12th Week- War

The people that went for community service to “a roof for my country” have returned.
We learned from them that.
1. They worked in teamwork to help this people and they seem to be very united.
2. The people seem to be happy and they helped in the construction.
3. They were really kind and offer them food.
4. They show lots of gratitude.

I think that this project is a really good idea since these people who did not have a house before now have one and their life condition will dramatically increase. As for my peers, they were trying to give their best to build these houses and I think that they learned a lot from this experience.

The other activity that we did was the construction of the tallest tower
The class was divided into 3 teams who had the following instructions in a card
*Build the biggest tower with plastic cups and u cannot share this card
And the specific instructions were
1. Do not use violence
2. Nothing
3. You can steal and destroy


I was in the second team and at the beginning of the game we notice that the third team was unfair. When I saw this behavior I immediately started to help the first team out and told my teammates to do the same. They didn’t do the same for quite some time until they finally understood that we had the same porpoise and that we must share resources.
Good things that I noted
1. The violence that was presented was not too severe
2. At the end we had a union with the first team
Bad things
1. Violence was presented
2. There was not a global good negotiation
3. The union of our team with the other team did not happen until almost the very end
Some interesting stuff
1. As some countries do, we started to build human and object barriers so our “enemies” had a hard time going through.

If the union would have been faster, perhaps I could of have a chance to look at the whole picture and then make a smarter move. The things that block me from doing so is that I thought of the third team as my “enemy” and the union of both teams did not happen fast enough. Therefore I never had a chance to look at the “whole” picture.

11th week- The Artistic Week

This week we did a painting. I was given the instructions to tell my partner to draw a painting by using purely geometric shapes. My partner could not look at my painting and I couldn’t look at my partners painting. I think that overall we did a good job because we finished in time and the drawing was not too far away from the original but I feel that my partner did not feel the same way. I must admit that the communication was not outstanding but good communication occurs when both parties communicate well. I think that we must not feel bad when we do our best to do something, if the outcome is not what he hope for then we can learn from that experience and grow stronger.

The second part had to do with orange negotiations. Basically in this game two people wanted to have at least 10 tons of oranges but a farmer only had 15 tons. They needed this amount of food in their business. In my team we didn’t want to talk about what did we needed them for since we were supposed to be rivals and instead try to fool each other by giving imprecise data. At the end we didn’t figure out that we wanted the oranges for different purposes and that we could both have what we wanted. I learn from this experience that we must pay more attention of what we need the stuff for and if a problem arises we must try to solve our needs first.

10th week

This week was outstanding. My friend Sokwhan came from Laramie Wyoming Colorado to visit me and my brother during his spring break. I really enjoyed the time he stayed since we played a lot of games and went to many places like “Ixtapan de la sal”. The only thing that I hope is that he enjoyed it too since we didn’t have vacations thus we came to school three out of the seven days.
Now, as for the class...

This week we played the game of Farming. The class got divided into five teams and we had to simulate farming for our town. The only risk of this game is that if a team didn’t farm enough food for two periods then they would disappear. The farming that we did could either be during a dry or humid year depending on luck. During the playtime there could be some natural disasters and some outside help.
I won’t tell all the details of the game but the best solution of the game (probability wise) counting all the restrictions is
7 of Yucca, 1 of wheat and 2 of beans every year.
Except if you knew the weather was going to be humid in which you would plant
7 of Beet, 1 corn and 2 potatoes.
And the teams should always try to get 251 or 501 and help other team to get to a production of 501. Note: 501 is the most stable position out of all. E.g. if a team gets 351, that team should gain 200 or give 100 to maximize the production of everyone.
Ok, I think I went a little too far into optimization ^^,
I notice one important behavior though. All the teams were helping each other so that no one dies and the team that had advantage knowing in advance that they will always have humid years helped other teams.

This week we also watched Live 8. I really felt impress by their work. We are talking about famous artist working together to improve the conditions in Africa throughout the world. I didn’t even know that such an event existed in the first place and after watching part of the video I notice that a lot of people are trying to improve Africans life condition. I think that we should do similar events in México and try to change the culture to a giving culture.

9th week

During this period we evaluated ourselves as a team and as a group. Overall I think that we did a good job since we tried our best.
By evaluating we
1. “Saw” the perspective of our peers in various activities throughout the month.
2. Found some very interesting experiences and new ideas.
3. Build up more trust.
4. Find the ideas that the whole class might share and which ones are personal.
I must say that although I haven’t done everything that I had projected since the beginning of the class period, I might have changed just a little bit.
I hope the class keeps going as it is. Out of all the humanities classes (like 7 so far), this is the only one that is worthy. Thanks you Luis Gerardo, teammates, everyone else in the class and you for reading this post.

