ITW Preview

In the past, my blog has focused purely on my experiences pertaining to chocolate, and school has been brought up a few times, mostly in humorous anecdotes about teachers asking me to bring chocolate back from various places like San Francisco, Seattle, and Amsterdam. Now, my school is going to take center stage, as an upcoming project will be focused firmly on the world of chocolate.

For context: My school's eighth grade Humanities class has a project that they run every year called Into The Wild. This project spans an entire semester, and its core driving questions are answers to 1 of the 17 United Nations SDGs, or Sustainable Development Goals. These goals are worldwide benchmarks that should theoretically be met by the year 2030, things like SDG 1: No Poverty, SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, and SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. Lofty though they are, efforts are being made to pursue these goals, and Into The Wild is my school's way of recognizing and contributing towards these goals.

Every eighth grade student will undertake this project with the end prouct being something that contributes to one of the SDGs. For example: my brother noticed that a considerable percentage of plastic waste came from condiment packets (ketchup, mustard, and the like), so he made a prototype of a biodegradable ketchup packet, formed from some kind of sturdy paper and beeswax. One may be able to see where this is going from here.

One more necessary detail is this: on the first Monday of every month, fouth period for some people is replaced with something called a CMI. I'm still unclear on what that stands for, but the long and short of it is that it is a 8th-grade-student-led presentation about their general ITW topic.

So, I have decided that my ITW project will be writing and teaching a CMI about cacao farmers and the poverty they face. To my knowledge, a cacao-centered ITW has never been done before, which surprises me, because my first thought was actually about cacao husk and pod waste, which is relatively well-known in comparison to what I'll be doing.

So for the next eight or so weeks, there will be an update every other about the project's progress. The updates may be short or long, depending on how productive I was during that week, due to the fact that we have just an hour every week specifically designated for this project. However, it is highly likely that I also do some of this work outside of school, so that is where the brunt of the updates will come from. I would very much appreciate any feedback on my idea.