This week was oddly short. There was no school on Friday, and Wednesday was spent doing standardized testing. This meant that there was only three days to start our AP Test prep, but we managed to use those days fairly effectively. The first day was pretty cut and dry, as we only took a practice multiple choice test. It was interesting since we had taken a test earlier in the year. Having spent more time looking at literature, I felt more confident in my interpretations of the pieces. The second day was spent scoring the tests. It was a little disheartening, since it’s designed for you to get a fair amount of questions wrong, but it still felt bad to see those slashes. Those slashes tended to be in groups, meaning that I didn’t intemperate a piece correctly. I realized that I really need to make sure that the answers I put down all have the same theme for the piece. If the answers don’t match each other, at least one of them is probably wrong. It was also a worthwhile experience because I scored very well (for an AP Test) on it. Since I had done well on it the last time too, I’m moving forward feeling confident about that portion of the test. The part that I’m not feeling confident on is the essay sections of the Test. I knew this would be a problem since I really like having a “right answer”, and essays are very open ended. I also just have bad essay writing habits that I fall back on when I don’t have time to think my essay through. Since the essays are timed, I definitely won’t have that time. I’m going to read many tips like these, and hope that they can counteract my bad instincts. With that being said, I still think I did ok on the practice essay. I had an idea and expanded on it quickly. It won’t be a 9 level piece, but I think it will have good enough marks for me to be satisfied. I just hope it goes that well on the actual test.
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This was the last week of the Snowfall recreation project. This ment four days of cramming to finish, and then one of getting to see each others. During those four days of cramming, my job was to finish all of the writing. I was definitely intimidated at first, as I had only talked about what the writing should be like. While previous discussions had given me the basic ideas of what to write, actually doing it is always harder. I also still wasn’t completely confident in writing in an article style either. A looming deadline gave me the push to get it done though, and it didn’t turn out to be too awful. I realized that it was very similar to authorizing in an essay, as you need to summarize the important parts of the novel. Websites like this helped me to be efficient in my summaries. This writing was quite a bit more extreme than an essay in this regard, but the skill transferred over. I also think that my authorizing in an essay will be better from this. I also got a nice surprise, as the rest of the group finished their jobs pretty early, so I had plenty of help getting all of the writing done. It was sort of fitting that we all had to write with the same ideas, as we all needed the same end goal for the different parts of the website. On the last day, we had a gallery walk where we got to see each other’s websites. I had a lot of fun with this. It was cool to see how each group tackled the project. I often found myself comparing different design decisions to our own. There were definitely some ideas that I wished we had thought of, but I was still happy with the quality of our website when it was all said and done. It was nice to finish up the last project before the AP test, and now it’s time to buckle down and get prepared. It’s been a week full of struggle. Having finished Siddhartha, my group started putting together the project. This started with doing the picture notes. The problem was that we took pictures of random things we liked, and none of them really fit the questions we were later given. We also didn’t really understand how the picture notes were supposed to help us, so we didn’t really know what direction to take with them. We got it done eventually though, so at least there’s that. The next step was to actually start the writing, website, and video scripts. We also struggled to get started on this. Since there’s so many different aspects to the project, we didn’t have a good starting point for us all to focus on before we started working on the individual parts. I was also confused at how I was supposed to write, as it was supposed to be more of an article than an essay. I understood how to write in an article style by using websites like this one, but I wasn’t sure how to incorporate my ideas without being able to talk about them. This all lead to a lot of conversation. We decided to make an outline and talk about the book until we understood our goal. This talking really helped to get us all on the same page and give us somewhere to go. It was incredibly useful. Through this, I realized that this was a very different group from the previous ones I had before. Everyone in my group had an idea of how they wanted everything to go, so we had to find a way to align our goals. Most of the other groups had one person as a leader, and the rest followed. It’s nice to have a group that has ideas though, so I’m excited to see how it all turns out This week was the first week of the new trimester, and with it came new opportunities. The tri started out strong with a new project to work on: a multimedia report. This is going to be a very large