Academic Update #1

In our second semester, we have implemented a completely open academic schedule. In addition to the work being done on my project, I have also been working to complete my math and English standards. These are being accomplished partly with the help of the teachers, and partly without. I am working at my own pace, keeping up with self set deadlines, and collaborating with peers throughout this process.

Math:
          In math, our standards are entirely covered by completing all ten chapters of the book. I have completed seven of such chapters, and am currently working on the eighth with Alex Sitze. Until this point we had been working by simply doing the pretest and using the book to learn all of the problems on such, but with chapter 8 this changed. It has a well earned reputation as the hardest chapter, and as such we decided to learn it section by section instead in the hopes of more thoroughly understanding the material. This chapter took a large degree of toil to work through, and often left us staring blankly at the papers we were working on. We now only have one last hill to climb, and this has been shown to be the biggest of all. Alex and I will be working on this last beast over the course of an entire week, if his project (creating,hosting, and organizing a school talent show) complies.This problem is a conics problem in which we must find the intersection of two circles. In the problemwe are given two sets of points that are the centers of the circles, the radii, and told to solve for the intersection of the circles. This requires isolating a variable, plugging the result into the other circle equation, solving for the now singular variable, and then finally plugging that back into the original equation to find the coordinates. I have already taken a few attempts at it, and gotten different answers each time, each of which were wrong. The struggle will continue; however, we have resources in our peers and teachers. After we finish this problem we will tighten up any weak areas in our knowledge and take this test after several long weeks.

English:        
         In English, despite a great deal of struggling with procrastination due to distant deadlines, I have finally begun to outline my paper over the book Anthem, by Ayn Rand. In this time I have taken classes of my choosing with Mr. Sitze, giving me a better understanding of developing unique interpretations through quotes. In this I have also done several practices towards paragraph level argumentation that have opened my eyes to being able to write better. I have learned the MLA setup for quotation, have used parallel structure correctly, and have learned a proper format towards setting up a argumentative paragraph. During this I have done five argumentative paragraphs that have been reviewed with Mr. Sitze, and I feel far more confident in my ability to develop a claim in a paragraph using a quote.I searched for the quotes to do so in my essay currently, and settled on a single quote to base the entire essay over. This is a new area for me, and I hope to grow in my ability to adapt to essay related changes that will be thrown my way in later years. I personally highly enjoy the method of learning that the open program is facilitating; the ability to work at the pace I choose has allowed greater understanding of subjects I may have had a hard time on in a specifically allotted time period, and allowed me to move quicker through the subjects that make sense to me quickly. I will write another blog detailing my open academic status when there is progress to report over my English and Math standards.

Project Update #2

Since I have last updated on my project a fairly large amount of things have happened. We have completed our storyline, which is based around a secret society known as the Hierarchy of Rings, which will be rooted out and destroyed by our campers. You can find the full storyline script attached below. We have been pledged at least 500 dollars from Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, to which we are very grateful and we will be putting the money to good use. Finally, I myself have designed the first of my games which is to be used in our camp. At our Park West near the school, there is a large hill at the top of which is a statue in a circular shape. I plan to use this as the location for the games, but the game does not need to take place on a hill nor with the statue. The game itself is ideal with two teams of 9 people each. Leading towards the ring or whatever I use as a goal, there will be three triangular lanes divided by cones which narrow closer to the goal. On the attacking team there will be three players at the base of each lane. Each attacking lane starts with a dodgeball. Their goal is to reach the hoop or ring and throw the dodgeball through it which will give them a point. After scoring, if there are no balls in the lane to pick up then the attackers go to the beginning of the lane and are given a ball. Attackers may only have one ball per lane. The defenders have two players on each line of cones and a tagger. The defenders on the lines have a dodgeball each, and cannot leave the line except to retrieve a ball. Defenders can only get attackers who are holding the ball out. Once out, an attacker goes to the beginning of a lane until his lane scores a point. If the defending lane gets all three attackers in a lane out, the lane is shut down and defenders may move to defend other lanes. Attackers win by reaching a certain point value, while defenders win by shutting down all three lanes. I plan to send this to gym  teachers to have them test it and check for holes in gameplay. If you have any observations on the game or script I would love to hear them and take them into consideration.

The script for the storyline is included below.

Project Update

I apologize for having been gone so long in my blog postings. Since I have been gone, a great deal of things has happened. I have decided upon my project for second semester, we have held an Open Faire in which my and other members of the Open Program projects have been presented, we have held presentations to the board, and are now in a fully implemented three hour block of time in which we work on our projects, along with English and Math standards. Now this is a large amount of large scale and notable things that have happened so accordingly this blog will be far longer than those previous to it. My final plan for a project was to have a camp for ages approximately fifth to eighth grade. This camp would consist of a series of outdoor games that avoid the strictures of regular schoolyard games that aim to be in general more fun than other games. These would hopefully leave the campers wanting to go outside again and open their minds to new possibilities for fun in being outside. My personal inspiration for such a project came when I was sitting in my house and I realized how little time I had spent over the summer actually being outside and doing things that involve rigorous outdoor activities that I actually enjoyed. When I decided upon this, I informed my wonderful teacher Ms. Radostits of what I would be doing and she in turn informed me that there was not one but two other students that were considering doing camps themselves. These other two students, Allyse Ketter and Kelsey Handschuh, joined forces with me and thus the Ultimate Summer Challenge was born, now with a leadership and forensics component. With this knowledge when we heard tell of the Open Faire approaching, we joined forces to create our presentation on a triboard. Before I describe this Open Faire though, there is one other large happening in the timeline preceding this. Candice Holbrook, the Recreation Program Manager at the Oregon Park District agreed to implement our camp in their activity guide, and along with this use the Nash center as a location to hold our camp. My current supplies list can be entirely fulfilled by them as well, so it is a huge help to our camp. Now back to the Faire. This was a large scale presentation from every member of the Open Program where we invited community members and those relevant to our projects to come see what we had to present. For example, our trio invited Candice so she could see the full extent of our project and how it related to our four tenets we follow. My personal relation to the four tenets was outlined on our board and I will describe them again to you now. For independence, I myself of course will be designing the games for the camp, which also hits the creative problem solving tenet. Collaboratively I will design and coordinate the camp with Allyse and Kelsey of course. The camp itself will be cross curricular, as it combines leadership, unique games, and forensics. Along with the activities itself we also plan and are in the midst of creating a storyline for the camp, in an attempt to further interest our campers and keep them wanting to come back. In any case, the Faire went well, we had many parents and community members that others had invited who seemed very interested in our camp, and had several who gave us very good insight into flaws we may have missed. Soon after this, we presented our project to the board, though this presentation was individually done unlike the Faire. This terrified me, as I myself am not the biggest fan of presentations in general, let alone one of this magnitude. But, as it was our final for the class, I of course did the presentation. The night before, again thanks to our wonderful teacher Ms. Radostits, I and several others stayed after school and worked on our presentations until almost eight o'clock. The next day I gave the presentation, which went better than I had expected. The audience again had useful comments and gave ideas towards the camp which I had not considered. Since the presentation, as I said, a fully implemented open schedule has been put into practice. Recently, we were surprised by our teachers, who had found and organized a class in which we could spend our first three hours and use it how we need to. Along with this, we have begun our storyline and gotten two days into the creation of it, we have nearly finished a budget and list of supplies necessary for the camp, and sent out letters to various local business asking for funding. In return, we promised them a spot on our camp t-shirts, and we have since received over 600 dollars, with another possible 200 in the making. I feel that we are making good progress on our project, and I have high hopes for our final product. I will be getting back to you when we have more news of progress to report.

The Open Acquisition

These last nine weeks of the semester, our class is individually acquiring a skill. I myself have chosen the wonderful talent of speed reading. It is a fairly self explanatory title, as i am learning to read faster. So far I have found this to be incredibly enjoyable, though I have not yet applied it to reading outside of my training. Soon I hope to practice outside of practice, and be able to put it to good use in reading packets and such for classes. This skill is going to greatly test my ability to work on my own. It doesn't have a near or solid due date, and I am a tried and true procrastinator. Whether or not I succeed is based off of my ability to force myself into working on the skill. It so far does not seem overly difficult to learn, it is all based off of setting time aside for it. If I do succeed though, this will be incredibly useful in college. If I have little time to study, because I want to be social, though unlikely, we will continue with the hypothetical. In this scenario I will be able to go through the content necessary at a far higher rate of speed, opening up my time for social activities. This skill was inspired by a friend, which led me to this site, extending my want to learn this. http://www.spreeder.com It was very helpful in getting me started.

Open Speed Reading

This second quarter in open lab, we are doing something that is in my opinion, just cool. We have each been tasked with both coming up with a skill, and then additionally learning that skill. The skill I chose is one in which I greatly increase my reading speed through speed reading, which is a very original name for the topic. I hope that it will increase my capabilities in reading articles for classes in a more limited amount of time, which would be very useful. I believe that while I am doing this, I will either learn how to stop procrastinating topics with a broad and undefined structure through creating my own structure or just disciplining myself greatly into learning the topic. This subject is theoretically incredibly useful. I can use it to study, glean the general information from an article, etc, while saving myself great deals of time for other activities, social or education based. One site that i have been to is http://www.spreeder.com and i found it incredibly useful and a very good introduction to the topic. My main asset in learning this is an app called Acceleread Speed Reading Trainer. It has also been very useful and has increased my reading speed through exercises that increase your eye strength. These also help you view more words at a time and try to eliminate this thing called sub-vocalization, which is you reading the words aloud in your head. Eliminating that increases your reading speed, and helps you view the words as images. I am greatly enjoying the topic so far and I can't wait to see where it takes me.

Openly Independent

This week in Open Lab we are focusing on independence. We have been asked to say what we thought was necessary in independent working. I believe that to work independently, you first need to have confidence, so that you aren't constantly running to help and instead if a problem arises you look to solve it on your own. Second, I believe you would need a good work ethic, so that you actually do the work on time and with a cushion in case something new arises. And third, you need to use your resources to help because every problem you solve can not be singlehandedly fixed. Here is a picture of us in the class  

Openly Collaborating

This week in open lab we focused on a new tenet. That tenet was collaboration. We kick started the week with an activity we carried through Thursday. Monday was a test run, we had to decide on 6 people out of thirteen to survive on a new earth, because the current one was soon to be demolished. We were first told to do it independently, then we moved up to small groups to have a consensus of several on a group of survivors. Finally, we were moved to a whole class discussion on who would survive on the new planet. This final grouping was not completed as well as the others. It devolved into shouting and no information spread to more than a few. In other classes as well I had opportunities to collaborate. In biology I had several group activities, though nothing on the scale of what we did at the end of the first class. Collaboration is incredibly useful, though I think it is not always used to its fullest potential. Either the lack of efficiency or lack of communication brought us down several times outside of this week as well, with us running out of time, or simply arguing. If used properly though, it can move a group to operate fluidly and more efficiently than an individual. On Thursday when we did our rerun of the whole class decision making, we spread the ideas and opinions of everyone, which shifted my opinion on several options as we reached verdicts I hadn't. This will remain useful throughout life. In jobs group projects are constantly assigned. In class the teachers talked about a "power hour" where they collaborate on projects the school could do. The program itself was designed mainly by four teachers working together. We had quite a few issues in the first attempt, and so the day before we tried again we went through ways to improve our collaboration based off of sites our teachers had gone too and printed out, and I believe I found another with helpful tips for collaborating. That site is http://www.uarts.edu/students/helpful-tips-collaboration-and-group-work. Readers, why do you think collaboration is so highly valued? What are some examples you have seen or participated in collaboratively? I have a picture as well of our final choices written on the board after the group collaboration: https://doc-0g-90-docs.googleusercontent.com/docs/securesc/vnfa5ltbrcm2745mfvouki4bfbpjmt2o/ev4o0vi2hl38u3hfecl75tfdhek7hcot/1412294400000/12776449778694492527/13650809792572941776/0B4KcrH0tHsbFOTdFSmpVLVRFckE?h=16653014193614665626&e=download