Below are 5 of my favorite poems that I wrote this year in humanities:

 

Dreams:

Nexus, Nexus, Nexus

That’s all I get to say

Until the people come and change me

It’s “Introducing the new Nexus 5X”

Not many people pay attention to me

Maybe someone will listen soon

Oh! Here’s a kid. Maybe he’s listening to me!

No, he’s just taking a photo

Maybe he’ll buy a phone because of me

I doubt it

Maybe I’ll be a big billboard one day

Not a little bus station ad

I can have dreams too

Big dreams

I can be a billboard president

I could have a pictures of the greats on me

The I-mac,

Madame Tussauds,

KFC,

And maybe the New York Mets

But those are just dreams

They probably won’t happen

So I’m just stuck here forever

And ever

And ever

Until someone starts to realise

We aren’t just advertisement

We have lives

We have dreams

And they can all come true.

 

6 AM:

I wake up early

Damn alarm clock I hate you

Snooze bar is the best

 

Afterlife:

Why cling to a suffering life

When you could cling to your amazing afterlife

 

Where no one ever dies

Where no one ever lives

 

There is just peace

You may be reborn

Or stay in your paradise

 

As long as you look good in His eyes

You will never suffer

And He will give you

Another and another and another life

 

My poem in the style of Emily:
6 A.M.

 

The horrendous train

The lone person sleeps in peace

I am alone too

 

Strangers/Commute:

I see the hand move

I did not see his face well

My wallet is gone

 

In humanities we read a book called Shabanu, which is about a 12 year old girl living in Pakistan in the 70’s. We had to write an essay about the book, and I chose to write about how living in the desert for Shabanu is a lot harder than living in NYC. We did our body paragraphs first, and then intro/conclusion. We used a TEEAC format, which is:

Topic Sentence

Explanation

Evidence

Analysis

Conclusion.

Here is the link of my first draft of the body paragraphs:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xf-W8MqS7o6gF03D85b6I5GMn8rssaSnLZwiqF-DEnI/edit?usp=sharing

After the body paragraphs, we made our intro and conclusion paragraphs, which I wrote on the doc below, which turned into my final essay. Below is the link for my final Shabanu essay:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ptx4GthdzEijII2eNkOuWaOs2Ytf_3wH2hw3h1UEiGA/edit?usp=sharing

This is our Shabanuws! Real Estate edition video!

Video

 

Here is our script for the video:

Freddie: Welcome back to Shabanuws: Real Estate Edition! I am Amu Kamat reporting from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Today my fellow colleague, Tamak Uma, will be showing the very wealthy American Adam Soldairs, around a very fine mud house. Over to you, Tamak.

 

Will: Thank you, Amu. Now we will start the tour with Adam.  

 

Armant: Thank you Tamak, I’ve traveled far and wide to find the perfect house, and this might just be it.

 

Will: Now we have the entrance, a very grand and well built house. Did I mention, it has a very good door?

 

Armant: So if you want a place without any visitors, and no civilization for miles, then would this be the place?

 

Will: Yes, but watch out for Nazir Mohammed, he umm, he doesn’t exactly like people very much… Anyway, let’s go inside, I’m burning out here!

 

Will: Here is the main bathroom. It’s very nice, for it has a toilet and sink!

 

Armant: Very nice indeed. Can we pause for a second, I want to, uhh try out the bathroom.

 

Will: sorry for the interruption. Now, we are in the bedroom.

 

Armant: Quite a nice bedroom here, good bed, almost soundproof walls, and very relaxing. How solid are the walls though?

 

Will: As solid as mud can be.

Armant: I may have misheard you… did you say mud?

 

Will: The walls are almost entirely mud.

 

Armant: So then very fragile-(Screen buzzing thing)

Either we go to a different room or we go back to Freddie

 

Auntie is my least favorite Aunt. She is always grumps and going on and on about how Mama should have had sons instead of Phulan and I. “If God had blessed you with sons, we wouldn’t have to break our fingers over wedding dresses.” page 3. She also is married to Uncle, who works with the government. He visits some times and brings us presents because he is very rich. Although Auntie is married to a nice man and has 2 sons, she is always ungrateful. She hates helping around the house, and never smiles. God sends miracles when she smiles. If only Auntie was nicer, than living in the desert wouldn’t be as hard.

