Family Tree Project

Reflection on Family Tree Presentation

            This project was a lot of fun for me. Because Mr. Blake did not give us anything solid to work on, very few rules and guidelines, I could let my imagination run wild and had a lot of fun experiments with my new presentation tool prezi. J I could take (steal???) several albums from my parents’ room. I could see myself growing up before my eyes as I rummaged through my pictures. My memories, some of them quite sharp and embarassing, returned. (Oops, my parents were coming home. I’d better tuck the pictures away and look innocent! J) I announced to my parents that I was going to do a project about my family tree. I was really impressed when my parents recited a list of about 50 people and I just could not put all of them into my painting-black family tree. They seemed to be really psyched about my project, and took me and my brother around to pick some cool food that I could boast around. It turned out to be bánh trung thu. I moved about my house like a shuttle, waylaid my cousins (older) and poured queries on my exasperated cousin. I plunged into my room, creating a big mess and jostling  everything on my path. I couldn’t remember how I cleaned my room afterwards, but anyway, I managed to wriggle out of the destroyed, crumpled manuscripts (some older than I am) the first piano song I played and the very first chess set I had. Unfortunately, I could not show them to the class because of memory reasons. J

            Apart from my own experience, I saw even more clearly how diverse AIS is. There are so many nationalities within 10 meter squared of my room. Emily is from Hainam, Olia from Russia, Jennifer from Norway, and Darlene, Vivi, and Henry from the United States. There are so many cool things to talk about. Emily is a polyglot, 4 languages she speaks! Olia pronounced very cool Russian words (too fast I couldn’t repeat, but I guess that the faster it is said, the cooler it sounds!). Jennifer told as that only one out of ten people in Norway is actually Norwegian. Henry was a Boy Scout. He brought to us all the different badges and told us all the different levels that he could achieved when he participated in the Boy Scout. Even within Vietnam I could see so many differences. Because my family is Christian, we celebrate Christian holidays such as Christmas, Easter,… I don’t really know about traditional Vietnamese holidays.  Therefore, holidays such as cung co hon are not very familiar to me. In addition to that, I could taste Johnny’s bánh dưà from Ben Tre, Mary’s banh chung banh day, and probably some more I could not remember. So many things are different about us, but however, I could see that we are united. We celebrate Tet. We believe in religions that encourage nonviolence and love. We can relate to each other. I could see that albeit our different backgrounds in our cultures and subcultures, we are relatively similar as humans. And Mr. Blake summed everything up, “We are not very different, therefore we need to treat each other as we would treat ourselves.”

            This project was very inspirational. Not only could I touch my heritage, but also see how my friends came to be. I could see that my friends are so much different from me, and I, once thinking that Vietnamese people are so boring, changed my view completely after listening to 17 very talented presenters!