project, but it’s exciting. We’ve worked with writing and videos before, but the amount of technical ideas that could be used is quite a large pool. My group choose Siddhartha to read, and it was a very good book. It’s the life story of a fictional monk who tried many different ways of life to try to find enlightenment. As he went through all of the different lifestyles, I couldn’t help but think of how I was living too. It really made me think about my own purpose in life, and I think I got a few lessons out of it. Just reading the books isn’t enough though, as we have to recreate the Snow Fall project from the Wall Street Journal. This article is actually really cool to explore, as it uses so many different forms of media to tell its story. I had never really thought of using videos, bios, and screen-casts to enhance a paper before. That's only the tip of the iceberg too, as websites like this offer many more ideas. If I’m going to be honest, I think this is going to be a very difficult project. Adding all these elements definitely isn’t going to be easy. I’m also really excited to see what these elements can do to enhance my own writing though, so hopefully it all goes well. I was a little behind this week, as the goal was to make our Pecha Kucha presentations for our independent reading project. I had somewhat forgotten about my book, so I was nowhere near being able to start a project on it. That led to me power reading through it for the first half of the week. I managed to finish it in two days, but I definitely won’t completely put off a later project for the current one. Once I did finish it, I had to start actually start thinking about the project as a whole. I went back to my proposal to see what I had decided before. My original plan was to look at what happens when someone is controlled and oppressed, but I didn’t really like that idea anymore. When I thought about my books, I realized that I wasn’t that interested at digging deeper into what happened to the oppressed characters. Nothing really surprised me, so I didn’t feel like it would accomplish much. Having no central idea to go off of, I looked back at themes of the books. Website likes this were useful in reminding myself exactly how to go about find it. I figured out that I would much rather look at how they were being controlled. This interested me much more, as it was more applicable to me. I’d much rather break someone’s control on me than suffer through it. I also really enjoyed this because the two book were different in how the control was applied. It really made me take apart all the elements and find the core of both. I found my answer, and I am now ready to present my idea. This week was an easier week. We finished up our videos over the first few days, then proceeded to watch them over the next days. Honestly, I was expecting this week to be almost a break week. Watching a bunch of videos didn't seem like it would be that engaging or informative. I was proven wrong though, as I feel like a learned quite a bit from them. The first thing that I noticed was that my video wasn’t as bad as what I thought it was. After seeing movies and YouTube videos made by professionals, my video didn’t seem to be worth acknowledging. Watching everyone else’s videos helped me feel better about my work though, as no one else could compare to the skill of those who make videos for a living. Not only did it make me feel better about my video making skills though, but it helped me feel better about my work in the class in general. I often feel like my work has a lot of holes in it, and I don’t always get the best grade on my work. Sometimes it makes me feel like I shouldn’t even bother with the AP test because I can’t even do well without the pressure. Advice like this can help, but sometimes you need something beyond yourself. Watching the movies helped me to remember that everyone else is in the same position I’m in, so I felt more confident in my work. I also realized something about writing while watching the videos. I noticed that some of the videos had some really strong subjects to talk about, and other videos did a really good job of presenting what they had to say. It made me stop and think about this in all of the writing that we do. If we can take these two ideas and accomplish both, I feel like something really good will come out of it. We need that strong central idea to talk about. It’s the reason to write the piece, and the piece will fail without a good reason. It also needs to be presented in a way that captures its significance. The idea is worthless if no one can understand it. Both of these parts are equally important, and should be considered when writing. This was an off week for me, as I was sick for over half of it. It didn’t matter too much though, as most of the days were focused on actually making and editing our videos. This made it easier for me to do at home, since it’s all online. Before I could actually start the video though, I needed to revise my piece a little. I ended up changing the direction a little of the piece, and adding some more content. It felt good to revise my paper. I know from doing all the other papers, that my first draft never quite captures what I’m trying to say. I was a little worried because I didn’t know if I’d find a way to phrase what I wanted to say, but it all worked out. The next problem to fix was that I’ve never actually worked on a video before. Using the provided editing software, I knew that it wouldn’t be hard to get