Human Geography

Today we had our test on world leaders in Human Geography that I did not study for because I did not know we were going to have one but we did but I think that I did a good job on it so I will get a good grade. I hope that it is enough to get me back up to an A in the class because I need straight A's to keep myself and my parents happy with school. I also had an English test yesterday but I am mad about that because I got an 89% and if I had gotten one more right it would have been a 91% which is an A but of course I did not do the extra credit assignment for five extra points so with my 89% it would have been a 94% but I am not very smart or good when it comes to giving effort to some things. I am kind of glad and kind of sad that this class s ending. It means no more seeing some of the people that are friends from this class and no more Mr. Schick sometimes twice a day and I am happy that I get to meet Mr. Fendryk.

Today in Human Geography we finished talking about our work on all of the most important world leaders and most of the people we talked about had a brother that was killed and I was surprised to see that one leader named Kim Jong-un killed people from his own family just to get more power so that he could take control of North Korea and when people got in his way from his family he hired people to get them killed and this way he was the first in line for power when his father died and there were no other relatives in his family that were older than him. He now uses his power to threaten other people but it took him a long time to get weapon capabilities but people from Russia came and helped give them nuclear capabilities to threaten the United States of America.

Today in Human Geography we talked about the same things as yesterday so it was mainly a review and then we started talking about different countries and listened to a song about a thing saying all of the countries from I think around 1970 and it went really fast so I could not hear all of the countries that the thing was saying and this led us to what we are doing now. We have a project about where we are looking at a bunch of countries and giving a map, the name of the country, the leader's name and title, what type of government they have, and an official portrait of the leader. Mr. Schick did the United States and I was surprised to learn that we have a constitutional-based federal republic which means that we do not have a democracy like I thought but that our government is based off of our constitution which is a very big part of how we live normally.

Today in Human Geography we finally met after 17 days so MERRY CHRISTMAS and Happy New Year. We started our final unit called Political Geography and we talked about how by political standings we can be divided into countries, nations, and states throughout the whole world. A country is defined as an identifiable land area, a nation is defined as a population or group of people with a common culture, and State is defined as a population under a single government and it can be synonymous with "country". A nation is a group of people with a shared identity and we can think of it as a culture group. A definition that applies to most places is that nations are groups of people, larger than a single tribe or community, which may share a common language, institution, religion, and/or historical experience.

Today in Human Geography we talked about how the exams were going to go and which room we were going to be in. Mr. Schick told us that we would have mainly multiple choice questions with one constructed response question and we talked a lot about the concept of the demographic transition chart and how we would have to look at all of the different stages of the chart and show how each of them meant a different stage for a different country and how every stage meant a different place with birth rate and death rate. In stage one a country has a high birth rate and a high death rate, in stage two a country has a high birth rate and a rapidly decreasing death rate, in stage three the death rate slows its fall and the birth rate begins to fall, in stage four the death rate has flattened out and the birth rate is starting to mellow out at the bottom, with stage five both the birth and death rate are low but the death rate is higher.

Today in Human Geography we talked about how we thought all of our exams were going to go and if we thought that we would pass all of them or if we would have trouble with a lot of them or just one of them because it might be a subject that we are not good at. The two subjects that I will have the most trouble with are English and Biology because I got a B in both of those classes last quarter and I really want to get A's in them but I am close to a C in English and I have a C in Biology but I am terrible at Biology and I hate the class because I do not understand how to study for the tests that we take and I always end up getting a bad grade and it makes me and my dad very mad. I want to get the best grades possible because it means a lot to me to prove that I can put in the work and get it done when I need to.

