Religion Project Reflection
For my religion Project I studied the Amish culture. This was the first project I completely by myself. For this project I lived the life of the Amish for five days. I filmed the process and created a mini documentary. I also wrote a short essay to go along with the video to give more background information on the Amish.
I had four and a half weeks to complete this project. For the first week and a half I did my research. I tried to use more than just my computer for source materials, as it’s a complicated process to check a websites reliability. I wrote down all of my notes and then compiled them into a document. The next week I was Amish. Amish isn’t necessarily a religion, but rather a way of practice. So for this week I mimicked what they practice. The following week I wrote my essay and put together the footage that I had shot from the previous week. I got feedback saying that I might have made my essay longer, and I would have, but I just ran out of time. I also would have liked to add a portion of writing on my experience of being Amish as well as the video.
In class we did mini updates, where we had to say a two sentence statement on what we had done for our humanities class. We also had weekly updates which we posted to our blogs. I did not like updating at all. The purpose of it was to show what work you had done and keep you on task. I was summarizing what I had done, and that is just really boring. If there was a week that all I had done was maybe write my essay and not really learned any new facts, then it became extremely difficult to find appropriate content without sounding like I had done nothing and learned nothing. These posts were also supposed to share additional facts that you might have not planned to bring up in your presentation. But I felt that some of the updates I read were rather skimpy, and made me feel like I was putting a lot of effort into something that someone else was taking five minutes to do. I just didn’t see the point. It also makes it hard to right a reflection now. I feel like I’ve already updated on everything and am running low on new information.
This was the shortest period of time we have had for a project, so it was hard to pull off anything to extravagant. During the time that I was researching, I felt that I had a pretty good work ethic. The week of being Amish slowed down my studies quite a bit, not only because I didn’t have my computer, but it was also the week of ERB’s, so we had limited amount of time to work. The week when I was writing my essay was when my time management started to crumble. I’m not very fond of writing essays because I’m not very good at it and its rather boring. I found myself getting distracted a lot more easily because of that, and wasn’t even able to edit my essay until the day before the project was due. My video was also time consuming, as I had to edit all of the footage, write the script, and record over all of it. In the end though, the video ended up only being three minutes long. I realized that although it was an interesting concept, watching me be Amish for twenty minutes really wasn’t very interesting. In the end though I got it all done.
We presented our projects in front of the entire class. I didn’t really have anything prepared to say because I did not think it was necessary. I said a little introduction, played my video, and then had questions at the end. I had a little bit of trouble with the projector and iMovie, but that was out of my control. The projects were supposed to be 4-5 minute presentation, some of which went way past that time frame. Its nice to be able to see sixth and seventh grade projects, but I think we need to find a better format for presenting. It took to long to present all of the projects, and people started to get antsy, which got very distracting. Maybe next year we might spread out the presentations into different days, so we avoid having to sit for two hours.
