4/2/2020 Edward Mui Period 1

Edward Mui
4/2/2020



What is it like working from home?

Working at home has been going quite nicely for me. I’m able to make my own schedule and do assignments at my own pace while in the comfort of my home. It’s giving me the chance to try to organize and keep track of things by myself which will be good skills to have when I go off to college

What are you learning about your world/ community based on the reactions?

Seeing the recent increase in the amount of people protesting the stay-at-home orders has been a rollercoaster of emotions. While I understand that they don’t want to be cooped in their homes for an extended period of time, going out and protesting in large groups with no protection is beyond baffling. Not only does it put themselves in the way of harm, it only increases the need to have stay at home orders as more people get infected

Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now

When I first found out about the virus spreading, I didn’t think it was going to grow into such a global problem. It seemed like something that would come and go fairly quickly. But now, as I sit at home waiting for the pandemic to end, it seems weird how even just one month prior I was living life normally. While it’s worrying to watch this virus continue to grow, I’m fairly certain that we will be able to recover eventually 

Anna Liu 4/27/20 Period 2 - Blog #3

April 27th. 2020

Anna Liu Pd 2

Modern Mythology 2020

What is it like working from home?

• Working at home has completely flipped my life around as it might have to many others. Doing schoolwork is what keeps me in check and brings a little order back into my life. Some teachers continue to hold calls which is nice. It gives us a way to imitate a classroom setting through a screen.. The workload given by most teachers is fair and manageable. Even if it seems hard to work while stuck at home surrounded by distractions, I find the work giving me a sense of balance in these crazy times.

What are you learning about your world/community based on the reactions?

• While stuck in this pandemic, we have learned a lot about our community and how it is growing even more divided as accusations grow and cases rise. The first thing that I have learned about was the rise of xenophobia and it hurting an entire race. In my neighborhood, a predominantly Asian community, there have been so many cases of hate crimes and harassment stories. It brings up worry in everyone that people would attack others just because of their race even without connections to the virus. The second thing I've learned is that people are very condescending when others don't follow what they consider a safe way of living. People are quick to hate when they see others going out for non-essential reasons, when they see people protesting and when the government or the department of education announce new regulations or more bad news. Lastly, I've learned how much of an affect paranoia has on people. It causes irrational thoughts and actions such as buying so much of something that it becomes so scarce that it drives up the  prices and hinders lives of those who can barely afford it.

Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now?

• My personal opinion is that I am as heartbroken as the seniors in the sense that we are losing what was supposed to be one of the most important years of our lives. However,I personally haven't had anyone close to me contact the virus and I know many people are probably suffering a lot more loss than us so for now all we can do is stay at home and hope for the best so that at least we can enjoy our college years. For now to make the best of our situation, people should focus on spending some time with their loved ones and use their time in quarantine wisely. Learning new hobbies, watching new shows and calling friends have kept me occupied and sane during this long break. I hope everyone stays safe and in time we'll be out of our homes thinking we took staying at home for granted.