This is a picture of what I think Auntie looks like:

This is a sculpture of Auntie made by Io and Tilda:

 

“A puppy with a large, round belly and soft brown fur picks at my fingers with sharp teeth. … I hand the wriggly thing(Sher Dil) back to him(Dadi).” page 68. That is how I would describe Sher Dil. He’s a cute puppy that is a little fat and always with energy. I love watching him play with the boys. It is like he’s their third brother. He is also very good at organizing the camels. I was amazed when he got all of the camels into a special formation when we were leaving Mehrabpur. He not only got them into the formation, but he also calmed them down so the landlord Nazir wouldn’t find us from the camels loud noise. He is almost good enough to replace Guluband. I still miss Guluband.

This is a picture I found that looks like how I pictured Sher Dil:

source: http://www.polyvore.com/animals/collection?id=1696455

 

This is a drawing I made of how I picture Sher Dil:

In humanities this April, which is poetry month, we started writing poetry. We started by Dave sharing a doc of how to write different poems. It was called Various Poetry Activities. It explained how to write haikus, which are my favorite, memory poems and a lot more. We would then choose a type of poem to write, and using the rules of how to write it, write it. I’ve done mostly haikus, but I have also done memory poems. The first poem we wrote had to be a haiku, and I worked with Zach and Miles. We had inspiration from Zach, because he always breaks his phone.

MyPhone:

Phone’s are great friends, but

We all smash them way too much.

And then we feel dead.

In the next class we were allowed to do any poem we wanted to. I wrote a memory poem about the Mets winning a world series game. The next class we did a New York Times poetry competition haiku that had to be about NYC. There was 5 categories: Commute, strangers, 6am, the island, and one other. My favorite was a 6am one I wrote. It was about how I hate getting up for school in the morning.

6 AM:

I wake up early

Damn alarm clock I hate you

Snooze bar is the best
A strength I had with this was thinking of the idea of the poem. That is always the easiest part for me. A challenge I had was expressing it in words. Each line of the poems I normally write 3 or 4 times before I got a good one out. My goal is to not write just haikus and to try some other types of poems.

Letter

The first step we had to do was write a letter to a person we thought would be interesting to interview. I thought Larry, the p.e. teacher would be extremely interesting to interview because he has been teaching for so long. I wrote a letter to him asking if it was okay to interview him and some possible times I could interview him. When I gave him the letter we decided what time to do it at then.

Questions

My first idea was to ask him about how p.e. has changed over time. I started with that then I added a lot more questions, like how his childhood was different from ours, and some questions about sports. Below are my planned questions, but I asked a lot of follow up questions as well.

1. How long have you been teaching for?
2. How has teaching changed over the years? ex. the physical fitness test
3. Why did you start teaching P.E, did something motivate you or something?
4. What did you do before teaching p.e.
5. What job did you want to do when you were a kid
6. When did you start teaching
7. Have you taught anything besides P.E.
8. what was your favorite sport as a child/now
9. What team were you a fan of growing up/now a fan of
10. Where did you grow up
11. If you didn’t teach, what job would you want to have
12. Was it different when you were growing up then it is now, how was it different or not(Did you have different classes, where the classes different or just overall different)
13. Do you like teaching or would you prefer to do something else if you could

 

Interview

The third step was to interview your person, and ask them all the questions you had. We also had to record it so we could listen to it after the interview was over. I asked him around 25 questions in total including my pre-planned ones. Larry was very helpful by giving me as much possible information in every answer, which saved me from having to ask some of the follow up questions sometimes.

 

Step 2

After we interviewed the person we had to fill out a document to help us write the final piece. I wrote down the most interesting parts of the interview in certain boxes saying beginning, middle or end so I would have an easier time writing the final piece. I didn’t write the ending on here because I was having trouble with it on first, but when I started putting the whole thing together, I made the end so it flowed in with everything else

YOUR INTERVIEW PAPER

 

Once you’ve conducted and recorded your interview, rather than copying down every single word, you should take a very close look to find the most interesting responses. Jot down some of the most interesting bits here.

