Personal Philosophy Project
Project Description
The Personal Philosophy Project’s goal was to give students an opportunity to explore different philosophies and ethics from history and derive their own philosophies from it. My philosophy investigates the importance of every individual’s role in each discovery we’ve made as a species. Personally, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that if anything in our history was changed we would be living in a drastically different present. After looking at butterfly effect scenarios I found that so many small, seemingly unimportant events must fall into place in order for us to have the history we have. Removing any human from the role they played in a discovery may result with us making a different one or not one at all. Along with this individual importance, I feel that the discoveries we have made are all interconnected with deriving the founding of the universe. For example, the discovery of glass led to the discovery of telescopes, which led to the discovery of different galaxies and dark matter… Somehow, just as how our roles in our lives will unknowingly lead to discoveries, discoveries we make are as interconnected to more discoveries, meaning the butterfly effect is even deeper. I feel that once we can explain everything that was meant to be explained, we will be able to explain the origins of the universe and humanity along with our cosmic purpose. For my project I chose to create a poetry book where on the right hand pages are drawings of different discoveries and on the left hand pages are poems that explain the origin and importance of that discovery. I wanted to put an emphasis on the creation of the telescope because I feel that it led to many other important discoveries.
New Insights
Throughout this unit, we looked into philosophies such as transcendentalism and existentialism along with smaller concepts. One of the smaller concepts that particularly interested me was introduced in a short story called “Mold of the Earth” by Boleslaw Prus. The story was about a man sitting with a botanist studying mosses and molds, the botanist points out the constant shift of colors in the mosses and how they grow and change. The man proceeds to reflect on the continents and human populations as how they changed and shifted through history much like the moss had. He spirals into a crisis, realizing he is just a colored dot shifting in the mass of a rainbow planet that is constantly molding into something new; that that is the history of the Earth, and that the art, language and progress we’ve made of humans isn’t even represented by that. I was intrigued by this story because I felt that it perfectly encapsulated the helpless struggle we face as humans in trying to pin a purpose to our lives while we are just a colored speck on the Earth’s timeline. The skill this taught me was to recognize that the difference between humankind and moss is the language, art and progress we make. Another topic we looked into that was interesting to me was the story of Chris McCandless and the book Into the Wild by Jack Krakauer that was written about his life. I feel that nature calls to us in a very certain way, and learning about a human that was so in love with it that he would abandon society for it opened my eyes to the possibilities that come with developing my own philosophy. I aspire to follow the philosophy I created for myself with just as much commitment as McCandless did.
Intellectual Work Left to do
Moving forward from this project, I’ve found that I’ve become much more observant in the way the world functions and runs. My search for my set in stone philosophy continues. I’ve found that while I am set on this idea of deriving our origin from discovers I’m still looking for a way to intertwine my love for the world in it. I feel that love is such a necessary aspect in our lives and is a key concept in our purpose. This is the reason that I felt my project wasn’t completed, love is such a huge part of my identity that it felt wrong to not include it in my project. Here are the questions I feel that I need to find answers to in order to successfully include love in my philosophy:
What is the balance of love and appreciation we should give to the things that make up our lives?
What is the best way to find love for the “gross” side of nature?
Why do humans love? What greater purpose can we derive from loving all aspects of our world?
How can we stress the need for platonic love and appreciation towards all things?
Here are my poems and artwork for the discovery of Jupiter and the telescope:
The Personal Philosophy Project’s goal was to give students an opportunity to explore different philosophies and ethics from history and derive their own philosophies from it. My philosophy investigates the importance of every individual’s role in each discovery we’ve made as a species. Personally, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that if anything in our history was changed we would be living in a drastically different present. After looking at butterfly effect scenarios I found that so many small, seemingly unimportant events must fall into place in order for us to have the history we have. Removing any human from the role they played in a discovery may result with us making a different one or not one at all. Along with this individual importance, I feel that the discoveries we have made are all interconnected with deriving the founding of the universe. For example, the discovery of glass led to the discovery of telescopes, which led to the discovery of different galaxies and dark matter… Somehow, just as how our roles in our lives will unknowingly lead to discoveries, discoveries we make are as interconnected to more discoveries, meaning the butterfly effect is even deeper. I feel that once we can explain everything that was meant to be explained, we will be able to explain the origins of the universe and humanity along with our cosmic purpose. For my project I chose to create a poetry book where on the right hand pages are drawings of different discoveries and on the left hand pages are poems that explain the origin and importance of that discovery. I wanted to put an emphasis on the creation of the telescope because I feel that it led to many other important discoveries.
