Take care of nature :)

    We should be aware that each day we are losing our nature because of our mistakes that we make. It would be nice if we all could do something to preserve our flora and fauna because remember people, we only have one mother earth. There are a lot of endangered species out there that we are losing because of environmental pollution.  I have some good ideas we could do to preserve our nature:

·         We could plant trees in our schools

·         Recycle

·         Help endangered species  reproduce

·         Preserve our flora and fauna

Here is a link that gives us some ways of preserving our nature: http://www.ehow.com/how_2170618_preserve-nature.html/

Artistic Response :)

Hi Melissa,

For our artistic response we are going to summarize a short story from Sherman Alexie’s book and we are going to perform with Sock Puppets.

Our group is:

Zexian Wang

Xing Yi

Yi Fei

Heng Xu

Sherry Jiang

Seimy Briones

Hopefully, we can come up with something fun and entertaining.

Thanks to Kohl and Paco

Thanks to Kohl and Paco you guys did a great job on presenting at school. I really enjoyed having you guys at school. It was very interesting everything that you guys talked about. I agree that we should all learn more about our history that way we don’t repeat the bad things that happened in the past. It is important to know our history and where we come from, so that way we can find our self. I hope that Kohl and Paco can visit us again or maybe we can go to their college. It will be interesting to know other students from their college that way we can learn from each other. Kohl and Paco are amazing people :)

Indigenous people from Costa Rica

I found this link from indigenous people from my country "Costa Rica".  Take a look :) http://www.travelcostarica.nu/indigenous-costa-rica

What did I learned today from peer review!

I learned many useful things that will help me improve my papers. I liked the peer review because it let us work as a group and get to know each other better, and I like talking to people and discussing things that could help me learn new things. Some of the things I learned from doing peer review are: how to organize my paper better and reword some of the sentences, mistakes I made while doing my paper, and that it is hard to revise a paper. One of the things that interested me the most was seeing the writing of others, because every person has their own writing style. It is a good idea to do peer reviews, because sometimes it is hard to see your own mistakes and maybe other person could spot your mistakes easily. When I was summarizing my paper I found that it was good rewording some sentences and make a clear point of my ideas, because sometimes when others read it, they may not get my point. 

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian

This novel is one of the best novels I have ever read! Sherman Alexie did a very good job on using humor for talking about very difficult topics like racism, poverty, bulling, differences between races, etc. Alexie wrote about how this Indian kid, called Junior, had to go through difficult times in order to find his true identity and get a better education. Junior accomplished his goals because he was persistent and refused to be defeated. Junior is living proof that you can’t allow setbacks and small disappointments to stop you from achieving a successful life. When I was reading the novel one of the parts that really touched my heart was when Junior family didn’t have money to take his best friend, the dog, to the hospital. It really made me think about how I would feel if that happened to me, and how sad is not having money to pay for things that we need in our daily life. I really liked this novel because it was easy to read and understand, it also had cartoons so that made it easier to follow the story since it give you a mental picture of the characters. One day before the reading was due, I was very tired and I wanted to go to bed, but I was reading about Junior and all the efforts he had to make to accomplish his goals and that inspired me to continue reading until I was done. It made me think that if I want to achieve my goals in life I have to be persistent and never give up no matter how hard things can get. This novel was great and it taught me how to see life a different way.

Reflection on Diversity Training

            Great experience! If you haven’t attended a Diversity Training before, you should do it because is very useful and you could learn different things that would make you be a better person and think different. The Diversity Training was taught by Eric Davis; a very smart man with a different perspective about life. This was my first time going to a Diversity Training and I really enjoyed it because I learned many different things that would help me to think different in life; it helped me to have a better understanding on different ethnicities.

            One of the things that I liked a lot about the training was that Eric made analogies to explain some concepts and also he had us participate in many games. That is a good thing because I usually learn more by doing things and participating as a group. Some of the topics that Eric talked about were Multicultural: that everything has a culture in life. Political correctness: Saying something the right way at the right time. Oppression: Many people that have been oppressed in life by many situations. “When we have a social culture that is being oppressed that is why we have diversity training, so people can help others and we could all grow as a community”. This training is to help all to learn to be a better person in life, and be a giving person. We have to deeply understand the social history, because if one person is oppressed all of us will be oppressed to.  Eric gave an example of these by saying “Some of the students that are here today share some common cultural values, because you go to the same school at Cascadia”. Eric says that we don’t have to act the same or think the same to be part of a community; we should be able to maintain our identity and still be part of it. We should learn to accept people regardless of the way they are.

            Eric made a pyramided called “The Slippery Slope” and it had to be with different bias we fall in to. Stereotyping people: when we have a positive or negative attitude for a person. Prejudice or discriminating people: We prejudice somebody but then we discriminate that person by doing or taking an action. The last one is ISMS: the systematic result of everything we have done. We need to do more critical thinking, be more sensitive for other people. Change the way we talk, for example: Don’t say, “That is so gay” just for the sake of saying it. We should think before saying things that can hurt others.

            The Diversity Training was great; I learned good things that will help me to be a better person. It is a good idea that when we go to these events, we should talk about what we learned and share with others. It is always a good exercise to share your story and what you think. I had a good time and I liked that I had the opportunity to go with other classmates and hear their opinion. It would be nice that more people were interested in this kind of topics because we all need to know more about them. That way we have better communication with each other and understand different ethnicities. We have a large variety of ethnicities in Seattle, so it would be nice to learn from them; for example, if we all could learn more about Indian Americans and their needs that would be great because maybe then we could all get along with each other.