co-ed bathroom

change one of the girls bathrooms in konia into a coed bathroom

ohhh kumu V....

today i had the pleasure of interviewing my homeroom teacher in order to gain an insiders point of view on things that teachers want to see changing about the school. this would be a pretty routine task except for one thing... my homeroom teacher is mr. Vinta. i was prepared for strange from the get go but he surprised me with some actually good ideas! for example when i asked him what pissed him off about the school, he replied that it is a pain in his butt to have to upload grades to ksconnect and then to another website on top of that! now this really isnt something that i could affect with our project but it was a nice start off with a good suggestion. some of the other ideas he had included was to kill mass numbers of gnats at once, as well as light sabers. the list goes on with ideas of things that Vinta would like to change about our school, unfortunately he was unable to come up with anything really feasible for us to do for our project, it was still good however to gain insight into what the teachers are thinking.

Spring Break is over = we need to start working

Hello all Supahbad Physics bloggers! Welcome back from a (hopefully) relaxing spring break. Today Mr. Blake "got real" with us and showed us the numbers... they're not looking pretty, folks! Take a look below:

Courtesy of https://sites.google.com/site/hoouluiakamehameha/

Needless to say, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Mr. Blake wanted to get us inspired, so he showed us a YouTube video of people in the Philippines making a difference in their community by using cheap materials in an effective manner. The result? Cheap lighting in homes using water bottles. It just goes to show that even the smallest and most unlikely things can make a huge impact in someone's life. 

Since we had a lot more of the project to "reintroduce" today, we basically took the time to divide up duties and whatnot. Starting today, we'll be writing a daily blogpost— I'll be writing it on Mondays and weekends, Rachelle will be writing it on Wednesdays and Fridays, and Kenny will be writing it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. 


We also broke down some groundwork— as we've already created a "bug list", now's the time to get input from REAL LIVE PEOPLE. Like teachers, students, and anyone else we see on campus. So we'll be conducting interviews within the next couple of days. I'll be contacting Mrs. Razee, the APUSH teacher, Kenny will be talking to Mr. Vinta, the English teacher, and Rachelle will interview Mr. Beckett, the Photography teacher. We wanted to get a wider range of perspectives, and figured that interviewing teachers with almost nothing in common would be able to accomplish that. In our interviews, we'll give them a copy of our current bug list, explain our project, and ask them about their own experiences during the school day and how we could make their tasks more efficient. I think we will be pretty successful in our interviews— and hopefully they will help us narrow down how we can make Kamehameha a better place. Let's do this and make this project the best we can! :)

Kenneth watched the lorax!

so apparently i was a deprived child and never had the good fortune of having the lorax read to me nor did i ever read it, in fact i had never even heard of it until a few weeks ago! i thought mr. Blake just wanted to give us a fun homework assignment, i was wrong. the movie actually had many lessons to be learned from it. from the obvious one which is protecting the environment, to others like the fact that a single person is all that is needed to change the world. the movie can be related to what we are trying to do with our ho'oulu ia kamehameha projects because it has to do with finding solutions to things before the opportunity has passed and you are left with a nearly irreversible result, this was shown in the movie when the ounceler (i think thats how you spell it...) watched the last tree fall down and realized how terrible of a thing he had done. we need to prevent things like that from happening in our world by doing our ho'oulu ia kamehameha project!

Rachelle's Film Review: The Lorax

When we were assigned the task of watching The Lorax, I was kind of shocked that watching a children’s movie would relate somehow to our improving Kamehameha project. After watching the movie though, I can see how Mr. Blake feels that we could get important lessons out of the movie. One lesson I feel stands out the most is the fact that it takes only one person to make a positive influence on the people around them. Ted, for example, comes to be the hero at the end of the story because he was given the task of planting the last Truffula seed so the trees and the Lorax could return. I feel that this lesson relates to our project because even though my group is only made up of 3 people and Kamehameha has a student body of almost 2,000 kids, our ideas and choices to help improve the school can benefit each person on our campus in some way. Ted was only one boy, but his determination and actions ending up working out for the better. Our groups dedication, determination and choices will hopefully end up helping our school for the better. 

