Academia / Essays

Gamal Abdel Nasser

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One of the concepts in the IB curriculum for history at my school is 20th century authoritarian leaders. In order to complete my Paper 2 (the IB exam) I was presented a question that had to be backed by two different authoritarian leaders. In order to do that, I had to learn about more than one authoritarian leader. To keep things interesting, we learned about Fidel Castro as a group but then my class was separated in two and we each did a different leader. The other group did Pol Pot, and mine did Gamal Abdel Nasser, authoritarian leader of Egypt. We divided the assignment into three parts; and I was in charge of the beginning. This paper is basically “intro to Nasser & how it all started” so there isn’t much of a conclusion.

Academia / Essays

Internal Assessment: Comment l’émancipation des femmes lors de la deuxième guerre mondiale a-t-elle mené au Mouvement de libération des femmes des années 1960s au États-Unis?

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Boy. This was the true test of patience and perseverance. The Internal Assessment for IB History is a research paper where you choose a very specific question and answer that very specific question very specifically. I chose to do mine on the Women’s lib movement of the 1960s in the US and the impact that women’s emancipation during WW2 had on that effect. I worked on this paper for one angry year and a half. I worked during my summer break. Read some books about it and some more, and s’more. I have a total of 19 different drafts saved on my iPad and 2 final drafts that look nothing like the ACTUAL final draft. It took me so long to get the question itself right, and then find the exact information to answer this question. I kept on finding cool things and saying “gee I’ll add that” and I would send a draft in to be reviewed by my teacher and I’d have 3 pages of pointless info or wonky sources. Also I had originally started this paper on a vintage MacBook de la 2008, which I have come to know I cannot trust, since I lost 7 months of research when it decided to crash while I was editing the doc? Just typing this out fills me with the rage I felt that terrible day…

Academia / Essays

Single-Use Plastics

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This was a fun little essay I wrote for my French class senior year. I’ve found out the past four years that other than writing about books, I love writing about how terrible plastic is for the environment. Which is such a depressing topic but makes for such an interesting research paper. This was fun because instead of going full ham on just never using plastic again, I consider the benefits of plastic for people with disabilities, like plastic straws, and gloves and sterile wrapping in hospitals, but also, the non-plastic alternatives that could be used on other platforms, like in the food and fashion industry, or even using vegetable bio plastics to make all these items compostable instead of just filling up landfills

Academia / Essays

Satirical Essay

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This was an awesome essay I wrote for my eleventh grade english class. The tricky part of this essay was that I had written it with one of my classmates – a good friend of mine – but I still usually prefer to work alone so writing this way was kinda new to me. The entire criteria to this essay was also quite new to me. This was my first practice of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos in an essay and my first satirical piece. We got a really good grade on this essay and it made people laugh, so I think it was a job well done. The rationale comes before the essay, that was just to examine and explain the key elements of the work. This was a true learning experience and I actually had to do a lot of research because I was not allowed to make up any of these names or stats about the school.

Academia / Essays

Green Grass, Running Water Stream of Consciousness

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This was an interesting assignment. We read Green Grass, Running Water, by Thomas King as a class and we had to write a stream do consciousness (or SOC) on one of the characters during one of the chose scenes in the book. It was interesting to read the other students SOC’s since we had all chosen different scenes and characters for different reasons. I also enjoyed that we had to include a rationale, hence all my classmates choices were pointed out and explained in their POV, which I thought was interesting for the assignment at hand, but also, with what kinds of people I was working with in this class. Even though these SOC’s are not about us, I feel that they are all tainted with a bit of our personalities. For example, I am a over thinker and am overly anxious. I think that my SOC from George’s point of view might be tainted with the way I would perceive these same experiences if I was him.