Yayin Ruan 5/1/20 Period 2 - Blog #3

YaYin Ruan

Modern Mythology pd 2

5/1/20

Blogger #28

Blog 3.2

1. Today’s lesson is about the history and origin of zombies. Zombies have their origins in voodoo and the Haitian plantations. Slaves who worked in the sugar plantations led a harsh life, and they saw death as the only way out. In voodoo belief, death means the return to Africa (lan guinee) or heaven, where they can truly be free. If Baron Samedi, the lord of cemetery, refuses to bring a soul to lan guinee, they will become a zombie. Zombie is a dead slave, who will be stuck in an eternity of servitude. Later, during the Harlem renaissance novelist, Zora Neale Hurston took a picture of a woman who was supposedly dead for 29 years. She believed this woman to be a zombie. She was criticized for this picture because the woman was most likely mentally ill and suffered a social death. The movie “Night of the Living Dead” caused a cultural change in the perception of zombies. It changed the connotation of zombies from slavery to a more violent image of the undead eating human flesh. This movie also criticizes consumerism with people acting like zombies fulfilling their materialistic desires by rapidly and massively consuming without thinking. 
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2. New York is currently experiencing declining statistics in the number of new cases and deaths. The newest update is around 1,000 new cases and 289 new deaths per day. These numbers are still very scary but we are slowly on the way to recovery. We should thank all the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and essential personnel, who are risking their lives to ensure everyone's safety and keep society functioning. Currently, the projection for New York to reopen is still on May 15th. New York City alone has 170k confirmed cases, and it doesn’t seem like reopening this soon is possible. 
3. Today Gov. Cuomo announced all public schools in New York state will be closed for the rest of the academic year. It feels weird to know that this is the rest of my senior year. Working at home is working out fine for me. There are ups and downs. I’m not sleep-deprived, which I would be if I was in a traditional school setting, and I am procrastinating less than I expected. However, the downside is that I often get distracted easily. I have two younger siblings and sometimes they can be very loud, which is not ideal when it comes to studying or writing. Secondly, the thought of the impact of the virus is always in the back of my mind. The pandemic is very real, especially living in New York, the biggest hub for the virus, and it is very sad and depressing to know that people around you are suffering. This combined with senioritis can be unmotivating. 

4/30/20 Eri Dumesh Period 1

1- What is it like working from home?

I personally do not enjoy working from home. I find that a zoom call cannot function with more than a few people. Also, I have many privacy concerns regarding software that is widely used. The sad truth is that the innovation of the internet is too new for a complete shift in the educational scene. It has a myriad of problems with security, hacking, and unauthorized access. This time should be taken for light review and work, and focusing on health and family. 

2- Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now.

I feel our house-confinement is an excessive move, but has to be done. Being the land of the free also gives us the title “land with the most responsibility”. It is unfortunate that we cannot trust the people in our country to be safe and stay at home, but it is the grim truth of a terrible pandemic like this. Hopefully, by summer we will be able to leave our houses and work like normal because in my opinion, this is an unsustainable lifestyle to continue. Our life has been changed permanently, and it seems like now we are more concerned with watching the news than the people around us. 

 3-. What are the updates around the world/community regarding the virus?

As of May 1st, there is still a lot of uncertainty in the air. Many are looking for quick testing kits and possible vaccines, but we are in more of a controlled state. There was much more widespread paranoia in the days before this, so you can say that we are seeing the light in the storm. So far, over a million people have recovered. 3 million have been infected and we are unsure what the future lies.

4/7/20 James Pannone Period 1

4/7/20 James Pannone Period 1

What is it like working from home? 

I have found that working from home is a lot better. The workload is way more manageable (for some classes) and way less stressful. Only having three classes a day makes dealing with our current situation much easier. The only problem I have, is I'm not home much now since I had to get a job to help my family. Some teachers are strictly using their timestamps, but that can be hard for me because I sometimes have work during those times. 

Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now.

I feel like ignorant people are making this pandemic much worse than it was projected to be. The fact that people still feel the need to leave the house for unnecessary reasons is just selfish. My dad is a member of the NYPD, he is forced to go on the streets and put his whole family in danger. He doesn't have a choice, but the people who do and still feel the need to leave are just disrespectful. He is currently losing 25% of his salary, which is usually over time, and people still think this whole pandemic isn't a big deal.

What are you learning about your world/community based on the reactions? 

This adds on to my previous topic, people are selfish. They are leaving the house for minimal enjoyment and putting countless lives in danger. My great-grandma was recently diagnosed with the virus, and she's 90. We don't know how she contracted the virus, but she is living in a nursing home so it's a good guess that one of her care-takers was neglectful. People need to think about people other than themselves and realize there is more in this world that minimal fun that leads to innocent death.

Sorry, this is late Zuting but can you please submit it anyway so maybe I can get partial credit.

5/1/20 Sampson Zeng Period 5

5/1/20 Sampson Zeng Period 5

Blogger 32

What is it like working from home?