Summary 2

This is the point were I start to become aware of the situation, and where I start to think that a change must be made in order to make this world, a better world (or at least not worst). Throughout this month I have learned some important facts about human life conditions and the problems of the earth (mainly us).

Some important ideas that I learned:

It feels good to help other people, perhaps this power is the fuel for some people to truly keep helping others. There is a problem though. If you help someone, the person or people that one is helping need to know exactly what we are going to do and for how long. Furthermore, if we are doing a project, this project better be sustainable or else people may feel awkward after a failure thus distrusting any further attempt to help them.

I learned that the system or the society that we live in may not always be as fair as I thought it was because sometimes it could be misleading and/or partial. For example, wealth is not distributed well enough in the world, and some people that really try to be successful, fail because they don’t have enough resources.

I think that above these problems of equality and wealth distribution, the greatest problem that we face nowadays is the destruction of the world and the consumption of natural resources. I think that these problems arise from other two problems which are:
Overpopulation: We have had an overwhelming amount of natural resources in the past century thus it seemed as if the world could really support us all. This problem is enlarged with the ignorance of some people that are not aware of the situation or that simply do nothing about it.
Economy driven society: We no longer care about the care of the world. Instead we seem to care more about the economy. This incorrect idea that we have might be a product of our minds since we think that we are disconnected from nature and we live on an artificial world made by mankind.
To be able to overcome these problems, the society most change the way it thinks. For the time being, we could help by teaching our awareness to other people.

I don’t want to think that we will become aware of the earth’s problems when it’s too late, but it might happen. As an example, when we played the world resource simulation game (with the newspapers), we realize that we were in great trouble only when we stared at the floor (after being told to do so) and saw what had happen to all of our resources. I think that the movie 11th hour documentary clearly shows that there is a problem thus more people need to watch it in order to become aware of the situation.

Conclusion
I think that I have learned a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. I also started to become aware of some of the problems that we face today, while doing fun activities in class and writing in this forum.

After thinking for a while, I have decided that while I am in Luis Gerardo class, I will teach kids and adults of what we should do to protect our home (the earth). Thanks Luis Gerardo for everything ^^.

8th week

In this week we played two fun games. The one that I liked the most is: The Climate Change Game .

In this game I reached level 10 with good popularity and great environmental care.
What I learned from this exercise is that if we really try to help the nature, we indeed can, will is the only power that is needed. I think that this game was just way too easy because we knew how things were going to behave, but the reality is that systems tend to be more stochastic and the deterministic behavior is hard to measure. Still it was fun and now I know that we should try to be less destructive.

In this week, we also watched the 11th hour movie that deals with the destructive nature of human kind. This movie literally make us open our eyes to “see” that we are relatively a new species but we have caused so much destruction by selfishness thus if we continue with this madness we will eventually destroy ourselves.





I agree with most of the information that is present in this documentary because everything is based on evidence and scientific research. Most of our actions nowadays are economic driven thus we are part of a materialistic society that keeps destroying the world by polluting the earth, changing the climate, deforesting the forest and taking away too many natural resources. Also the human population keeps increasing exponentially because we are using non-renewable resources of energy so the problems of resources will become more and more evident as times goes by.

I think we should change the way we look at the world. The world should not be viewed as an infinite source of resources; instead we should try to live in harmony with nature. It will be too dangerous to corrupt the ecosystem because it gives us (for free) a lot of things that we need like fresh air, food, etc. The problem is that we generally take these benefits for granted hence putting at risk our own existence.

7th week

Resource world Simulation Game
In this game, every student grabbed a piece of paper and placed it on the floor. After doing so, we had to wonder around for some time while the teacher removed some of them. When he made the sign of “stop”, we had no choice but to step on a piece of newspaper.
The newspaper represented the resources of the earth (every turn there would be less resources).
The behavior was as follows
1. Everyone started the game without sharing and they try to find their own piece of newspaper.
2. When there was like 70% of the resources left, everyone started to believe that sharing was a good idea.
3. When we had like 30% of the resources left, everyone started to bring the resources together (pieces of paper) in a false attempt to stop the removal of the resources
4. When we had less than 15% of the resources we stared to share massively in order to continue playing the game.
5. After a while, there was just one piece of newspaper to share among thirty people or so. This time we knew that it was not possible to share it together; therefore we decided to split the resources in parts, so we could still land on a piece of paper.

After playing this game I realized that this pattern is very similar to the pattern that we as humans do to the earth. After we finished the game, Luis Gerardo told us to look at the floor. When we did so, there was nothing but destruction. All the resources that we had at the beginning were all gone and there were just some fragments of what was there before. I think that this is very similar to what is happening today to the earth. Every day, there are more humans, more pollution and fewer resources in the earth.