Week 2: Personal Reflection

I've never been the best at organizing my time and sometimes I end up forgetting to do somethings. Recently, I began writing down everything on post-it notes and stick them on my desk. I can then throw them away when I finish all the tasks I wrote on them. Since I began doing this, I have done a lot better job at completing everything that I'm suppose to do.

Week 2: Class Reflection

Our second class was extremely fun. I specifically liked the second activity where we had to rank items that would help us survive on the moon. I liked doing activities like this when I was younger also. It's fun to see the different possible ways we can think of to use the different items. In the last activity, it was fun to see all the different ideas we thought of even though most groups resorted to throwing something as hard as they can to get the distance. Also, I think our group will be known for the messiest and most destructive group after that activity.

Week 2 Personal Reflection

My creative idea of the week happened while I was tutoring this week. I tutor phy 11 and there was a specific concept that as much as I tried explaining, two of my tutees just couldn't understand it. They are both architecture majors and this is important because of what I did. I am a science&math loving person so that was the way I was solving the problem but they just could grasp what I was saying. And finally I tried drawing out a figure that explained the concept and they both understood it within 5 minutes. This experience I thought was really important because I saw that people see things differently and approach the same thing differently. Everybody's perspective is a bit different and when we have to work together everyone has to be able to compromise and be flexible. 

Week 2: Personal Reflection

This week, I haven't done anything terribly creative or fun, however this morning I did solve a particularly nasty homework problem that made me rather happy with myself.  I won't delve into the specifics of the problem, as that doesn't matter.  What does matter is the way I solved the problem.  I sat for an hour just trowing numbers back and forth until I finally got something right.  It took me about 5 sheets of paper, but shows that sometimes big problems can be solved with a little persistence.

Week 2: Class Reflection

This week was an interesting week.  We started with an activity that required us to break free of our earthly thinking to survive on the moon.  It was a new perspective to see what we forgot to think about when it came to differences between Earth and the moon.  We also had to build a flying machine from various scarps of things.  This activity showed that even honors students - supposedly some of the brightest students on campus - will devolve into using brute force over a creative solution if the brute force option is effective enough.

Week 2 Class Reflection

This is probably the most fun class I've had all semester! I thought all the activities had good meaning behind it. I think the meaning of the assignments were to see there are different perspectives to solving a problem. Everyone has a different way of seeing things. For example, when we played with the Tangram puzzles some were better than others. And that was because some had the more compatible perspective to solve them. And same thing with the NASA assignment. Individually, we all had our perspectives on how to solve the task of surviving on the moon. And then we took it one step further and worked on the same task with others with different perspectives and depending on how naturally adept to living on the moon you already were, you increased or decreased your chances of survival on the moon. So I thought overall, these activities were really fun but also thought-provoking about using different perspectives when you're working on something. 

Week 2 Personal Reflection

Every day, I'm faced with the same problem: How am I supposed to accomplish everything I need to get done in 24 hours while also trying to fit in some sleep?  At times, it seems to be impossible.  I used to freak out and stress all of the time, and that got me no where.  How on earth was I going to manage my time better?  Well, for me, the only way I'm pretty sure I function is by writing everything down...and I mean EVERYTHING. Between homework assignments, meetings, softball practice, basketball games, shopping lists....well, you get the point. Writing all of my thoughts and worries down helps clear my head, keeping me organized and (almost) stress-free.