I used to think that OCD was just a wierd personality trait—something that made people too tidy, handwashing too much, or obsessed with lining things up “just so.” I thought it was a silly habit, something people could break if they focused hard enough. Social media and just the general pop culture made me feel that OCD has more to do with cleaning or perfectionism than it does with an actual mental illness.
But after this unit I think OCD is a deeply complicated and often debilitating disorder based on anxiety, not a personality. The main project of this unit—researching OCD taught me just how misunderstood this disorder is. OCD is not about liking neatness; it’s about getting stuck in a never-ending cycle of unwanted, dreaded thoughts (obsessions) and rituals or mental actions (compulsions) done to neutralize anxiety. That is, a person might check under the stove 20 times not because he “loves order,” but because he is afraid of burning down the house and desires short-term relief from fear.
Research Process:
We started by looking at the sources that was provided to us. Some of the were quite useless, because sources like the UN didn’t include anything remotely related to OCD. However, other sources were more helpful. Using this we figured out a lot more about OCD and many websites had specific columns dedicated to the myths of OCD.
Presentation: After that, we started working on the presentation. Despite being sick for a couple classes, I was able to contribute to the group and I made my share of the slides. I specifically worked on the impacts and conclusion sections, and I learned a lot of about the negative consequences of having OCD.
For the actual presentation, we rehearsed a lot before we presented and I thought we did quite well in general.
In conclusion, this Unit was an eye opening experience and I understand now that many myths I had about OCD are very wrong.
The purpose of my conference is to summarize and reflect on my learning journey this year.
I’d like to share:
what i’ve done and what I still want to achieve
Some areas of growth, struggles, and some of my work
My goals and how I plan to achieve them
VISIONBOARD
MY GOALS ARE:
Procrastinate less
Get more organized
Work harder in Drama DT, and Health
I think I handled these goals well and I can see clear improvement with all 3 goals, however I think more work is needed in the 2nd one.
TTGs:
The TTG I chose to reflect upon throughout the year is Effective Collaborator. I chose this because it is important to collaborate and we often need this skill a lot in 8th Grade.
I think I worked effectively on the TTG. Experience from multiple group projects has supported my growth. (eg. WW1, ELA Netflix)
This is an essay created for Social Studies, focusing on the Armenian Genocide. It explores the historical context and its impact on the Armenian population. The goal was to analyze its causes and significance. In particular, this was part of our WW1 Unit.
This was another activity in the same unit, where we took command of countries in WW1.
This assignment was all about exploding pumpkins. It was really fun and my prediction ended up being the closest to the reality.
This was a very fun activity designed by our teachers to help us have more choice in our learning.
Language Arts
This artifact is a storyboard created for a Netflix Script in Language Arts. It showcases the story line of the incredibly long script without presenting nearly as much text. The goal was to create a hook for our story on the day of the gallery walk. While creating it, I felt rather frustrated, partly with my teammates, but mostly with the AI we were using to generate the images. I learned how to better prompt engineer and work with my teammates. This piece reflects my understanding of how to create storyboards, how to use generative AI, and how to work in groups.
This artifact is an excerpt from an analytical essay in Language Arts. It showcases my ability to write analytical essays. The goal of the essay is to give us the skills for future studies where writing these analytical essays for literature is often used. While creating it, I felt proud of my ability to clearly analyze the text, but was also frustrated with the length of the readings. I learned how to read with a critical eye as opposed to quickly scanning over information. This piece reflects my understanding of literature and especially realistic fiction.
Encore: Health
This artifact features my presentation on a stress resilience toolkit for health, focusing on the benefits of yoga. I feel proud of my ability to convey how yoga can help manage stress effectively.
Description: This project was designed so that we could demonstrate our mastery of the vocabulary of the unit. We were required to create a poster explaining how to prevent one common health risk for teenagers, and record ourselves reading it.
Reflection: In retrospect, I could have improved on this project by tailoring everything specifically to teenagers, which is why I only got a 3.5 not a 4. However, in this project, I specifically learned how to apply passé composé, which is one of the many past tenses in french, to real world situations. I demonstrated growth by getting the conjugation right on the first try.
La Lettre
Description: This project was designed so that we would write a letter to a relative who was fighting in WW1. We were supposed to use this to learn about how to write french letters, and use our vocabulary.
Reflection: I thought I did decently well on this project. I was able to write the letter to the standards required. However, there was poor communication between my partner and I, which is ultimately what resulted in me getting a 3.5 not a 4.
Encore: P.E.
This artifact shows my maximum score of 4 for transitioning between offense and defense in floor hockey, soccer, and water polo. I feel proud of my ability to adapt quickly during play, showcasing my strategic thinking and teamwork.