Today in Human Geography Mr. Schick was not in school so we had a substitute and we were allowed to start working on how we thought we were going to study for our exams and I need to figure out exactly what it is on so that I can study the exact material for the exam so that I can get the best possible grade which I need to be able to get straight A's and that would be great for the first semester and then I will be switching classes to gym from health and a couple of my other classes were switching to other things. I do not know if my off-mod will be changed and I hope it does not because I have the same off-mod as the game club teacher and we are allowed to go to his room and play games which is a lot of fun and I am glad that he does it because he is very good at the game we play which is cool because it is a lot of competition when a bunch of us play together with up to 8 people which is always a different result.

Today in Human Geography we talked about the answers to the pop quiz and when he was talking about them only two people in our class got 100% on it which surprised me because a lot of people said that they got 100% when we first took in but the two people that did, nobody expected and Dominic, who everybody did expect to get 100% did not but I only got a 50% so I should stop hating on other people. I was mad at myself for doing so bad because I thought that I did a lot better but I failed and it dropped my grade to a B from a middle A which really sucks because I want and need straight A's and I am close to having a C which would kill me.

Today in Human Geography we took a pop quiz which I was not ready for and I noticed that Mr. Schick just posted the results and I got a 10/20 which is a 50% and it caused my grade to drop from a middle A to a high B which hurts because I need straight A's to keep my academic scholarship but I might be able to have 2 B's but now I have 3 B's which one is close to an A but the other two are closer to C's which I would hate because my dad would get extremely pissed off at me and never stop yelling at me for needing to do better even if I try my best. I want to get straight A's because it means that I am doing well in my classes and I will get Honor Roll which would be awesome to get in my first year of High School and I would just feel good about it because it is a big thing and it is very hard to do because I am in very tough classes and I want to keep working hard to keep getting straight A's once I do get them.

Today in Human Geography we talked about a thing called a Demographic transition chart which tracks all of the countries that go from pre-industrial to industrial to post-industrial and how each of the countries that were in the video from yesterday were in different stages along this chart. The video and this chart are helpful together because when you looked at the graph you could get a picture of where they were on the graph and how they corresponded to each other to get more specific measurements for each of the other countries that were on the graph. I noticed that countries started to get healthier and richer during the industrial stage and that they are continuing to get healthier in the post-industrial due to how much everything that they did changed and how it influenced how everybody around the world and in their own countries would live their lives and how it was going to be either good or bad which is still yet to be seen.

Today in Human Geography we watched a video on how less than 40 years ago all of the countries were poor and sick except for the UK and the Netherlands who were not that far ahead but they were still doing better than the rest. In 1940 they were wider spread than ever and more of the countries are closer to rich and healthy but almost all of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are still poor and sick. It was in 2009 when all of the countries started getting to Rich and healthy but not a lot have the most money but they still have a high life expectancy which means that they are healthy. Some of the provinces in China when split off from the whole they appear to be like the Sub-Saharan African countries that are stuck behind because of bad diseases and they cannot grow a lot of food and they will continue to have a low life expectancy until they can fix their problems.

Today in Human Geography we talked about our tests and got them back and I saw that I got a 98% on it and I missed one question but I did not get the extra credit questions because one of them was a close reading question and I did not pay attention to exactly what it said but only one person got it correct because the right answer was zero and the only person to get it right was Dylan and Dominic was the only one who got the second extra credit question right so he ended up with a 102% on the test. The question I got wrong was very confusing because it was talking about the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The question was asking about which nation had the highest net migration rate and the correct answer was Canada but I put the United States because did not remember learning that specific answer but I could have been more prepared.

Today in Human Geography we got to look at a website called Kiva and we just got to explore and see if we thought that some of the things on the website were interesting and I noticed that it is just for donating money to people and you can give a minimum of 25 dollars and you can only donate to a person one time. I liked this because we could pick the people that we thought deserved it most and I saw about a woman that was raising money to pay for hospital expenses because she had already had a kid but she was having another one and needed to pay for the bills that were coming when she did give birth and all the times she had to check on her process. I noticed that she had a long time before her donation time was over and she only needed $175 to pay for all of the expenses that she would have to cover. I hope she either gets the funds or I am happy that she did get them depending on the next time I check it.

