PERSONAL OPINIONS

In today's class everything started out pretty normal. You know boring old Monday Human Geo class, what could go wrong am I right? Well when Mr. Schick teaches your class I supposed you prepare for the worst. We were just discussing regular matters about the world map and it's regions and all over sudden the point of the discussion took a turning point. For me this made the listen interesting. We started talking about North Korea and it's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and how he was threatening to bomb the U.S. Mr. Schick asked us what we would do in defense and I immediately came up with the brilliant and intricate plan to just thrash North Korea with bombs. I mean who could blame me right? Apparently that wasn't such a good idea since one little misfire could practically start WWIII and all so I guess that's out of the picture. In the end we found out that the smartest way to go about things would be through diplomacy and discussions. Sure take the boring route if that's how you like it. Whatever, this was a pretty good class.

REGIONS

In the last class we discussed regions and why each place on earth is unique in its on way. We didn't do that much because we finished class much earlier so we had time to do what we wanted. Me being the idiot I am didn't take the time to do the blog but you know what..it's okay right? Other than that we went over the maps that Mr.Schick had told us to draw and for the most part I think my map looked...you know...somewhat like the world map to put it in simple terms. After that we wrote some notes on maps and regions which were fairly little and yeah rest of the time was off.

ACTION PLAN

This year I want to accomplish a couple of goals for myself as a freshman. First I want to play for the Junior Varsity soccer team and maybe even start at a point and make a difference in the team. I also want  to try keep my grades up above a D average every quarter. Something I've always wanted to accomplish is to learn how to play football despite my relatively small body size :(. I mean who knows maybe one day I'll be on varsity football (in my dreams). Finally I want to make many friends and have a prosperous year at John Carroll as a freshman.

MENTAL MAPPING

Today we learned about daily routines and routes we take in our day to day lives. Mr. Schick told us how a mental map works and how it is supposed to be made and used. A mental map is someones view of a specific place. This helps us to get the general position of a place we need to go to. Mr. Schick also told us that we should not have a stereotypical view of a place because of what we have heard or seen on TV. He gave the example of the French people who Americans think are very rude but in fact most usually try to be kind and helpful to tourists. At the end Mr. Schick told us to make a mental map of the world and our daily route to and from school. It was a difficult class for sure.

THAT ONE BEE

Today's Human Geography lesson was filled with stark boredom, the clicking of of keys on a computer, Mr.Schick losing his bearings due to all 168 assignments he had to grade and a little bee smaller than my fingernail which caused the most excitement today. Honestly if that little bugger hadn't wandered into class I would've died with my hands on my keyboard thinking about life in that unusually quiet class. Otherwise at least I got my other stuff done before I had to try deal with the bee but unfortunately Mr. Schick chose to spare his life. Just so you know little bee I spared you cause you put honey on my croissants every morning.

WEEKEND BLOG

In the last Human Geography lesson we learned about maps. We saw that there were two types of maps that were the first standard maps to be drawn up many years ago. First is the Mercator map which  was made by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in the year 1569. This map distorts and stretches out the map so that countries like Greenland look much larger than it really is. The more correct map is known as the Peter's projection map. We also watched some videos from an old TV show that explained how the world back then had been looking at the wrong map the entire time. Finally Mr. Schick showed us his pet peeve which was the weather on local news channels. They project the US in the weather map to be at least a quarter of the earth which it most definitely is not. I think it's safe to say this was definitely a mind blowing discovery in our recent lesson.

NEW UNIT BLOG

Today we started a new topic in Human Geography. The name of the topic is 'Thinking Geographically'. Mr. Schick announced that we would now be having a much harder time in class taking notes and studying for tests. Today we mostly talked about regions and how they are similar or different. We got a worksheet with maps of the world's regions and our exercise was to fill the names of the regions. Personally I had no problem in doing this exercise and completing it fairly quickly. I got every region correct without having to check a map. I hope it keeps going this way while I'm still in this class.

A MESSAGE TO GARCIA.

A Message to Garcia tells the story of a brave diligent and inspiring leader named Garcia who was leading the revolution during the Spanish-American war in Cuba. The author of the story explains in great detail the conflict occurring in the war and how this message needs to be delivered to Garcia. Fortunately a hero steps up to take the task head on. This was a valiant soldier named Rowan from West-point Military School. He bravely and diligently fought his way through the war zone with the message to Garcia from the President himself. In the end we see that Rowan's efforts bore fruit as he finally managed to deliver the message to Garcia which helped in the eventual conquering of Cuba by the Americans. This story by Elbert Hubbard teaches us that we should strive to achieve great feats in our lives and live up to our full potential like Rowan did. This will eventually lead to our success in life.

TEST BLOG

Today we did our first ever Human Geo test and it was pretty good for me anyways. I didn't really read as much I actually went through my notes at the last minute before Mr. Schick came into the class. But fortunately it did come out better than I had expected it to. The questions were pretty simple and straight forward. Most of it was what I had actually went through before the class started today except that one question about the person who writes in short hand. I kinda just blanked when I got there but never mind that I think I did pretty well in my first test and I can only hope I'm not wrong.