Project Reflection: A Hero in My Eyes

1. To me, a hero becomes a hero when they have been defined that way by another. This is because a hero is different to each person. For instance, some people consider Soldiers heroes, others do not. It really is defined to each person as that way. And every hero, regardless of by who or what they have done, have been defined by someone as a hero. To me, that is all that matters.
2. Project Description: In the A Hero in My Eyes project we had to create a character sketch of a person that had created a personal impact (meaning we knew them personally) on us. The pieces were accompanied by two black and white photos, one portrait and one full body, that we had taken ourselves of our heroes.
3. Process: I first interviewed my hero, Ms. Lopaz, the Director for High Tech Middle Media Arts. I then typed up that manuscript and wrote the first draft of my character sketch. After a peer review I edited my rough draft and re-wrote it. This was then edited by Charlotte, our teacher, and edited again by myself. I then added in word of the days and made it more picturesque. I also then took the photos of Ms. Lopaz that I needed. After I had my final drafts of everything I put it into the class template along with a blurb about my hero that I had written.
4. Reflection: In this project I didn't really run into any problems while writing my piece. However, I did have to cut it down from 2.5 pages to 2 pages which was really hard to do without missing content or getting rid of some great sensory details and figurative language. In the end I was able to do it though and learned to cut my paper down while keeping the important content. I also encountered a problem when I was trying to put my photos into Adobe InDesign. The photos became very pixelated in the template, but after much trial and error I was able to convert the files into high quality using Adobe Illustrator. This solved the pixelation and taught me to not be afraid of technology. Overall I learned a lot in this project. I learned how to write a character sketch, conduct an interview, and use InDesign as well us cut down my papers efficiently.
5. Habits of Mind: I really think I used the habits of mind ownership in this project a lot. I constantly asked myself the question, "Is this my best work?" and "How can I make it better?". Because of this I was able to produce better writing than I initially thought I could do.
   
6. Artifact: http://lunaeve.blogspot.com/2009/11/redefine-impossible.html
7. Picture: The picture above shows how people really define others as heroes. Some say the only heroes are those in capes. Some say that's ridiculous. But I'm sure if you were to ask the child in this photo they would say superman was a hero, and we really wouldn't be able to persuade him otherwise.