I didn't know so many words began with 'Anal'...

This was the AP for unit 2 of our Humanities class, Endurance. So far, our central focus has been on personal journeys and the meaning of what it takes to endure hardships and challenges. A key term from this unit was Katabasis. Katabasis means, "diving into your underworld", and it is all about finding your way through the dangers around you and it encapsulates the very meaning of endurance. We read stories about individuals who had made their own personal missions and learned about their processes of getting through them. An example is a documentary (called maiden trip) that we watched about a 14-year-old girl from Holland, who voluntarily sailed around the world by herself - it took her 2 years. Another was a magician named David Blaine, who tried to break the world record for having no oxygen in one setting - he made it to 17 minutes. Both of these were a choice, but we also learned about journeys of endurance that were not voluntary. We read Night, a book by Elie Wiesel, written about his perspective and journey of surviving several death camps with his father, during the Jewish Holocaust. We also watched Schindler's List, which gave us a very real perspective of what it took to endure such times and a glimpse of the horrors that humanity can impose on one another. After we gained enough context, we moved into creating our own missions, otherwise known as our Kautilya plan. Our challenge was to document 12-hours of us completing an activity or reaching some sort of goal of our choice. 

For my challenge, my goal was to become more knowledgeable, so I started thinking of ways I could do that and then it clicked - I could read a dictionary! I originally was going to use the Oxford Dictionary, since that was the most popular one that I had heard of. However, when I went to purchase it, it was $100 so I just settled on the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which was just as good and it was only about $5. I connected this back to when I was in homeschool and I set off to start my journey. I found so many words that I either didn't know/didn't know existed, or that I thought had the potential of me using them, and I was able to get through letters A, B, and C. I asked myself a couple of questions along the way and had many times to reflect. Overall, I enjoyed this experience and I definitely feel like I had the chance to broaden my vocabulary. I enjoyed finding words that I thought were funny and making several connections - one discovery I made was the seemingly enormous list of words that began with 'Anal'. I don't know why that just made me laugh and it lead me to be so much more interested in what I was doing. Below, you will be able to see my daily log, my vocabulary notes, as well as my Kautilya plan video. Enjoy!