Blog 14

To start this big and scary final blog post, I'd like to thank Dr. Bent for not only creating a bearable English class for second-semester seniors but for also creating an English class that was enjoyable. Comparing this class to any others I’ve taken in the past, this one by far best bridges the gap between academics, and the real world in the sense that we were basically on our own 100% of the time… especially when it came to getting our projects set up, and done.

Next year I’m going to Sri Lanka for a few months, and to be perfectly honest I could not be more excited, or scared. And I think his class has helped me somewhat prepare for the whole “real world” deal we’re all about to get tossed into.

Overall, I enjoyed my project, and getting to see everyone else do their own thing. A challenge I defiantly faced was getting into contact with everyone, but for the most part, I think I recovered really well.
Something I could have done to improve the outcome is like I just mentioned, getting in contact with everyone. I should have set up some sort of google classroom thing or survey and have people sign up for time slots, and answer some questions about their projects.
I think during this exspirnce I’ve grown quite a bit as a person. I definitely got over my chronic fear of research papers, and had to learn to just get stuff done rather than procrastinating has my life away.
As far as risk taking goes, I’m all for it, and I think its super important for people to grow and learn. Using my gap year for example, probably somewhat risky being “let loose” on the other side of the world with zero supervision. But I know after I get home I’ll never be the same person again.
I think without any risk, there can not be any growth. In any situation.
And the difference between a good risk and bad risk is simply determining the potential growth or fall back you will gain from the outcome.

In this class, I think I pushed myself, being the center of attention has never been my favorite thing. And its hard not to be the center of attention when you’re walking through a classroom of middle schoolers trying to discreetly take pictures.
And honestly, I was surprised with how comfortable, and calm I was thought my entire project.

For me, this class was the perfect one to end my time at Pentucket with. I’ll forever be thankful for all I’ve learned here, the good and bad.  And I’ll never forget all of my classmates and teachers that helped me get through these past four years.

Blog 13

Although I obviously don't have any professional experience as a photographer, I do think for my level of formal education in this field I have an enough good understanding of it.
Even though we’ve all been working on these projects since January during the first week, I had a little bit of trouble getting off my feet. Especially since I can’t start my project until other people start theirs. So the first week went okay I guess, I didn’t take any pictures, unfortunately, but I did get a pretty good idea of what a few dfferent6 people are doing for their projects, so I guess I made some progress.

Blog 12

So from April 24th to May 17th, my project schedule is in the hands of everyone else in the class. I put my number on the board in the classroom for people to let me know when it would work best for me to get pictures of their projects. Since everyone is still in the early stages of their internships, this week I won't be doing much. But I'm taking this time to get an idea of what some people are doing, and I'm getting super excited!

Blog 11

I think teachers make students write research papers to expand our knowledge. In this class, our research papers are making an academic connection to our service projects, which is also giving us valued information to use when we are actually in the field.
When it comes to collecting information for the first draft of the paper, I usually hand write all my notes from my sources first. It’s always a huge force but its a lot easier for me to remember and absorb the information enough to spit it back out to write a paper.
Looking back to the classroom portion of this class I guess I’ve learned a little about myself, after doing all of those reflections. Although I feel like the majority of it wasn’t things learned, more just putting a name to my collaborative habits and leadership tactics, and comparing them to others.
Since I’m spending at least a quarter of a year in a nonenglish speaking country with a completely different social etiquette than that in the US communication will definitely be the largest challenge I face… hopefully… So I will definitely keep some of the different leadership and “group interacting” tactics in mind.
My favorite part of this class has definitely been the “okay go do it and get it done” approach from Dr. Bent. We definitely had freedom, but not too much, and since it’s last quarter for seniors, I think it was for the better.

Blog 10

So far I think my biggest frustration has been topic selection for my research paper. Each database has thousands of sources on every topic, so that made pinpointing specific articles and details sort of a challenge. My biggest time waster, besides getting distracted and then unmotivated in class has been the leadership reflection readings we did as weekly assignments. For me it just felt like busy work, with each new reading I honestly felt like I could have used my submission from the week before and answer the same questions. It just seemed repetitive, asking the same questions over and over again. Stress-wise I’ve shockingly been dealing pretty well, the fact that I only have four classes has to do with this since this is the only one I have a decent amount of work in ever.  The largest stressor I’ve had so far is the research paper that’s due on Thursday… research papers have never exactly been my thing, considering that I just turned a thesis paper in from last semester in today. But, I’m going to manage my time this week the best I can.. Aiming to turn it in on time. For the most part, I’ve stayed ahead of all my work, but I wish I had more notes on articles and a solid idea of exactly what I’m writing about. To prevent this I could have maybe been less distracted in class, but honestly, I’m not complaining about the amount of prep I’ve done for this paper, considering it’s more than what I’d normally have done.

Blog Post # 9: Belonging-Motivation-Checking In-Reflection

In the past,  around this time of year, I lose about 95% of the motivation I barely have in the first place regarding school. This year is a little different, even though coming to school at 9:21 for a whopping four classes a day is rather painful, the threat of not graduating if I fail this class is the only thing getting me through the end of the year. With that being said, I guess I’m pretty on top of all of my work with so little time left- for me I guess. I’ve read about 50 pages of my book and have taken notes on six different journal articles for my research paper that are due before these two weeks are over and we head into the field for our projects. I honestly wish I was more caught up on reading and further along on my paper, but I’m somewhat proud of myself for staying on track this well so far. Documenting all the different projects during the time the in the field is something I’m pretty excited about. I’m mostly excited to put the final product together so Dr. Bent will be able to use it as a portfolio for this class, and also having it count for my contribution to the community.
At this point, I’m convinced reflecting has something to do keeping me on track since I’ve haven't been able to keep up in school for the life of me for the past two years now. So yes. I think reflecting has something to do with the promotion of learning to us painfully unmotivated seniors.