This artifact showcases my dribbling skills in basketball, where I received a score of 3 out of 4. While I feel I demonstrated good control and technique, I recognize that there were areas where I could improve my speed and precision.
GoodTask is a powerful task management app designed specifically for Apple devices, including the Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, and MacOS. GoodTask enhances the functionality of Apple’s built-in Reminders and Calendars apps which offers a familiar interface while delivering advanced features.
At its core, GoodTask revolves around two types of lists: Reminder Lists and Smart Lists. Reminder Lists allow you to organize tasks into specific categories, making it easy to manage different aspects of your life. You can also group lists together for added organization. For instance, I have a list dedicated to each of my school subjects, all grouped within a “School” category.
On the other hand, Smart Lists offer a high level of customization. These lists can be configured to display only specific tasks that match criteria you define. For example, I have a Smart List that shows only tasks due in the next 24 hours, and another that only shows tasks that I have tagged as #later.
Inside each list, you can add tasks, which can be tagged with user-defined hashtags for easy sorting and filtering. Each task also allows you to include detailed notes, making it simple to track additional information. You can even attach documents to tasks for quick access to related files.In addition to notes, GoodTask lets you create subtasks for each task, with the same customization options as the main task.
One of the most important features of GoodTask is its due date and alarm function. Thanks to its seamless integration with the built-in Reminders app on Apple devices, you’ll receive reminders from the native Apple software. This means that if I have GoodTask on my computer, I can also get notifications on my phone.
USEFULNESS
This app definitely supports my WOOP goal (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) because it helps me stay focused and on track. The constant reminders from the app act as a nudge, ensuring I’m always aware of deadlines and when I’m supposed to complete something. This makes it easier to stay disciplined and keep my productivity on track. Additionally, there’s something incredibly satisfying about ticking off tasks once they’re completed. That muscle memory of checking off boxes not only feels rewarding, but it also motivates me to keep moving forward. It’s a simple but powerful way to reinforce progress and build momentum
Moreover, this app also helps me develop healthy habits that improve my stress resilience. A major source of my stress comes from procrastinating on schoolwork. This app encourages me to plan everything beforehand, which is a healthy habit. Consequently, this reduces my procrastination and ultimately leads to better stress resilience and increased productivity. Since this app decreases procrastination, and procrastination causes lots of emotional trauma, it also improves my emotional health. Moreover, because I have better grades, I get in less arguments with my parents, which is ultimately better.
DESIGN
This app clearly uses humane design. This is because it lacks addictive elements. Even though there are notifications and red alerts, which normally should be addictive, they are so that the user can focus on what’s actually important. Moreover, there are no particularly interesting parts of the app that could be addictive, since the design is grey and drab, and color is only used to organize tasks.
Thus, this app adds value to the user’s life. First of all, it has certainly added value to my life, as I am now a much better student since I manage my time better and plan in advance. More generally, it is a task management system that simply works and can be used in a myriad of scenarios. For example, you could use it to track tasks as a parent for your child. Or, it can be utilized by professionals to organize work projects and deadlines effectively. Regardless of how you use it, it definitely adds value to the users life.
Finally, the long term impacts of using this app could be, an increase in productivity and a decrease in procrastination. For me, it could improve my grades, and the quality of my life, and for others, it could improve their revenue or happiness. Generally, the long term impacts of using this apps will be a net positive.
This first unit in health, we learned a lot about stress, stress resilience, how to manage it, and more. This reflection will go over everything we learned, and ultimately try to summarize this unit.
We started off by learning about how the brain functions, because this will be necessary for further understanding. As it turns out, teenage brains are underdeveloped. In particular, teenagers do not fully develop their pre-frontal cortex until they turn 25. This is often problematic because the PFR is used for logical reasoning and rationality. On the contrary, children first develop the amygdala which causes your FFF response. Obviously, this can get out of hand very quickly. We then learned about the Mood Meter. This is a tool used to graphically represent the relationship between the energy and feeling of your mood. After learning all of these tools, we then further learned about the negativity bias. This is essentially the bias to always think negatively. As it turns out, this was used to help us protect ourselves from situations back when we were cavemen. Furthermore, we learned about the difference between distress and eustress. Distress is “bad” stress because it causes suffering. Eustress on the other hand is positive stress and helps build resilience.