Today in Human Geography we took the test and I am very glad that I studied for it because everything that I studied was on the test and this helps because I knew what all of the answers were and I believe that I am going to get an A but if I do not it will be a very close B but I will be upset at myself for not getting a good grade of an A. The only two question that I did not know were the bonus questions on the back of the test. I do not think that I got any of these right and I would be very surprised if I did. I also got to work on anything else that I did not finish so I was able to finish my biology work that I thought I turned in but I guess I did not because it said that I did not and I found it in my book not turned in or fully completed.

Today in Human Geography we kept going over presentations that people made for the go for an A or go for a B project and I noticed that more people today went for a B than the last two days combined, 3 groups out of 5 or 6 today went for a B and from the last two days only two groups went for a B and the rest went for A's because people may need the A grade because their grade might not be that high and they want to bring it up or they have an A and they just want their grade to be even higher than it already is. I noticed that on veracross, Mr. Schick posted my grade for it and I saw that my group got an 81/100 on the presentation and it is a B but it is very close to a C and I was surprised because I thought that we were going to get a much higher grade on the presentation than we did because we worked very hard on it and we did a very good job presenting.

Today in Human Geography we continued hearing project presentations from groups and my group had to go first today. I do not like speaking in front of classes and I did not like this because people were very disrespectful like Ryan and they were just sitting on their computers doing whatever they wanted while we were trying very hard to present the project that we worked our butts off to do and finish to try and get an A while other groups like the one yesterday only went for a B. This frustrated me because it is a very tough class and all I wanted to do was present my project so that I could get an A and bring my grade up from the B that it dropped to because of the first pop quiz that we then re-took because almost everybody got a bad grade on it. I hope that we got an A on the project because it would help me tremendously and I would feel better about having to do a project like that again.

Today in Human Geography we started listening to the presentation projects by people that either went for an A or went for a B. Only one group did the go for a B project which surprised Mr. Schick because all of the groups in his HONORS class did a go for an A project and most of the projects in our class did go for an A project and my group did a go for an A project and I think that the rest of the groups did a go for an A project. I think that my group will get an A because we did everything that was required to the greatest standard of what we can do and if we get a B I will be upset and I will want to know why it happened and what we could have done better. If we do get an A I will be happy but if we get a low A I would just want to know what we could have done better so that we can do better the next time we do a project.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TAnOn2QxC-OBcCl_rBaJ12lp9hGjPhxyrAopFf5xJ9c/edit?ts=5a05fdd4 this is the link for our finished project and we did the go for an A type of project.

Today we had a pop quiz in Human Geography which just made my grade get dive bombed to a lot less than the 100% that I had before. I hate the pop quizzes because they make me fell really stupid when I get simple answers wrong and I never know what they are going to be on. I didn't like this pop quiz in particular because we only had 10 seconds after Mr. Schick read the question, to answer it before it disappeared and we could not see it again and only 3 people got 100% on it which is more than the last pop quiz that we took where only one person got a 100% and that was Dominic who should not be in the class because he gets 100%'s on everything he does in Human Geography and in English class so nobody was surprised by this. We then talked about if we liked the class or not and I was in the middle and one person did not like the class because they said it was too much to remember.

Today in Human Geography we looked at the different population pyramids for different cities and it was interesting to see the different countries and their representation as a population pyramid. Some of the specific countries we looked at were Chad, the United States, Japan, and another one called something but i cannot remember it. Chad's population pyramid looked like a Christmas tree because a lot of kids are being born but not a lot of kids are living to adulthood so the families have a lot of kids to try and counter that but it does not work and only hurts the country even more. The United States was represented by a population pyramid in the shape of a box because an even amount of people being born are living to be old and we have OK health care that helps people live longer. Japan has representation by a population pyramid that looks like a cup because they take care of their old mainly and do not have time for kids to take care of as well and they do not have immigrants ...