the video how I wanted. The issue was that I had no idea what I wanted. For example, I had no idea what kind of music to use as background. I used websites such as this one, but it’s hard to think up music that fits my theme. As I struggled to figure out how to make a decent video, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the first essay we did for this class. I didn’t really know how to structure an essay well there, just like with the video. As I started playing around with the video, I noticed that it took some time until I was able to really figure out how I wanted to do this. This reminded me of the pre-writes that I found myself doing before I wrote any of my previous essays. I’ve discovered that the whole video editing process is very similar to the writing process. Hopefully my writing skills will transfer over well into my video. This week, we started a new project: This I Believe. We started this by watching some videos about telling stories. Some were just of people telling the stories, and some were more on the theory of what storytelling can do and how it should be done. These were cool to watch and think about, but they were really just lead up into the actual assignment. Our goal for the project is to write a story about a belief that we have, then turn it into a video. This scared me at first. I felt self conscious about the idea of talking about myself, and I really didn’t like the idea of recording my voice. That started to fade away though, as I focused on the task at hand. Beliefs make up who we are, and it was really cool to start thinking about my own. It’s also different from most of the other projects that we’ve done, since those were about something we’ve read. This is the first project we’ve done about ourselves. This really breaks into a new part of your brain, as it is more personal, and less formal. I had a hard time coming up with ideas. I used websites like this to help me get closer, but they couldn’t quite get me all the way there. I eventually decided to write about my animals, since that was something safe yet meaningful. As I was writing it, ideas really started to break out. I think the problem was that I just didn’t feel comfortable about writing about myself, so I just didn’t come up with ideas. I think that this project is really good for learning to write in a different way. Having moved on from Shakespeare, we we’re able to shift focus to a new concept: forming an argument. We started by reading a few articles on internet tracking. For the first one, we read half of it and shared the information with someone who read the other side. I didn’t really care for this, as it felt like I was missing out on information because I didn’t get to read the other side. Instead of processing the information, I was trying to gather more. For the second article, we did group discussion. I really thought this one helped my learning, as it forced me to consider the parts of the article that other people selected. Left to my own devices, I would have only seen the part of the picture that was the easiest for me to see. Next, we moved on to a debate between the two arguments as to the ethics of tracking. This was probably what I learned the most from this week. Because someone else is trying to disprove your argument, it really shows you the holes in your argument. It also really taught me about how important it is to take time to do research on your subject. Reflecting on it, I can see that it also taught me a little about my argument style. I spent most of my argument focusing on stating facts, but not explaining them well. I’ve noticed that in my writing too, so that will be an area that I need to work on in the future. This website has a lot of good information about arguing, and I think it will help me extend better in the future. Having finally gotten a full week of school, we used the opportunity to finish and present our Shakespeare presentations. The first few days were hectic, as we tried to put the last touches on the slides. Then came actually figuring out what to say, which is always a little harder than what you expect. My group decided that it would be easiest to assign everyone a slide to speak to. This was a really good decision, as our we had three different psychological perspectives to present, and there were three of us. It was also nice, as it allowed us to pick art and music that we could each feel confident about explaining. Our presentation went well, without any major hang ups. This project has taught me much more than I thought it would at the start. It obviously was a way to learn about the story of Macbeth, but it was more than that. Since we did psychological theory, we spent a fair amount of time looking in to the history of psychology. Getting to look at websites like this was really fun. This was especially fun since I have a psychology class this trimester. It was cool to be able to apply information I learned in that class to what we were doing into this class. The biggest thing this project taught me though, was how to work in a group. Plenty of other projects in this class have had me working with others, but this was the first where things didn’t go smoothly the entire time. We didn’t agree on all the ideas, and there were some parts of the project that no one really wanted to do. We worked it out though, and it’s taught me a lot about working in teams. |
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April 2017
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