So far I am getting use to working from home and I feel like working from home is less stressful. We only have to attend three classes per day and the workload isn't too much in my opinion. However, group projects can sometimes be difficult to complete since we don't attend school and have to communicate with group members through digital interactions. Also, working at home seems to cause me to slack off more and sometimes it can be hard to make yourself motivated in order to complete the work that has been assigned. My home also is starting to become more noisy as my family is all stuck at home and sometimes have things of their own that they do. 

Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now.

I at first enjoyed not going to school since I didn't have to wake up at 6 am in the morning everyday for school. However as more and more time passes by, I am starting to miss going outside and being able to do normal things like going outside without a mask. I think that the corona-virus will soon be over soon since social distancing seems to be effective in preventing the spread of the virus. It's been pretty strange in my opinion to not leave my house for about a month and I sometimes feel bored with being stuck in the house. Everyone I know seems to be doing well and they don't seem to have any problems so I don't worry for anyone. Hopefully the virus will go away soon and everyone can just live normally again.

What are the updates around the world/community regarding the virus?

Governor Cuomo announced that school will be closed for the rest of the school year and that it might be even longer. So far, more than 18,000 people have died in the New York state. There is 1.1 million confirmed cases of people infected with corona-virus, and more than 300 thousand of those cases are from New York. About 133 thousand people have recovered from the corona virus in the US as of now and almost 64 thousand have died. Considering the entire world, there are 3.28 confirmed cases of the corona virus and about 1 million have recovered. Many are starting to get tired of the lock down in other states as the news reports about protesters who want to reopen the economy while others are saying that it's still too early to lift the lock down.

4/28/20 Alexandra Shinkareva Period 8

Modern Mythology 2020

Blog date: 04.28.20

Name: Alexandra Shinkareva

Period 8

Blogger number: 25

1. What is it like working from home?

I personally do not like working from home, however this is not what I expected my “working from home” experience to be like. When I went to school, there was a lot of structure, with school starting and ending at a particular time and classes being at the same time every day. Now, there is minimal structure and I miss the feeling of having lessons and actual assessments. Classes do have assigned days and times, but it is not mandatory to be there at that exact time and it is very easy to simply not do the work at the right time. While it is nice that I can wake up late and go to sleep late, everyday is starting to get repetitive and all the school assignments feel like busy work. I am thankful that I learned everything I need to know for my AP tests before we began working from home because I have learned almost nothing from the new topics that we have been doing. Homework is very easy and lessons do not feel as engaging. I also don’t like online assessments because it's very easy to cheat on them and it doesn’t even feel like an assessment anymore. I expected my “working from home” experience to be a lot more structured than it actually is.

2. What are the updates around the world/community regarding the virus?

I am writing this blog on April 30th, so there have been new updates since April 28th. One major update is that in America, jobless claims have surpassed 30 million, which is 12.4% of the workforce. This is a huge amount, considering that the normal unemployment rate is around 5%. This record was last broken in the early 1970s. This shows how America is continuing to plunge into an economic recession because of the virus. In addition, Americans cut back on spending by 7.5% in March, which is the biggest monthly decline since 1959. Because of this, businesses in a variety of fields are being hit. Another update is that the US death toll from the virus has exceeded 63,000 and the world death toll has exceeded 231,000 today. The third update is that Europe is already making plans to reopen and lift lockdowns. France set their date for the lockdown lift to May 11. Germany is going to start reopening small stores and some schools in the beginning of May. Other European countries, such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece have similar plans.

3. Your own personal feelings and thoughts about what is happening right now.

I don’t have many strong feelings about this whole situation, mainly because I am still absorbing everything that’s happening. This event is so widespread and hard-hitting that it is hard for me to even process what is happening, especially in NYC. Everyday, I take a quick look at the news to see what is happening around me and I am very thankful that it is not affecting me. My dad is an essential worker, so he has to go to work everyday. I am grateful to see him come home feeling healthy everyday. However, I still worry about my friends and extended family, as I already know people affected by the virus. Thankfully, those people have already recovered. I’m just sitting in my room, like everyone else, waiting for this virus to just magically disappear so I can go hang out with my friends and not have to worry about being 6 feet apart and wearing face masks everywhere I go.