New Insights
Throughout this unit, we looked into philosophies such as transcendentalism and existentialism along with smaller concepts. One of the smaller concepts that particularly interested me was introduced in a short story called “Mold of the Earth” by Boleslaw Prus. The story was about a man sitting with a botanist studying mosses and molds, the botanist points out the constant shift of colors in the mosses and how they grow and change. The man proceeds to reflect on the continents and human populations as how they changed and shifted through history much like the moss had. He spirals into a crisis, realizing he is just a colored dot shifting in the mass of a rainbow planet that is constantly molding into something new; that that is the history of the Earth, and that the art, language and progress we’ve made of humans isn’t even represented by that. I was intrigued by this story because I felt that it perfectly encapsulated the helpless struggle we face as humans in trying to pin a purpose to our lives while we are just a colored speck on the Earth’s timeline. The skill this taught me was to recognize that the difference between humankind and moss is the language, art and progress we make. Another topic we looked into that was interesting to me was the story of Chris McCandless and the book Into the Wild by Jack Krakauer that was written about his life. I feel that nature calls to us in a very certain way, and learning about a human that was so in love with it that he would abandon society for it opened my eyes to the possibilities that come with developing my own philosophy. I aspire to follow the philosophy I created for myself with just as much commitment as McCandless did.
Intellectual Work Left to do
Moving forward from this project, I’ve found that I’ve become much more observant in the way the world functions and runs. My search for my set in stone philosophy continues. I’ve found that while I am set on this idea of deriving our origin from discovers I’m still looking for a way to intertwine my love for the world in it. I feel that love is such a necessary aspect in our lives and is a key concept in our purpose. This is the reason that I felt my project wasn’t completed, love is such a huge part of my identity that it felt wrong to not include it in my project. Here are the questions I feel that I need to find answers to in order to successfully include love in my philosophy:
What is the balance of love and appreciation we should give to the things that make up our lives?
What is the best way to find love for the “gross” side of nature?
Why do humans love? What greater purpose can we derive from loving all aspects of our world?
How can we stress the need for platonic love and appreciation towards all things?
Here are my poems and artwork for the discovery of Jupiter and the telescope:
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The Labor Question Project
For the past few months, my class has done a large amount of research into the question sparked after the industrial revolution, the labor question. There are a lot of elements that needed to be learned in order to truly understand this question. We researched all things labor, child labor, migrant workers, local economics, globalization, and more and completed a couple different projects during this unit, an essay, a presentation and a produced podcast. These things not only helped us learn more about the labor question, but also show our peers our knowledge and help them understand our research and findings.
Podcast
Here is my reflection on my podcast;
The greatest challenge I faced in the project was the absences my group had and how it made me reflect on the work I did. The circumstances for the absences made it incredibly hard for us all to collaborate and do a fair amount of effort in the project. Jade was out of town for the first few weeks, after she came back I was due to leave for Denver in two days so we got all our recording done in those days. It was hard to get started with Jade gone, and it was more work on my group while I was gone. After my three days absent, and only a few days left in the project, Willa, Jade and I worried that we wouldn’t be able to finish this on time while still being beautiful work. It wasn’t like we could go back in time and be there, so to overcome this challenge Willa and I did the most we could do without Jade (recording interviews, researching, creating an outline), and while I was gone I feel that I left a lot of the bulk of the editing to Willa and Jade. However I feel that we overcame this challenge by getting as much possibly done with the shortage of people.
If I could go back and do this differently, I would definitely add more interesting commentary plus start the project on SoundTrap instead. I would add more interesting commentary because, after editing, I realized how boring and non engaging out podcast is; while it is educational and on an interesting subject, I feel that the podcast could definitely use some more humor and side commentary to the interviews to make the listener feel more engaged. I would also use SoundTrap as our audio editing software because that would have allowed my group to work on the editing part while absent, or after school. We would’ve had a much more well produced podcast with better audio and editing; if we had more opportunities to refine outside of school time.
The greatest insight about everything I learned is that’s the labor problem and everything is not black and white. With every subject we touched on, globalization, child labor, migrant workers, local labor etc all don’t have an easy solution. Take over seas workers for example; they are usually paid very, very small amounts for sometimes extremely demanding labor. However, because it is so cheap to employ them companies send their factories over there, thus leaving many Americans jobless. There’s no convincing the companies to move back to the US, but also it as at the enormous cost of both oversea workers and Americans. So, because many of the past and present labor problems have a lose-lose situation for most of the parties involved. That’s why, as my insight, I believe I will take away that humanity must come together and agree on the same labor and human right laws. If we could just come together to create a set of rules defending workers, then the labor question might just have its answer.