For this project, we had to construct a race car out of home brought cardboard and materials that we could “race” in (run with). However, the goal of the race was not to get first place, instead it was to get the closest 1:1 ratio to your predicted time. Wait, i’m getting ahead of myself. For this project we had a predicted time, which was estimated based on everyones moving speed (we were in groups of 3 or 4). For example, if John could move 7 meters in 7 seconds, then we would estimate that if he had to run 400 meters, he would take roughly 400 seconds. With this, we managed to get the total time needed to complete the race. The race track was a not-so-well-laid-out track with chalk arrows. It was split into 4 legs, with each person taking one leg (if you had 3 people, you would just do 3 legs). For our first leg, our first racer was not aware of time and kept speeding up, this was worrying but it wasn’t all over. Because we had 4 legs, as long as the later people could balance out the time, it would all work out. I was the 2nd racer, and I tried my best to slow down, but even then, we were still too fast. In the end, we had to put it all down to the 4th racer. Our 4th racer was able to control his pace and in the end, we were only 10 seconds fast to our predicted time.
But it doesn’t end there, we had to finish up some calculations. Even though we were 10 seconds too fast, we had an extremely long race. So in the world of ratios, it would eventually balance out to a 1:1.07. This would eventually be enough to give us a 1st place finish. But during a group discussion, something interesting happened. Another group was also 10 seconds off, but they somehow got a worse ratio. And here is why having an extremely long race helps. Because our race was longer, the 10 seconds was a smaller portion of the race time compared to the other team, which was why we got a better ratio.
My Reflection:
If I could have done the race again, I would have kept pace better from the beginning. We left it incredibly late, and that meant our racer had to adjust to a uncomfortable pace. For example, at one point, we realized we were too slow, and we were quite far away from the finish line. We had to sprint to the finish line, and, given that we were in cardboard race cars, was incredibly difficult. However, I do think we did amazing during the race. We tactically made it so that we walked instead of ran. Some groups had a running strategy and they finished the whole race in a 4th the time we took. This was not only tiring, but also meant that a little bit off predicted time would mean a big gap in the ratio. I think a smart thing we did was we constantly had a count going so we had a general idea of what time it was, and after each leg, we would calculate the time the next racer needs to accomplish our goal. But it wasn’t all the race. A major issue we had during the project was the Race Car itself. The cardboard car was so small that we struggled to move properly in the car and greatly messed up our predictions. Also, the quality of our car was not great to say the least, for a huge portion of the race, we had to fix the car on the go which also made our predicted time less accurate. In the end, I think that also we messed up in a few parts, it was an amazing project and our team was incredible.
As the Chinese New Year (CNY) holiday approaches, I find myself feeling a mix of excitement and nerves. The holiday is a time for celebration and family gatherings, but it also coincides with the release of report cards from my school.
To be honest, I am a little nervous about seeing my report card. I have been working hard throughout the semester and I hope that it reflects in my grades. However, I also know that grades aren’t the only thing that matters and I try to remind myself of that.
I know that many students feel the same way I do and the release of report cards can cause stress and tension. It’s important to remember that grades aren’t the only measure of success and that we should also focus on our own personal growth and development.
As the CNY holiday approaches, I remind myself to be kind to myself, take a deep breath and remember that everyone goes through this process and it’s not the end of the world. I will look at my report card with a clear and open mind and use it as a tool for self-reflection and improvement.
I also remind myself to make the most of my time with my family and friends during the holiday and enjoy the celebration with them. After all, the CNY holiday is about spending time with loved ones and cherishing the important relationships in our lives.
The saola, also known as the “Asian unicorn,” is a species of antelope that is found only in the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam and Laos. This elusive and rare animal has been called the “most exciting find in the mammal world in the last century,” and is one of the most endangered species on the planet. To find out more about this amazing animal, check out this website that I worked on in science class by clicking this link.
Or, if you cant access this link, scan this QR code:
Creating a portfolio, or blog is a great way to collect all the work you’ve done throughout your academic career. You can include academic, athletic, and personal artifacts or experiences that you want to share with a wider audience. This is a great way to organize all your learning in one place and you can take it with you when you leave SAS. When you make your portfolio, you create posts that are categorized according to your subject. Some categories have already been set up for you, but if you need more categories you can add them as needed. It’s important that your posts have the following:
An engaging title – this should not include the name of the subject since this is referenced in the category. Think of this as the first opportunity to engage and hook your reader!
Body – this is where you share your learning. This should include a combination of text and media in the form of images, graphics, and embedded videos. You should always consider how your post looks to your audience. Is it engaging and organized? Do they want to keep reading?
Category – select one that has been set for you or add a new category. Posts can have more than one category e.g. Humanities and Myself as a Learner
Tags – create tags that can be used as keywords to describe your post. Tags help organize your post a little more! Aim to have 3-5 tags for each post. For example, if you are posting about a novel you wrote, you might want the following tags: #Fiction, #MurderMystery, #Theme, #PlotDiagram
Click on the images below to find a few helpful tips for creating your posts, adding media, and making categories:
