Growing

This past year I have learned a lot about myself. I have learned to be confident in my strengths, and work on my weaknesses. I learned how to be a better leader; however, I have also learned that it is sometimes okay to be just a team member. I have found a passion for marketing and raising awareness for causes. I truly enjoy working on projects that bring the public’s attention to something I feel strongly about. It makes me feel like I am making a difference in the world in my own way. Throughout the year, I have learned diversity in a group is a great advantage, and that there is always something I can do to help.

            At DRSS (The Dayton Regional STEM School), our sophomore year is a very dark year content wise. We have to learn, discuss, and acknowledge depressing and heavy topics. We have entire units on cancer, depression and anxiety, food insecurity and hunger, war crimes, the tragedies caused by imperialism, drug abuse and the hardships of addiction, and genocide. The genocide unit is especially dark. For six weeks, we learn about the atrocious things humans do/ have done to one another. In language arts we read books that followed characters through a genocide. My literature circle group read Never Fall Down. It is a true story that follows a young Cambodian boy through the Cambodian genocide. You are crushed when you read about the struggles and hardships of this young boy.  In World History, we learn about the events themselves. We go through different simulations, learn statistics, and read stories from victims that break your heart and makes you question so much about the world. The lessons makes your make you wonder how humans could be so cruel. However, it also inspires you to take a stand and make a change.  So, when we found out we were going to create posters to display to the public about genocide, I was ready to make the best product I could.

            The Genocide Poster Project is a project where students create posters informing the public about a past genocide and relating it to a current topic or event. The posters are hung in the Wright State Library and are accompanied by an essay giving more information and explaining the poster. Each poster has a slogan, a visual metaphor, and a statistics about how the genocide still effects the world today. It is a group assignment where you collaborate with two to three other members from you literature circle. Although I was excited for the project, when I found out my group members, I was self-conscious in my abilities and filled with self-doubt. On group projects, I typically find myself taking the lead; however, this time I felt unqualified to do so. This project required art skills and a great understanding of the Cambodian genocide. While I felt I was okay with the Cambodian genocide content; I knew my art skill were lacking. I felt like the weakest link on our team. One of my partners was an amazing artist and the other was great with world history content. If it helps to put in in perspective around this time, the artist had just one a scholastic award for her piece and the other won a statewide competition for The Junior Council on World Affairs and was moving on to the national competition. Being in a group with them set the bar high and I was anxious I would fail and drag our group down. My strength in projects is typically my leadership ability, but this was not needed. The project was off to a rough start for me. We had to start by brain storming visual metaphors for the poster. I was completely lost. My art skills are not great and I struggled to come up with an image that was too literal. My first draft was a picture of a foot stepping on a land mine. This was to illustrate that there are still land mines that are left over from the genocide have not all been cleaned up and they still injury Cambodians today. The image is poorly drawn and very literal. I again felt like a weak link.

            The next step was combining our ideas and images as a group. Our second draft ended being a picture of a Cake with a year 0 candle on it. This is because during the Cambodian genocide the Khmer Rouge declared that it was year 0 and that nothing in the past mattered. This image was an improvement because it was visually appealing and it was not horribly literal; however, when we got feedback form teachers and peers we were critiqued on the fact that those who did not know a ton about the Cambodian genocide would still be confused by what the image was. Many also mistaken the year zero candle to be a bomb. Because of this, we decided to change direction with the poster. We went back to my idea of talking about how the land mines were still effecting Cambodians today. We change to the image to a picture of a cake with a lighted bomb on top. Our slogan was blow out the candles. It was a great and powerful visual metaphor, and the slogan made it even better. Once we made our final paper draft, we moved onto carving the linoleum. Now this again was the part where I felt useless. However, my amazing teammate traced the image on to the linoleum, so all I had to do was carve it. One of the biggest things I learned to do during this project was “what can I do to help?” Once my group finished the linoleum carving and printing it was time to make the drafts. While I am not artistically inclined, I am good at creating layout and knowing what is artistically pleasing in a poster. I created a whole power point of different layouts of our poster. It had different positions of the slogan, image, and statistic. We went through multiple rounds of critique on all the options and came to our final product. We received a final grade of 100% in both language arts and world history for the poster. I was extremely proud of not only the product, but of myself.

            Even though I originally was sure, I was going to ruin the project I did not. I pushed myself to become better at asking what I can do when I feel like I am useless. It gave me an amazing sense of accomplishment to see that my groups’ hard work payed off. I was not only excited to have received a perfect score, but to also have a poster I was actually proud of. The fact that my groups poster was actually spreading awareness about a topic I felt strongly about made it all worth it.