Humanities projects

Poem Project What would happen if I didn't kill him Would he kill me without hesitation I pull the cold sticky trigger I just watch the lifeless body drop My teammates praise me The game said mission complete All just for taking someone's life It slows the game down to show how perfect of a kill it was The objective was complete I had killed my enemy who I didn't even know He had no chance He was just standing there when I pulled the trigger. Everyone playing witnessed it, Even the kid in the dark room with chips and soda everywhere. Some laughed, others were mad. This kid was especially mad because he was killed! I could feel the recoil and shock, It felt good knowing I had killed my enemy. It made me hungry for another. I made it my goal to get another. I had ended that game by killing someone. But started another battle because I killed someone and was praised for it. People didn't want to lose, The only way to win is to kill I was playing an un winnable game. No matter what I did the war was still going on, Because of the millions of people playing. Artist Statement Cameron My poem is about how in our society we get praised for getting kills and what I try to show through this poem is that the video games we play are almost exactly war is, there are only a few differences. In video games when we're killed we get to come back alive and there is no thought to who the person actually is. Everyone just looks at a person in this game as points. No ever thinks about the kid behind the controller. In my poem I tried to talk about the similarities between real war and video games by having it switching back and forth from the video game to a real war situation. My poem is also about how we let a lot of our little children play these violent games and even though they are really young they are still some of the best at killing people. My poem is written in a way where I tried to get it so where you could read it forward and then you could read it backward and then it would have a different idea to it. I based my structure of my poem off of the one poem we saw in class. I also based my idea off of Brian's poem from last year. I really liked the idea he had about how video games are viewed in our society. I mostly liked his because I like video games and I know a lot about video games that involve war and when I saw his poem I felt like I should make a poem about something I know a lot about. When I started writing this poem I tried to make it readable front and backward but once time went on I realized that it is really hard to do that and I realized that I really liked the structure and flow that the poem had. My poem is written where it alternates from a real war situation to just a game winning kill in Call of Duty. I also talk about the kid in front of the tv with controller in hand and being either really mad or really sad. How I would like to present my poem is by having me read my poem aloud to people as they come up. I would have liked to do something with flash or what the one display is where the words are all placed in a different place on the screen. I really liked the way this is because I feel that it gives the words and overall poem a deeper meaning by having the reader trying to focus on whats going on. I would really like to talk to Lori more about what I could do for my exhibition and what she thinks would be the best way to present my poem. The Truth of War

The truth of war is what actually goes on in the war for the soldier before, during, and after. About 35,000,000 were killed in WWI and in WWII. Almost all of these soldiers and civilians had families. That is about 35,000,000 people with out their husbands and/or sons. There are more than 35,000,000 deaths in both the world wars but that number is just confirmed kills there are more people that got killed but we didn't know about about it. So if your the family or your a loved one that was killed you wouldn't know if your loved one was ever coming back. Think if your husband and/or son was killed in war but no one told you. You would always be wondering when or if he was ever coming back. Then I would be thinking why did my son or husband ever leave for war? The truth of war for a soldier is "Although I don't want to go to war, I must to protect and support the ones i care about."

The only reason a soldier would go out to war is to protect and support your loved ones. What is the reason most soldiers stop fighting? When the reason for their fighting is gone, like if their family is dead or have left him. thats why at the end of the book All Quiet on the Western Front Paul stopped fighting. He lost his loved ones so he stopped fighting. In chapter 12 In All Quiet on the Western Front Paul says" “All quiet on the Western Front.” As Paul dies, his face is calm, “as though almost glad the end had come.”"

Before war a soldier thinks of war as the only way to support their family. They see it as a chance to serve their country. The military also tries to convince everyone that its the best thing. They do this by putting up posters making the army look glorified. I see a poster like this makes me want to join the military. this shows what happens if you join the military you will be the one keeping the world safe. In All Quiet on the Western Front the teacher in Paul's class glorified the war.

Once you get shipped off to where ever it is that your going you realize that the war isn't actually what you thought it was going to be. There is a lot of death and misery going on all around you. Like in the movie we watched a part of during class. the main character showed up and there was thousands of people dead. Even when it came down to weapons half the people don't even receive a rifle. It would be pretty scary being in a war without even a weapon. The only way you could get a weapon would be to pick it up of one of your comrade or enemies dead body. In All Quiet on the Western Front, chapter 9 Paul says, "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle."

Once a soldier gets home from war some people can't handle the change from war to society. In All Quiet on the Western Front, chapter 12 "will return home as living corpses, shells of human beings." some people have night mares of the war. They see all the death and misery going on around them again. They see all their lost friends that were killed during the war. I would think this would be a gruesome cite. I couldn't handle seeing my childhood friends dead bodies over and over again, even after the war.

The military is glorified by how they market how cool and exciting the war is. As a kid my age I am exposed to all kinds of posters,video games, and tv commercials that just make going to war look like the best thing to do. they even pay you to go and do something that looks so cool on tv. We don't realize that this is completely wrong until we are actually the soldier there fighting for our freedoms. Then there are the people that have never liked war. They always protest that war is bad and we shouldn't send our troops out to fight, but yet we do. Why do we do this? why does our government and society protest against war when we still keep sending our troops out?

Project Reflection
For this project we did a lot of stuff leading up to this final project. We started out by reading All Quiet on the Western Front and then slaughterhouse five. After we read these books we had seminars for each of them (look under humanities seminars to see seminar reflections and book covers). We also did a lot of writing that involved the truth of war for other people that aren't in the 2 books we read.

For my project the habit of heart and mind I used the most was refinement. I went through several copies and in the end my final project was pretty different from my origanal design. "> my first project idea started out with 2 sides of one paper, then I changed it to where they were on the same side of the paper but they were 2 different posters still. Then with my final design they were both on the same side and are part of the same poster.

two substancial revisions i made to my essay are first my thesis statement and then my conclusion. the change i made to my thesis statement was that i completely made a new one. the reason i changed it was because that it didn't fit with the rest of my essay except for my conclusion. once i changed my thesis statment it fit perfectly with the rest of my essay but now my conclusion didn't fit with anything in my essay now. so i changed my conclusion so now it fits perfectly with everything in my essay. i feel this was the best change i could have done to my essay because now everything complements everything and it has a nice flow to it which makes it easier for the reader to follow it.

If i had another week to do my profect i would scan it into a computer and make it bigger, then i would laminate it to make sure it couldn't get dirty, and then finaly i would put it on a music stand for exhibition. Changes i wuld make to my essay would be to reread it again and have some of my peers reread it and have them give me feed back so that i could make my essay even beter then it already is.