My most proud piece, was the research I did for this podcast. I feel like I really accomplished a lot for the group in terms of preparing for the podcast itself. I learned so much about automation and how that plays into the education factor, two subjects that have never particularly interested me. However I was determined to be very prepared for my group so that I wasn’t left clueless and silent when we were recording. I have several pages of notes of research, most of wish I was happy to have learned based on the actual discussions that took place during our podcast.
Something that I learned and grew in as a is recognizing my successes and not downsizing my hard work. This is pretty much only exclusive to my school work, as I don’t take my free time activities as seriously. I have a habit of putting my work down if I don’t feel that I did my absolute best on it. I at first felt that I failed my group in the last part of the project, the editing part, as I was absent for nearly half our given work days after we finished recording. I felt that I left the bulk of the recording to Willa and Jade to deal with, and that to me is a failure. They insisted I did my part in the beginning and end, but I didn’t really believe that I did in the end. In order to feel proud of what we produced while not feeling like I did enough, I deciding to celebrate the successes as well (the role of research, scripting and recording) instead of grading myself poorly just based on my failures. I know that this work I did was important to the final result, and after accepting that fact I was a lot happier with the product and was prouder to show it at exhibition. I hope that this knew skill will be a guide for me when I feel that I didn’t do enough work although I did plenty.
The greatest challenge I faced in the project was the absences my group had and how it made me reflect on the work I did. The circumstances for the absences made it incredibly hard for us all to collaborate and do a fair amount of effort in the project. Jade was out of town for the first few weeks, after she came back I was due to leave for Denver in two days so we got all our recording done in those days. It was hard to get started with Jade gone, and it was more work on my group while I was gone. After my three days absent, and only a few days left in the project, Willa, Jade and I worried that we wouldn’t be able to finish this on time while still being beautiful work. It wasn’t like we could go back in time and be there, so to overcome this challenge Willa and I did the most we could do without Jade (recording interviews, researching, creating an outline), and while I was gone I feel that I left a lot of the bulk of the editing to Willa and Jade. However I feel that we overcame this challenge by getting as much possibly done with the shortage of people.
If I could go back and do this differently, I would definitely add more interesting commentary plus start the project on SoundTrap instead. I would add more interesting commentary because, after editing, I realized how boring and non engaging out podcast is; while it is educational and on an interesting subject, I feel that the podcast could definitely use some more humor and side commentary to the interviews to make the listener feel more engaged. I would also use SoundTrap as our audio editing software because that would have allowed my group to work on the editing part while absent, or after school. We would’ve had a much more well produced podcast with better audio and editing; if we had more opportunities to refine outside of school time.
The greatest insight about everything I learned is that’s the labor problem and everything is not black and white. With every subject we touched on, globalization, child labor, migrant workers, local labor etc all don’t have an easy solution. Take over seas workers for example; they are usually paid very, very small amounts for sometimes extremely demanding labor. However, because it is so cheap to employ them companies send their factories over there, thus leaving many Americans jobless. There’s no convincing the companies to move back to the US, but also it as at the enormous cost of both oversea workers and Americans. So, because many of the past and present labor problems have a lose-lose situation for most of the parties involved. That’s why, as my insight, I believe I will take away that humanity must come together and agree on the same labor and human right laws. If we could just come together to create a set of rules defending workers, then the labor question might just have its answer.
My most proud piece, was the research I did for this podcast. I feel like I really accomplished a lot for the group in terms of preparing for the podcast itself. I learned so much about automation and how that plays into the education factor, two subjects that have never particularly interested me. However I was determined to be very prepared for my group so that I wasn’t left clueless and silent when we were recording. I have several pages of notes of research, most of wish I was happy to have learned based on the actual discussions that took place during our podcast.
Something that I learned and grew in as a is recognizing my successes and not downsizing my hard work. This is pretty much only exclusive to my school work, as I don’t take my free time activities as seriously. I have a habit of putting my work down if I don’t feel that I did my absolute best on it. I at first felt that I failed my group in the last part of the project, the editing part, as I was absent for nearly half our given work days after we finished recording. I felt that I left the bulk of the recording to Willa and Jade to deal with, and that to me is a failure. They insisted I did my part in the beginning and end, but I didn’t really believe that I did in the end. In order to feel proud of what we produced while not feeling like I did enough, I deciding to celebrate the successes as well (the role of research, scripting and recording) instead of grading myself poorly just based on my failures. I know that this work I did was important to the final result, and after accepting that fact I was a lot happier with the product and was prouder to show it at exhibition. I hope that this knew skill will be a guide for me when I feel that I didn’t do enough work although I did plenty.