Our Bug List

Courtesy of http://www.ksbe.edu/images/v6/kapalama_aerial.jpg

Our Kapälama campus is so vast and there are so many opportunities for our group to make a difference! We've compiled just a few of our ideas here so you can get an idea of what we're thinking about.

1. Extend the benches and outdoor seating to the second floor of Konia (not very original, but very useful, if you see the number of people that hang out there in the mornings before school). 


2. Have our own “Pow Wow Kamehameha” and enlist the help of art teachers, students, and faculty to paint over graffiti, blank walls, and ugly or unattractive exterior surfaces with meaningful and tasteful art that (possibly) evokes emotion, political views, critical thinking, our heritage, or other local issues. This could bring our school together as a community and as artists with opinions. It could also have interchangable QR codes incorporated into the art that link to school sites or a good song that the user can listen to while passing by in the halls. ( See Pow Wow Hawaii's site: http://powwowhawaii.com/home/)

3. Help students get more organized by creating an efficient planner system (digital or tangible).
4. Build better bathroom stall doors that completely hide the person occupying the stall in order to avoid any awkward moments.
5. Building off of idea #4, create some sort of louder background noise (like air rushing or something, like in a home or office restroom) in order to cover up any unpleasant or awkward noises.
6. Organize student workshops afterschool or during lunch/homeroom periods so that students unable to take certain elective classes (i.e., Ceramics, Creative Metals and Glass, Printmaking) can learn and try something new. Even if they're not able to continually take the class, they can at least get a taste of what it's like.
7. Move the pool to the current construction site by Keku and place the future parking structure that they'll build where the pool is now so that way the pool doesn't crack or leak again in another five years.
8. Organize student-to-student days where high school students help incoming freshmen (current eighth graders) figure out what to take and what they should do their freshmen year. The current middle school counselors are not very adept at helping confused eighth graders figure out what to take and actually discourage them from aiming high from the very beginning.
9. Assemble a group of willing and capable tutors in the following subjects: Math (all levels), Physics, Economics, Hawaiian, Spanish, Japanese, and English. Create an organized system that helps students succeed, and chart the growth and grades.


10. Put some sort of shade over the pool so the students and swimmers who use the pool on a daily basis don’t have to risk some form of skin cancer. Although skin cancer is a long-term consequence, and may possibly be an exaggerated thing, it is a concern for the ones who use the pool everyday. They could also install sunscreen dispensers next to the pool for the people who need, but forgot. (This idea is actually very dorky I realize, but that’s okay)

11. Have some sort of social set-up on Konia Field (possibly including shade). It may make the field look more cluttered, but it’s a nice open space that both students and teachers could enjoy considering how big the field is.

Nikki talks about 'The Lorax'

Courtesy of http://elleswim.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/lorax.jpg

The 2012 remake of The Lorax by Universal Pictures was interesting, to say the least. I thought that it had a good message, but it failed to reflect Dr. Suess' nostalgic world of Truffla-truffs and thneeds in a way that the good doctor would have approved of. Parts of the movie felt clunky and a little too forced, but Zac Efron and Taylor Swift's voice acting made up for those awkward moments. I think the reason why Mr. Blake assigned this movie as our homework over Spring Break was because Ted, the young protagonist of the story, set out to accomplish something (find a real tree) in a shallow vein, but then he ended up truly caring about the environment and the trees. I would venture that Mr. Blake identifies us with Ted, and this is all a subliminal message assuring us that we will end up caring about our "Making Kamehameha A Better Place" projects. Rest assured, I have great confidence that his prediction will come true— it did when we launched (no pun intended) our Water Bottle Rocket project last quarter. I also think this was a way for us to 'get in the spirit' of things and encourage us to be part of the solution. As the Lorax says, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."