6/10/08

As this school year is coming to an end, I have realized that I might not have been as productive as could have, especially in this class. However that does not mean that I have gone without learning anything. I can assure you, that is far from the truth. This class was really a time for me to step back, take a breath from the normal pressures of school and really learn some great skills. In this class, I was taught to think outside the norm, and even reevaluate my process of thinking, which has actually proved to be very useful in many scenarios in my life. This class primarily taught me a different way of thinking in general. This relates to my project, where the goal was to figure out how to make a positive sense of peer pressure in the community. This was a very hard task, but I liked thinking about how I could benefit the community. And, our group had some really good ideas to. Our problem seemed to be in executing them. In all honesty, I know that I didn't use my time as wisely as I could have and with so much going on in the other classes, and technical difficulties and things of that nature, we didn't complete nearly as much as we strive for. I think that our group should still send out our survey, to get a better idea of what the students think. Even though this project wasn't as complete as we hoped, I think that it opened up all of our eyes how we can make a positive difference in the community, and I believe that we will continue this in the future.

Today is Tuesday

It's already Tuesday and almost the end of the year. We had good things to do but this week we really haven't done that much. We have just haven't had Darrell with us and it has been hard. I mean he's not going to do the project for us, but we should of have check ins and also we wanted to ask questions. I think that before this week is over, we should have all surveys back but I am not sure if we have send them or not. I think that this is the last week that we are in this class but we need to have something done and also have people's opinion on our topic. Maybe if we would of had more time and less talking in class and more computers that worked, everyone in the class (including us) could have done more and a had a better project at the end.

School's Almost Out!

I have come to realize that taking on the task of making a short documentary for this class was unrealistic and impractical. Considering that there is only an hour of class time to work on it, my group and I decided that perhaps we should be content with just administering the survey I created on survey monkey.

Also, the majority of the students at our school are currently taking finals/worrying about TPOL's, therefore, there are less likely to take the time out of their schedule to visit a website and watch a PSA about peer pressure.

Motivation

Unfortunately our mentor in this class, Darrell, is not at school. This makes having the desire to work extremely difficult. I talked to Andrew for a bit about what to add or change on the survey. We also discussed what we wanted our final product to look like. It is tempting to not pay attention to deadlines in this class considering our final major project of the year is going on in our core classes.

Of course this class is just as important.

5/28/08

We haven't spent a whole lot of time this week working on the project in class, but I know that everyone in our group has been working outside class. We have all been relentlessly brainstorming ideas and continuing work on our individual aspects of the project. I have been working on the video and developing a basic outline, while Nicolette and Guadalupe have been working on the survey and other aspects. However, since the class time dedicated to our project has been a short this week (no school Monday, watched Oprah Tuesday), we haven't been producing a cornucopia of physical work, but I know that we are all working on planning and developing new ideas on how we are going to implement our plans into real life. The rest of this week should be spent physically making progress on each of our subtopics. Personally, I hope to finish a detailed outline of the PSA video and work with Nicolette on the website. Nicolette and Guadalupe should think about giving out some test surveys, and then distributing the final edition.

Today is Friday!!!!

This week we got things done. We decided that I was going to be the one who was going to be writing on the blog. Well in a way I wanted to do this because like this I know what is going on with our group and also I know that I am doing something. This week Andrew has just been helping us with ideas while Nicolette started to do the survey. She didn’t have it all done but she got it started. We were thinking to pass the surveys through Marcus because like this he can send it to everyone at school. Like this we can get to know how people think of our topic and we can do this without going around and asking every single student. So probably this week that is coming up, Nicolette or I would be the ones that finish the survey. So far, I think that we are doing a good job at working together and I do think that we can do a good job to get our point across about peer pressure.

Plan so far....

This week we are thinking of having questions for the interview that we have and equipment to film our video. Our video is going to be about different opinions from students. We decided to have a one or two students that are seniors gives us their opinions and in the other hand, we are going to have to interview a freshman. Like this, we get to know what is the opinion that they have as they start high school and what is the other side of peer pressure as a senior. Also Nicolette wanted to do a survey and I thought that it would of been better for us to have a survey online because like this we don't have to worry about us collecting them and looking in each one of them. Laura Mcbain gave us a website that we can register and all the surveys that students do, they all go to our e-mail. This is one of the option that are thinking of doing because we also want to know what other students think about our topic and how we can change this. Everywhere students go, there can be peer pressure but we want to help them out and have something positive come out of all this.

First Work Week

This week we began the process of talking to different people about our topic, and collecting as much research/ideas as possible. Gaudalupe and I talked to Laura Mcbain, David Bergren, Spencer Pforisch and Marcus Bell about the issue of peer pressure, and it was very interesting to see how mixed the responses were. On top of collecting a full page and a half of notes based on our conversations, I made up a "to-do" list of responsibilities and set up this blog. Unfortunately our other partner Andrew was sick this week, so it was just Guadalupe and I working on the project.

-Nicolette