In this unit, we learned the rules of water polo. We learned how to play offense and defense.
One thing I improved at during this is treading water. I learned how to do three types of treading water: egg-beater, breaststroke, and sculling.
Something I can improve on is my water polo skills, as I didn’t get a chance to practice very much.
I used to think that mental health was something not many people understood, and I didn’t know that you could get mental health issues from many causes. I also thought there weren’t many treatments for it.
Now I know that you can reach out to many people if you’re struggling with a mental health condition. I know that these conditions can come from genetics, learning, and your own biology. My perspective is different on people with these conditions, as I learned about all the ways the stereotypes of these conditions are portrayed in media. My perspective changed because I realized that many of the ideas I personally had about these conditions were just because of stigma and stereotypes.
In this unit, I specifically studied OCD. I learned about how it affects people’s daily lives. Learning about OCD helped me understand more about the struggles of people with the condition. This is important to me personally because I am close with a person with OCD, and now I can understand them better.
Active Learner self assessment rubric.
My current goal is to turn in more assignments on time by writing homework in a planner. I have take steps to achieve my goal by creating a note where I can write my homework, and so far I have been able to rarely get an overdue assignment.
I’m most proud I can get a full score on every 3-for-3. My biggest challenge is contributing in group discussions, but I’m trying to raise my hand more. I feel like I am an active learner in this class. There isn’t much I want to work on.
Improvements
I chose question 1 as evidence of my best thinking because I improved a lot from the pretest. I was able to get both these questions correct!
Another question that shows my learning is question 8, where I was able to successfully determine the imposter triangle while being neat.
Throughout this unit, I improved the most at dilating and rotations. I feel that I still need to work on explaining transformations and reading the question more carefully.
The 3’s
Three strengths I have:
- Finding center of dilation
- Finding the imposter triangle
- Proving triangle and angle congruency
Three things I want to improve:
- Checking my work
- Reasoning
- Sequences of Transformations
Goal
My goal for the next unit is to be able to exceed the standard on the summative. I can get closer to achieving this goal by completing all homework assignments on time and checking my work more often.
Alien AI Bot Reflection
Throughout this unit, I learned the parts of speech by teaching an AI bot english from scratch. I improved my understanding of sentence structure and functions of words. Sentences also have to have have fluidity by varying sentence structure and length. Sensory details can be used to accurately describe objects and experiences. Diction can be used to change the connotation of words, or the implied meaning. The final result was the paragraph attached below.
The piece I think shows my work best is my final grade for the project.
(Note: There is an extension, however I decided to omit it as I did not receive a grade for every category.)
fin .
WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan.
Baseline
My WOOP goal was to be able to use my time more efficiently and prioritize work. Currently, I always spend time doing random things and run out of time to do important assignments.
The app I chose, evernote, should be able to let me plan each day and allocate time to do each assignment. After 7-10 days, I should be able to finish assignments on time, not have to stay up late to finish work, and still have enough time to do fun activities.
Right now, I sleep less than 7 hours every day. I also feel tired and stressed most days because of my unfinished assignments.
App Functions
The app has the option to write notes and organize them in notebooks. Inside a note, you can write tasks (checklists) and important reminders. The app can also send you notifications if required! You can sort notebooks like folders.
The app is good for organization as it has a good system with a side bar that lets you access your notebooks and notes easily. The feature I used the most was the template feature, where you can use a template to help plan out your day. However, after a while, I was unable to use templates anymore, although I’m not really sure of the cause.
The app looks really clean and modern, and it offers a lot of options to help with planning, including an AI assistant.
Improvements
I did feel like I was more organized after using the app for 10 days. I was also able to write everything I needed to do in a day, although some days I would not feel enough motivation to try to log into the app to check what I had to do next. Compared to my baseline, there was a great improvement in productivity, especially by not having to memorize each task.
The previous app I was using also had no way to count how many tasks I completed, so it was nice to be able to count easily with Evernote.
Overall, I also felt less tired as I didn’t have as many unfinished assignments. I slept more and was less stressed. This was likely due to the break however, so this data may not be fully accurate. It did help me finish my own projects over the break, so it was still useful although there was no school.
