Academic Update #3

Progress in my classes has been achieved, and as I had promised to blog after such had been done, here I am to tell you all about it.
As I said in my second academic update, Chapter 9 did indeed prove to be the easiest chapter. Alex and I finished off of a single lesson with Mr. Davidson after school, and we look to move on to the final chapter next week. After the brutal chapter 8 it felt very good to zoom through a chapter as fast as we did. It gave me personally a sense of motivation as it was quick progress on our board of standards, and for chapter 10, we are going straight to Mr. D in an attempt to replicate what we did this chapter. We will have the last chapter done in the next two weeks at most, and then begin work on our final. In math we are moving at a steady and thankfully far faster pace than before, and I feel that we will finish this year strongly.
In English however, there is a little less positivity towards the subject and far more seriousness. I had spent far too much time working on math and my Anthem essay, and now find myself with very little time to finish this literary analysis paper, along with several sitting responses, paragraph level argumentations, and a discipline specific paper all before the end of the year. But, with careful planning and well spaced time I fully believe that it can be done. Last week I outlined my paper over the book Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, and got a body paragraph done along with my intro. This week will be stressful, but after it is over I will have made great strides towards finishing the list I made above. This week I plan to not only finish my essay, but get three sitting responses done. This will require dedication and time, but as long as I have both it can be, and will be, completed. Also during this week I recently decided to create a list of the standards I need to knock off the board before the end of the year, and will be putting those standards into the work I complete in an effort to furhter organize my English end-of-year strategy. After Chapter 10 and my essay are completed I will get back to you on how my experiences in those things went, along with a plan for how to finish off my year in Open.

Academic Update #2

I have definitive news to report on my academic work thus far in Open. I have waited to blog until two requirements were reached, those being finishing the dreaded Chapter 8 and finishing my English essay over the book Anthem. I would like to thank my math and English teachers, respectively Mr. Davidson and Mr. Sitze for guiding me in the finishing of the goals I set forward. I would also like to thank Alex Sitze for collaborating with me in our math ventures along with reviewing my paper for English so as to provide an outside eye to errors I may have had. I will go into more detail of what I accomplished in math and English below.

For math, we struggled a great deal in finishing Chapter 8. As mentioned in my first academic update, we planned to learn by the book before taking the pretest. Upon reaching the pretest we encountered a problem on it that has been dubbed by students before us in Open as the "Hobbit Problem". This problem took multiple attempts, all of which failed, before I reached the level of desperation to ask Davidson for help. He showed me in this that I had the process correct, and was simply doing bookkeeping errors, along with square rooting things in an incorrect fashion. Upon learning this, I was able to understand and eventually even enjoy doing this problem, simply because I understood what I before had not. Upon getting this assessed, which we did separately from the actual test, both Alex, who had worked with me on this, and I achieved a green star symbolizing our mastery of the problem. Last Thursday we finally took the test, after some strenuous review over what we had forgotten over spring break and the Hobbit Problem oriented classes, and it went well. We were being tested over multiple conics: parabolas, circles, hyperbolas, and ellipses. We both received green stars on nearly every standard assessed, and plan to move to Chapter 9 next week, along with hopefully finishing it, as it has a reputation as the easiest chapter. Our math, though seeming slow for a while, has now picked up and I am glad to have finally put some stars up for it.

In English, I also finished my essay over the book Anthem, by Ayn Rand. With the competition deadline I planned to have finished by looming, I buckled down and typed the essay, at a far more pleasing pace than anticipated. I had planned to leave a week for editing and peer review, but I left myself with nearly two. After typing over half of my essay in one night simply because I didn't want to stop, I was very content with what I had accomplished. I had it reviewed, edited, and turned into Mr. Sitze with ample time before the competition deadline, which is a first for me. I usually am far behind on schedule with essays, and I was quite proud of myself for having done it well and ahead of schedule. I had done the essay over a single quote as well, as an experiment to see how well it would work. Unfortunately, this did not go as well as expected, and I have no plans of doing so again. For my final essay, I am reading Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Earlier this year I had read the book Lord Jim by Conrad, and had quite enjoyed it, so I have high hopes for this book as well. I plan to have it read within the next two weeks and hopefully the essay done within the two weeks after, possibly three. I will return when I have further progress to report on my academics, but I feel I currently am in a strong position to finish this year well. 

District Presentation

This last Friday, March 27th, the Open Program students and teachers presented to all the teachers in our district. We spent weeks preparing for this presentation. We were trying to decide several things: what we would present, how we would present it, and who would present what. We varied from videos to standing presentation for the formatting, and settled on a live presentation from Mr. Davidson, and all of the Open students. Unfortunately, three Open students could not make it to the final presentation. Ellen Reckamp and Allyse Ketter both had vacations that left that day, as it was the day before spring break. They both prepared videos about what they were discussing, which had a few difficulties during the live presentation, but they were purely technical and solved quickly. Despite us just being a small group of only 9 present highschool students, the teachers listened. They asked questions that proved this, delving into what is going on in Open, and a few asked if it could be implemented in lower grades. The third student who was missing on that day, Nicholas McCourt, did not have as much warning that he would not make the presentation on Friday, and I myself ended up taking his place to present about the challenges the Open Program faced. I found the topic I presented to be appropriate, due to my fear of public speaking. The presentation practice in class was itself was a challenge, and presenting in front of all of those teachers was incredibly difficult. Nevertheless, I stood my ground and discussed our challenges.
I often wondered about why I was so nervous presenting. Because of this, I recently did some research, especially on being nervous. I found an article by Olivia Mitchell, which describes three possible reasons for nervousness in speaking. These three reasons are based off of our brains, which she describes as Old Brain, Mid Brain, and New Brain.

She began with Old Brain for an explanation. Old Brain is our natural survival instinct where our pack mentality comes into play. We do not want to stand out from the pack, the pack being the audience in this situation, so we fear to say something offensive or silly. Saying these things would separate us from the pack and so we fear to speak. Mid Brain is our fear from past experiences being blown out of proportion. This is when we had a bad experience from before and believe that everything following this will be the same bad experience. For this she suggested to compare it to something such as cutting off your own little finger. When considering that against giving a speech, the speech is far more appealing. The last fear she mentioned was New Brain fear. New Brain fear is trying to meet the demands of the audience and being afraid of being unable to. Her suggestion for meeting this fear of being unable to meet demands is to learn your topic so as to avoid being unable to answer questions, improvise if you get lost, and so on. In the presentation itself I did better than I had expected though.

For first semester, I talked about deciding on a project and acquiring our skill, along with the communication that went along with that process. In second semester, despite being done with the project decision and the acquisition of skill, I told the teachers that we are still challenged. This semester, it is our own challenging instead of the teachers. We have to adhere to our schedule by our own motivation, which provides challenges by the bushel. And of course, in all of these challenges, of course to me the most difficult was standing up there and talking to those teachers, even if it was only for a minute. Attached below is a video of our presentation, and I would like to extend a special thanks to all the teachers who helped design the Open Program, because without it there would have been absolutely no way I could have presented this last Friday. Thank you.

Here is the video:https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4KcrH0tHsbFajBHWTRhUzd5SmM/edit