https://youtu.be/_z391QNOjv0
https://youtu.be/67XtZwzo_UI
https://youtu.be/NuiBqXJMw_4
https://youtu.be/ZOZmTKKPhGw
If I went to space and met aliens, I think the gift I would bring as a peace offering would be, like, an alien toy, you know, because I think that would, that would make aliens feel very, like, honored and respected that like, “Oh my God, these humans, like, idolize us!” And I think that would really help us have peace with each other.
So I'm just going to give an example of -- in sixth grade, I'm sorry, I said fifth grade. But IXL. A lot of people know about IXL; it's a learning platform, supposed to be educational. But I don't think it's educational, exactly. You just practice your knowledge when you already know it and it kind of takes you down, you know, when you get something wrong. It's timing you constantly and you feel the pressure, and when you get something wrong, it takes you down and it doesn't really build you up, you know? And slowly -- like, if you're at 99 you can get to, like, 90 if you just get one wrong, and then you have to do like five more questions just to be able to finish it. So I really don't like that about IXL. And I also feel like you can practice your knowledge in some other way. It doesn't really help you. So anyways, I stood up and I started a petition against IXL in sixth grade and I passed it around the classroom, which is probably not a very good idea. Actually got an online signature from one of my friends, too, but.
And he created a documentary that brought World War 1 to life in a manner that the world has never seen. And it's so wild how it can take something that we would look over so quickly, especially if you're not a war enthusiast yourself. You would see this footage, the frame rate is super fast because someone was probably literally winding the camera. So it looks like people are walking in fast motion, silently with this damaged film. It's very easy to be like, “Okay, so I get it. World War 1 was literally -- feels like hundreds of years ago, based on that footage,” which makes no sense because video didn’t exist a hundred years ago, but whatever. But when you put in the effort that Jackson did and his team, suddenly you have something incredibly compelling and it feels closer to time travel than it does to just finding a relic of film. And at least once a year, I will show my students the trailer for They Shall Not Grow Old, which begins in black and white with the original footage and slowly works its way into the colorization and it never fails to make my kids’ jaws drop. And suddenly, you can see them just, almost like a light switch, they go from not even knowing what World War 1 was to suddenly completely engaged and they want more. It's so -- when done correctly, colorization of older footage is amazing and it can be such a vehicle for education.
When my sister was born, she's two years younger than I am. A relative, and I'm gonna have to ask my mom who it was, but a relative brought over two trees to be planted, one for my sister and one for me. And every time the two of us are home now, since neither one of us live up in… every time the two of us are home together, we get our pictures taken by our big pine trees and they're absolutely huge and gorgeous now, and probably were planted too close together because they've totally grown together in the last… my sister's 36, so it would have been 34 years ago that they were planted. And they are just absolutely huge, gorgeous trees. And I always, you know, we always think of how special it is to have those two trees behind, you know, my parents’ house.
What's the coolest thing you think you've ever found on a beach? We once went biking, and then we came across this little private beach area, but it was like really weird 'cause it was clearly a public beach but then it was covered up by vines. And when we went down there, we found like this whole camping set up sort of thing, but it looked like it hadn't been used or touched or anything in so long. Do you remember that? Uh-uh. It's really cool. What lake was that on? Michigan. So you found a -- an abandoned campsite. Have you found anything else that's kind of cool on a beach? We found a potato rock, a rock that resembled an actual potato. Other than that, I don't think so. You don't think Petoskey stones are cool? Well, they are, but they're pretty common. There's always Petoskey around.
Have you ever tried to do your own 70s-inspired Hairstyle? What was it? So I have never tried to do my own 70s hairstyle, but my sister has. So over the pandemic, me and my sister both had online learning, and unlike me and I woke up ten minutes before class. My sister would wake up five minutes before class. And so she didn't have time to fix her bad hairdo. And so what she would do is she would prop up like the hair -- like right at top of her head, right above her forehead, she'd prop it up to this 70s hairstyle when you have like a big mohawk thing on the top of your hair. And it would look beautiful on Zoom. But whenever I would walk in on her, whenever she would come down to eat or something, and we saw her hair, it would crack us up because it looks so 70s, but it also -- there're just so many clips and stuff propping it up that you couldn't see on Zoom. We thought that was hilarious, especially if she like kind of turned her head or something, and people saw the clips, it would be hilarious, but that didn't happen to her.