World-Class Speeches, Ancient Persia, and a Hidden NYC Tour (Session 2, Week 2)

It is now two weeks into this session and here is a brief update of what we have been up to this week! In genre, we dived more into what makes a great speech. In quest, we all continued to plan the trip to Guatemala and the tour we will create in NYC. In civ, we got to learn about ancient Persia and engaged in some captivating discussions. And I can't leave out the unforgettable field trip we got to attend, a guided tour in NYC!

Let's start with Genre, this week we learned about the importance of analyzing your audience to make a compelling speech. We learned how depending on the audience you may need to shift your vocabulary or tell stories that they can relate to. We also studied taglines in world class speeches and how to create one of our own.

In Quest, we worked on finding affordable and comfortable flights for our trip, then proposing the best ones we found and choosing the final one to take. We also planned a detailed itinerary with activities, food, and transportation all around our budget. This week we also are planning the NYC tour we will give in the exhibition. We planned out 5 different locations, figured out transportation and how long everything will take. I can't speak for everyone else but I know that the challenges this week have taught me so much about planning out trips, and how to figure out the logistics of excursions.

Now Civ, so far this year we are covering all sorts of ancient civilizations, and this week we zoomed in on ancient Persia, a bit on Alexander the Great, and the Hellenistic period. We had two different civ challenges and for each one, we got to come up with our own Socratic question and then debated it as a studio.

And last but not least, we got a super fun tour in midtown NYC from Ortal. She is a super great tour guide who showed us cool hidden gems, waterfalls, public art, and privately owned public spaces that we could visit for free. We also learned about different styles of architecture and how to tell what period they were built in. This whole tour was such a great experience and we also got to ask her questions about her job to prepare us for the tour we will give at the exhibition.

In closing this week was fun but we also got to learn alot about planning and itineraries, world class speeches, and ancient Persia. We are also looking forward to actually living out on the trips we are planning out in both in NYC and Guatemala! Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I'll see you next week. 

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