Drawbacks
There are multiple parts that I dislike about Evernote.
A setback the app has is that it is extremely difficult to login and use it, and it automatically locks me out every few hours. I felt demotivated to use the app because it took me 20 minutes just to log in. Also, when I tried to download the app on my phone because logins simply stopped working on my laptop, I was hit with a paywall and couldnt sync my devices without paying.
Additionally, almost every single one of the features was locked behind a paywall. This is understandable as a way of making money, but I simply couldn’t find many good features because I had to pay to access them.
The UI is clean and polished, but it was hard to delete, rename, and especially move notes between folders.
10 days
It took me 15 minutes to create this formating,
I think porfolios should explain how to do this easier.
As I mentioned, the app lets you create a note for every day you log in. These are the 10 days I used Evernote for! I also finished the assignments in the core classes as listed by the task number.
Overall
I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who can’t pay for the subscription, as it is have a very limited use.
During this unit, we learned about how the teen brain works and how it is different from an adult brain.
Project
For my project to demonstrate how the teen brain is impacted by stress, I coded a project on scratch.
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1209454399/
The feedback I received for my presentation was the following:
- They liked the pixel art style
- The scenario was relatable while being memorable
- I clearly explained each “F” in FFF
My final grade was an exceeding.
Reflection
Learning about how the brain functions has allowed me to think through things more carefully. I can recognize when my sympathetic nervous system is activated and use coping mechanisms—breathing from my breath anchor, taking a meta-moment, practicing mindfulness—to stop it.
The most surprising thing I learned was that there is a phenomenon called “amygdala hijack.” It can cause the amygdala to take over the prefrontal cortex in stressful situation, so it isn’t completely a teen’s fault if they are irrational under stress.
If adults learn about how teen brains function, they may be able to communicate and understand how it’s hard for teens to always make the best decisions. They could also realize that many things trigger teens, and this could make the environment feel safer or less tense for teens.
I could practice being more active. This not only refers to doing more exercise, but also actively keeping track of my work and items. I can also talk to people more actively. This could be incorporated into my schedule by taking the time to do exercise and socialize. I could also implement some way of sorting/keeping track of my belongings. These all are habits that give delayed gratification! Instead of getting instant gratification by playing games or lying down, there will be an increased reward and more dopamine release after successfully avoiding bad habits.
In the first unit of Physical Education, we played table tennis. In this unit we were graded based on active learner and our ability to strike. I got a 3 on both of these areas. In the unit we learned how to do serves, fronthand, and backhand shots. One thing that I think I did well on was my serve, as I was able to consistently do good serves. Something that I need to improve on however is hitting shots with front hand.
We also practiced teamwork/collaboration by doing doubles. I also struggled a little bit with doubles as it was hard to coordinate with my teammate.
The game that we created was called “Luckstab Pirates”. The game was about spinning the wheel to get a chance for a prize. If you landed on “game”, then you were allowed to choose the pirate game or the alligator game.
During the process, we mostly split up to work on different parts. This was because if we worked together, we would always have an argument. There was also a conflict where one of my partners (the person with an evil cat emoji on her face) decided to start drawing random things and deliberately ignored me when I asked her to help me. I solved this problem by not solving it and just doing everything myself.
During the probability fair, something that went well was that many people played our game and we got a lot of tickets. I also really like how the stand turned out in the end because I thought we wouldn’t have enough time.
I think that something that we needed to improve on was collaboration. I often time would get mad at random things, which caused a lot of tension in the project. However, we would all be very petty and argue over everything. I think it was mostly because we wanted it to be perfect, but I think we should all have listened to each other better. Also, there wasn’t the correct color of construction paper so we should’ve thought of that earlier.
I think we calculated the theoretical correctly to estimate how many prizes we would need, as we ran out of things pretty equally at the end. The theoretical probability is shown on our posters, and I think in total we had about ~230 prizes. In the end, there were maybe 15 small prizes left over. (candy + small snacks)
