My name is Brendan. This is my coming-of-age story. I was born in New York and grew up in an apartment near the George Washington Bridge. Early on, my mom took me to many different extracurricular activities such as soccer, gymnastics, wrestling and singing classes. The most recent of these were improv classes, which two of my friends attended with me. I found that I never really enjoyed any of the extracurricular activities, except for improv and soccer somewhat. The two that I hated the most were the singing and wrestling classes.  The singing classes were so restrictive and often there wasn’t really anything to do except sit and wait…

Nancy Varley  was 4 years old with glasses and finding out she was moving to a different Preschool. Her first preschool was okay. She had friends and her teacher was nice until Miss Cater  had to leave and a substitute teacher came for the rest of the time she was in the school. A couple days before she had to leave  Miss Miller  was trying to talk to her but Miss Miller could not understand her. Miss Miller  called Emily Varley and asked her “ Does Nancy speak a different language? because I can’t understand her.” When Miss Varley told her that she did not speak a different language  that…

Summer Mist The time pressure and effort put into my quinceañera took more than half a year to plan. How far away it seemed to be from choosing who was going to be in court, the songs I would dance to, my hair for pictures, and choosing my dress. Choosing my dress was hard at first, but it came to be easy once I saw it on. My family from far away started arriving a week earlier to be at my party. The house was packed with people. My aunts, uncles, and cousins from both sides of my family. So many people helped me prepare for the day. Everyone was…

In this week’s English Composition class, we used this class to start wrapping up or 2 assignments. My research essay and autobiography just needed a few changes, but most of it was done. I finally chose a title for my autobiography. I wrote down some bullet points on what I wanted to talk about in my presentation so it can be organized and hopefully reach the 3-minute mark. I had a one-on-one with Rachel to discuss my research essay, and she helped incorporate more historical facts about when zoos originated and where they originated from. I also plan to change my first sentence to have a more impactful introduction based…

Ethnography: as I read the articles from the hurricane Maria to the one explaining how ethnography is harmful and dehumanizing,there’s different point of views to enthography. first I like to start off by saying the way enthography is very harmful because it’s like using humans as tools or subjects. For example, The researcher on Hurricane Maria in Puerto rico was devastated as she had to do field notes as she thought of visiting her mother. She describes how the hurricane washed away the vibrancy of the land and the people in it. It felt so dehumanizing to just write about your homeland being unrecognizable by a natural force. Another thing…

Today, we watched a documentary called People’s Park, which took place in China. This film was recorded by two ethnographers who filmed people in China without their consent. This film showed how people in China interact with their community. I did not enjoy this film because kids were being recorded, and the ones recording didn’t even care enough to learn a bit of the language to try to communicate with the people or make them feel comfortable. This film is also making a profit out of the people’s community; it feels like these ethnographers are invading their privacy.

For English we worked on our essays, I am finished with my Research essay completely and I will be finishing my autobiography soon. My main argument for the research essay is why A.I is bad for society and I hope it will show people what I see from my point of view with this argument. For Ethnographic methods at work, we are working on our final blogs and checking our overall progress we have made up until now. After that we read “Decolonizing Ethnography: A Reimagined Framework for Teaching Radical Ethnography”, It proposes a radical ethnography approach that shifts the research focus from the ethnographer’s schema to the research subjects, aiming to…