a long time had a way of putting their own personal touch on an artist's piece. But this kind of idea of contributing art, especially on something already made (like the science experiment pages), seems to be a relatively new and exciting equivalent for the visual arts (thanks, I suppose, to the internet and globalization).
Josiah Luftig |
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