Reflection on this Unit

Blog Post

For this project Jay and I worked together on a saving the bee campaign. When we started on this project, we were sure that we wanted to do something that would actually affect humans and because we knew that bees have a huge impact on humans we wanted to do something that would relate to saving the bees. Before we started working, Jay and I separated the work. So we decided that I will do the video and the poster and jay will do the stickers. Doing this was very helpful because we were both focused and we knew what we were doing. However during the process Jay had to leave but this didn’t really make a big difference because Achille and Mike were there to help me out. Both of them were really helpful and I introduced them to our campaign. They really helped me with the timing of the video, which helped me because when I was reading the text in the video it was easy for me to read but thanks to Mike and Achille I made the duration of the text longer so everyone had time to read the text in the video. They also helped me with the poster, so I asked both of them to do some research for me, which meant that I had more time to put into our video. Once we were finished with the 3 pieces for our campaign, we made sure that we all, as well as Ms Taynton, checked the work before we presented it to our class. Over all, I really enjoyed doing this campaign because this campaign showed me that planning out the work before you start is a great way to manage your time.

Power & Leadership

The past 3 weeks I have been working on my biography of Osama Bin Laden. I have done a lot of research on the Internet as well as used an actual biography that I got from the library to gather some information. This unit we have been learning about Power & Leadership, and I think it’s the most interesting unit we have done so far. This unit has showed me how people used their strengths in leadership to gain many followers and convince them to do something that they didn’t actually didn’t want to do. I think it’s really impressive on how you can ‘Manipulate’ people and make them do things. Many people use their strengths in leadership and speech to do good things but there are some exceptions like Hitler and Osama Bin Laden for example. That is why I have been concentrating on Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957 or 1958. Osama bin Laden’s source of money was from his father’s heritage. Bin Laden’s father was owner of the largest construction company Saudi Kingdom and when he past away he reportedly got over 250 Million $ which he then used for his terrorist activity’s. He started off his life as every other average person; he was well educated and therefore went to school in Jiddah. When Osama was 18 years old he decided to get married, his father unfortunately passed away and therefor he didn’t get his opinion. His young marriage had positive affects on bin laden because he learned to make decisions at a young age, He grew up as religiously committed boy and the early marriage was another factor of protecting him from corruption. Bin laden joined the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood but then criticized the Brotherhood, and accused it of betraying jihad and the ideals of Qutb. With the age of 22 he joined up with the Afghan Muja dine to fight the soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He did not begin life with a worldview; Osama grew up during a period of rapid and traumatic transition in Saudi Arabia, which may have affected his ways of thinking and his worldview. The suffering of palatines, the loss of Dane of Omar, and Israel’s very existence definitely later shaped his view. You could say that Osama’s actions were lead by revenge and hatred against the U.S.

He blamed the U.S for creating this “Zionist crusader” outpost in the Middle East. “They have mobilized their people against Islam”. Many events in 1979 fuelled him more toward the path of jihad and at this time Osama was somewhat lost. Osama’s family also influenced his outlook. The writings of the Qutb and radical Islam completed his worldview and made sure that Osama was finally aware of what he wanted to do. Quote from Jamal Khashoggi” He adhered to a very strict interpretation of Islam. He did not smoke, refused to shake hand with woman, and watched only the news on television. No pictures adorned the all of his home as he considered art un-Islamic. Although he belonged to a wealthy family he insisted on living a simple life, eschewing all extravagance.” The thing I don’t really understand is that Osama was a very religious person based on Jamal, How can someone like him end up doing so many horrible things? Osama’s beliefs have been dubbed “Jihadist Salafism” The afghan war against the soviets was another milestone that took him towards terrorism. At 21 years, he fell under the influence of Abdul Azzam, a Palestinian, radical Islamist. Azzam proclaimed obligatory for all Muslims Azzams preaching affected Bin Lade, how he wanted to fight in the Afghan war.

Reanimation

In our Language Arts class we have been reading the novel Frankenstein. We have also watched a movie of the novel. Now that we have finished reading the novel, we were given a project on pushing the boundaries. However, our task was to make up a research question and somehow connect it to Frankenstein. I first started off working by myself, but when I realised that Cole somewhat has the same research question as me, I decided to team up with him. So, Cole and I decided to team up and approach this assignment together. Before Cole and I started our research we first broke our research question into smaller questions in order to narrow down the research. Once, Cole and I did that I decided to watch a video about the creation of life and Cole started to watch a video about the reanimation of a dog. The video was actually quite good and explained everything well even though it was a very old video. The video I watched was fantastic and it really explained everything well. Now that I learned some information about reanimation, I can concentrate on my research.

Reflection on Unit 4: Connect, extend, challenge

Reflection on Unit 4: Connect, extend, challenge

We have read “The Merchant of Venice” in the past 4 weeks and I realized that a lot of Shakespeare’s plays are very similar to each other. This play for example was somewhat like “Romeo & Juliet”, the leading theme in “Romeo & Juliet” is Romance and the same goes for “The Merchant of Venice”. In “Romeo & Juliet” Romeo falls in with Juliet knowing that they cannot be together due do the fact that their parents are in a family feud. In “The Merchant of Venice” Bassanio a not so rich you man falls in love with a rich young lady knowing that it’s going to be hard to impress her because he does not have the money to do so. Both of these stories are about love however they do not have a similar ending.

To be honest, I thought that Shylock has done the right thing, Antonio made a deal with Shylock knowing the consequences. Antonio’s part of the deal was to pay back the money to Shylock however; Antonio knew that his source of money is not constant. He knew that his ships might not come to Venice but he still accepted the deal. Therefore, I think that Shylock has done the right thing. In my perspective it doesn’t matter if Shylock is a Jew or not, a deal is a deal.

The most difficult thing for me was the way the story was written. I of course understood what was happening but most of the words in the story are not used these days and therefore I had trouble understanding some parts of the story. This also is why its hard to write the essay because I understood the basic parts of the story but I of course did not fully understand everything that’s why I might miss out some important details in the story.

“The Title”

Hello 🙂
This is my first blog post and to be honest, I have no idea how to write one…Anyways 🙂
I am very interested in this blog thing and I want to find out more about it.