 

He has been teaching at LREI for 33 years, doing p.e. He went to one of the first Mets games at the Polo Grounds and one of the first Titans games, before they were the Jets, also at the Polo Grounds. He grew up in Brooklyn and went to public school there, all of his friends lived on the same block as him He became a Oakland Raiders fan because there quarterback, Ken Stabler, was a lot like him, left handed and bad knees His parents would give him 3$ to go to a Mets game, it cost 30 cents to ride the subway there and back, the ticket was 1.25 and the rest was for a hot dog, soda, and a box of cracker jack

 

• Was there something that surprised you?
• Are there different answers from different questions that you feel have a connection?
• Are there bits of information that you can chunk?
• What do you think the reader would find the most interesting to answer, “Who the heck are you?”

 

STRUCTURE:

THE BEGINNING

• You will have 3 sections to your interview — a beginning, middle and end. It’s up to you to decide how you want to chunk your information.
• Your paper should be two pages long.
• You should have 3-6 quotations.  At least 1 or 2 in each section.
• How will you grab the reader’s attention? How will you begin your paper? Your beginning should include a grabber statement about your interviewee. Will it be a direct quote? An unusual fact that you learned about him/her? Jot down some ideas here:

We all know Larry as our great P.E. teacher, but did you know he used to teach reading to kids who couldn’t read very well at a Board of Education High School? Did you know that Larry went to one of the Mets and Titans’(Jets) games? Did you know Larry thinks teaching P.E. is the “…best job in the world”? “I love working with kids, and what would be better than playing games and sports with kids all day?”

 

THE MIDDLE

The middle is the bulk of your interview; this is where your reader will find out the most information about your interviewee. Jot down some ideas for the middle of your interview.

 

Larry grew up in Brooklyn during the 50’s and 60’s. He has spent his whole life living in Brooklyn except for 2-3 months when he went to California to work at a friends business. He and everyone on his block went to the same public school. His two best friends lived across the street from him, one also called Larry.  Everyone on his block would walk to school together. I asked Larry how it was different growing up then it is now? He said the money was really different. Movies were 60 cents, Mets tickets were 1.25 and a subway ride was 15 cents. “The other thing that was different was that there was less people. You know, it just wasn’t as crowded. The city seems very crowded these days. There were less people around, more kids played in the streets, there was no video games, DVD players, there was none of that stuff. When I grew up there was no color T.V. All television shows where in black and white. So, that was a big difference when I was growin up too,” Larry said. Larry grew up in Brooklyn. He went to a public school, the same one as everyone else on his block. quote about how everyone on his block went to the same school, part with fat larry and skinny larry. He would go to Mets games with only $3 with him. It would only cost 30 cents for the subway there and back, 1.25 for the ticket, and 1.45 for a soda, cracker jack and hot dog. include part about how there was a smaller population… Larry was 8 when the Titans started as the Jets in 1959. He went to one of their first games at the Polo Grounds. He was 11 when the Mets started in 1962. He went to one of their first games as well, also at the Polo Grounds. Around that time between 1959-1962 the Titans, Yankees, Giants, Titans (giants/ maybe dodgers) played at the Polo Grounds. They all shared the same stadium because it cost to much for every team to have separate ones. He was a Giants football fan before the Titans came into play. His favorite player was the quarterback called Y.A. Tittle. As he got older, he became a bigger fan of a quarterback named Ken Stabler because…. quote about why he liked them w/ ken stabler. Larry has been teaching for 38 years in total. He has taught pe at LREI for 33 years. He used to only teach sports, but now he does the physical fitness test, all types of games and still the sports. He taught for 5 years at a Board of Education High School to kids who couldn’t read very well. Before teaching he worked at an afterschool community center, and even before that he was a postman. Childhood Stuff Sports Games Went to school Friends on same block Flag Football Job Larry taught for 38 years. Before he was a teacher he wanted to… When he first started teaching… He wanted to be a PE teacher because… His job has changed…

 

Final paper

Below is my final paper. I wrote it so it was like a biography of what Larry told me, in order from childhood until he got older. I’m very proud of it because I wrote most of it on my own, only little edits from other people.

 

Who the Heck is Larry?

by, Freddie

We all know Larry as our great P.E. teacher, but did you know he used to teach reading to kids who couldn’t read very well at a Board of Education High School? Did you know that Larry went to one of the first Mets and Titans (Jets) games at the Polo Grounds? Did you know Larry thinks teaching P.E. is the, “…best job in the world,”? “I love working with kids, and what would be better than playing games and sports with kids all day?”

 

Larry grew up in Brooklyn during the 50’s and 60’s. He has spent his whole life living in Brooklyn except for a few months when he went to California to work at a friend’s business. When he was younger, everyone on his block went to the same public school. That sounded really important to me, because then he had the same friends while growing up, he didn’t lose any of them. His two best friends lived across the street from him, one also called Larry. “Right across the street, two of my best friends(lived). One of my best friends was also called Larry, he was a big fat kid he was called fat Larry and I was called skinny Larry,” he said. All of his friends on his block would walk to school together. If they got to school early, they would go to a park where they would play basketball until school started. All of my friends live in different neighborhoods, so I thought that it would be really cool to have them live near me.

 

Larry was a big sports fan growing up. When he was a teenager his favorite player in football was a quarterback named Ken Stabler who was on the Oakland Raiders. Larry liked him because, “…their quarterback was a lot like me. He had bad knees, he was left handed, and he had a beard and long hair. I said, ‘Gee, that guy looks like me!’” Before Larry liked Ken Stabler he was a fan of Y.A. Tittle, the quarterback of the New York Giants.

 

The Money was a lot different in the 50’s and 60’s. Movies were 60 cents, Mets tickets were $1.25 and a subway ride was 15 cents. “The other thing that was different was that there was less people. You know, it just wasn’t as crowded. The city seems very crowded these days. There were less people around, more kids played in the streets, there was no video games, DVD players, there was none of that stuff. When I grew up there was no color T.V. All television shows where in black and white. So, that was a big difference when I was growing up too,” Larry said. That made me wonder if there was not as big of a population now, that kids would play outside more and not use X-Boxes all day, or if the X-Box would even exist.

 

Larry said school when he was growing up was a lot different than it is now. During his junior high school and middle school years he took a shop class. He took a class in ceramics, in metal work, and woodshop. He said the other classes were the same except he had separate english and history teachers, which would be like having Dave teach only english and Lynne teach only history. There was no humanities class.

 

Larry has been teaching for 38 years in total. He has taught P.E. at LREI for 33 years. He used to only teach sports, but now he does the physical fitness test, all types of games and still plays sports. He taught for 5 years at a Board of Education High School before LREI to kids who couldn’t read very well. Before teaching he also worked at an afterschool community center, organizing games there. Even before that, he was a postman. He didn’t like being a postman because he didn’t get to work with kids.

Larry Kaplan has a fascinating life. I wanted to interview Larry, because I knew he grew up at a different time than me, so I could infer that his childhood was different than mine. I knew from when we studied times around them in 4th grade, and learned how it was really different in the 1900’s than it is now. I used to think that Larry had only been a PE teacher, but now I know that he taught reading, worked at an afterschool program and was even a postman. We are lucky to have Larry as our amazing PE teacher, and not as our postman.

 

June 3, 1348

Dear Brother,

 

I hope that you are not dead yet. I hope you shall hear from me again, as I have the terrible pestilence. The other nearly hopeless flagellants and I have decided that the Jews are the reason of all this. The Jews were the reason of Jesus’s death, and we think that by whipping ourselves, and suffering the same pain as Jesus, we shall not get the terrible pestilence. We are also attempting to kill them avenge them for their horribleness. I got this dreadfulness anyway, so I have decided we are not whippings ourselves hard enough. I’m missing my old life now. Before I was a 28 year old farmer/peasant, now I’m half dead on a street covered in blood.

 

It is getting extremely bloody on these tiny little roads. As you know in little Sicily all our roads are tiny. All I hear is those painful whips hitting our nearly skinless body, and the terrible groans. And the sights I see, they kill me! So much blood, those crazy women putting our blood in their own eyes, it’s just a horrible sight! I taste all that blood as well, and I feel and smell it! All the blood is taking over my senses! It’s just terrible!

 

Below you shall see the symptoms of the pestilence. Then you can know if the whipping has helped you. At first you will get cold and hot simultaneously. You will feel extremely hot then extremely cold. After that you will start to cough blood. I hated this one because it gave me the terrible blood taste in my mouth again. Then you will get big odd colored bumps all over you. They sometimes pop and let out a gooey liquid. You’re pretty much dead by then, and you are dead after you have seizures. I hope this advice will help you in your later life.

 

You shall go and tell all of your friends and all our family to flagellant as well, in honor of me, and in hopes of protecting yourselves. If you do this you shall not get the pestilence, and saves the lives of others of whom we love and would hate to see the suffer the terrible five  days.

 

Good luck,

 

Joe Nivvy
P.S. Watch an eye on the family for me. I would hate to go back to France and get our whole lovely family sick as well.

At home I’m happy because I get to eat and sleep before going to school and I don’t have to do any work.  When I start to walk to school I’m sad because I have to walk a lot to get to school. I’m nervous on the corner of Greenwich and Spring because I always get worried that I’m going to be late for school. I’m tired at the corner of Varick and Vandam because my back starts to hurt from carrying my backpack and because I would prefer to sleep. On King street I get hungry because I realized I didn’t eat enough for breakfast. I’m annoyed at the crossing of Houston and 6th Avenue because you have to cross twice and the lights are offsetting. I’m angry when I get to school because then I realise that I have to start to do work.

In humanities our first emotional cartography map was our path to school. I used emojis to explain how I felt at certain parts of my walk.

 

Many kings are born into royalty. It is their fate to become a king. In the book Parzival by Katherine Paterson, the main character, Parzival, becomes king a different way. It is his own free will that led him on a great journey to become a knight, and furthermore a king. This free will led Parzival to become King because of his curiosity, bravery, and generosity.

 

Parzival became royal as a result of his curiosity. On page 8 Paterson wrote, “‘Tell me,’ he (Parzival) said, ‘Are you the one called God?’” (He said to the two knights.) Parzival didn’t know a lot about the world, and when the knights came he thought they were God. The knights told him their job was to protect people, and this inspired Parzival to become a knight. Without his curiosity, Parzival would have asked questions, which led him on his journey to be a knight. Not only was Parzival interested in learning new things, he was also courageous.

 

Parzival’s path to royalty started with his bravery. On page 12 Paterson wrote, “‘Never fear mother,’” the boy (Parzival) said, ‘I will avenge my people with this javelin.’” Parzival wasn’t scared to become a knight and protect people from the brothers, Lahelin and Orilus. The brothers stole two of his kingdoms, so Parzival wanted to get his kingdom’s back. Parzival wanted all of the good people to be ruled by a fair king. This is significant because his bravery, and his desire to help and protect others, helped continue his path to become a knight. Not only was Parzival fearless, he was also considerate.

 

Parzival became king because he’s generous. On page 40 and 41 it says, “Two ships foundered on the rocks of the river-ships whose whole cargo was food… then he (Parzival) carefully parceled out all of the food, so that no one would have to little or too much.” He gave the people equal amounts of food, which was a sign of his generosity. His selflessness to give everyone equal amounts of food was what made the queen want to marry him. Parzival’s consideration for other people enabled him to become king.

 

Parzival had to make his own decisions about life, which is how he started the journey to become king. His free will triggered his journey to become a knight, and a king later on. Parzival is similar to King Arthur. King Arthur became king through making the choice to pull a sword out of a stone. Because of their free will, and their choices, both Parzival and Arthur became king.

In humanities we all wrote an essay about Parzival. Parzival was the name of the book and main character in the book we read. It’s about a boy who is a king, but doesn’t know it. His father was the king, but died in battle as a knight. His mom didn’t want him to die as well, so the moved to the forest so parzival would never know about this. She kept all information about his life away so he wouldn’t die. He figures out about all this anyway and becomes a knight at his own free will.