Leader

A leader I admire is my mom. I consider her to be an effective leader because of all she can do while juggling so much on a day to day basis. She balances her priorities and time, between family and work.
The best leadership experience I've had was helping out with a youth basketball clinic a few years back. While working with some of the younger girls, I used connective leadership, because I was able to relate to the girls thinking back to what I was taught when I was their age going to these clinics. As strategies of connective leadership for correcting some of the technical errors, they were making in their footwork. I would relate to them by agreeing that the right way to do certain footwork felt weird, but I then provided reasoning to why the correct way was more efficient. I think what enhanced my abilities to connect with the younger players and teach them was my experience playing basketball in the same program.

"The Bumpy Road to Success"

If I’ve learned anything in my four years of high school, it’s that any single success comes with a handful of small failures, all of which contributing to the reward of eventual success.
So far, I’ve been pretty aware of the consequences of any failures in this class, like not walking at graduation, so obviously, I’ve been doing my best to avoid failing at all costs, and haven’t had any detrimental setbacks. The most obvious setback I’ve had was joining the class a solid two weeks late. Luckily, since I already had a pretty good idea of what I wanted my service project to look like I had no trouble at all catching up to everyone else. Also, February break was the saving grace that kept me from falling way behind. I was able to complete all of the blog posts from early on, without any new things being assigned. I’ve realized the best way to stay on top of the workload in this class is, just to do the work as it’s assigned, it’s straight up that simple.
The most rewarding part of the planning process so far was how I was able to catch up so quickly. I’m honestly still kinda shook I was able to pull it off.
Even though last week the workload was piled on I somehow managed to get the two assignments in not only on time but early. I’m pretty sure they were the first assignments I’ve ever turned in early. With our projects starting in a few weeks I’m in a pretty good place stress wise.

"Getting Back Into The Swing"

This week I’ve been working on finding journal articles for my research paper. Since my main topic is photography, which is pretty broad, I had to narrow my focus down to smaller subtopics to research, and then eventually write an entire paper.
The “narrowing down” was difficult for me, and I’m not very surprised by that since that’s what I usually have the hardest time with when it comes to doing research and writing papers. Not the actual writing part, more just getting my brain to focus, and then stay focused on a single topic, idea, or task. Eventually, I settled on basic techniques of photography as my topic of research, after reading about, and looking work of renowned photographers, like Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Mario Testino and Art Wolfe. I had originally wanted to write my paper on different photographers, giving a brief background, then focusing on their personal inspirations towards their work. I quickly decided the information it was very clear cut enough to write a paper on. Instead, I found what all these photographers had in common: they all knew how to take amazing photos, and that brought me to the basics.
After choosing a particular topic, my next step was finding articles to write my four annotated bibliographies. I’d advise to anyone searching for journal articles to make sure they're using an easy to use, reliable database; I used JSTOR. I had done research on there for a history class last semester and liked the way it was set up. Also, while searching any database it's important to realize how the search engine works, JSTOR and GoogleScholor search results are generated by keyword, so if you search for, say “the history of photographs” your search results will include every source in the database with the words “the” “history” “of” and “photographs.” So you’ll end up with hundreds of thousands of articles, and a good 99% of them might not have anything to do with what you're actually looking for. With that being said, always search being as specific as possible, it’ll save you from reading through lists of promising sounding articles, which have zero relevance to what you're looking for. After finding articles came the annotated bibliographies. They’re super useful because once you summarize all the important stuff, you don’t have to go back to the article once actually writing your paper. Additionally, I find it easier to recall/retain information when it's written in my words, vs. when it's in another person's words. I guess I wouldn’t consider annybibby’s a waste of time, but they're tremendously tedious, to say the least. My most productive day in the mists of all if this was Monday, I knew what I had to get done by Friday and was trying to be proactive in getting it all done. I’d have to say my least productive day was Wednesday, for no other reason than that I was distracted, and just didn't get anything that had to be done done.

Skills

Each person has their particular set of skills or something they're good at. Pretty much anything you can think of can be considered a skill, math, singing, writing, running, listening,  drawing, building things. There's no limit to an individual's skill set.
I consider my two strongest skills to be my ability to think creatively, and my ability to communicate while working.
Since I wish to pursue photojournalism in some way for my project I think my two top skills will come in handy... a picture is worth a thousand words after all.

The Juggling Act

The whole juggling act aspect of this project is definitely already stressing me out. Especially since I got a late start on the "formal" parts of this project. Although, I'm pretty content with where I'm at regarding my nonfiction book, and my research paper, wich makes me slightly less anxious about getting behind.  Once we get back from vacation, I plan on making tremendous progress with getting in contact with people and places sharing all the ideas I have.

Resume Writing

Being 17, and pretty inexperienced when it comes to the real working world I had sort of a difficult time displaying all of my skills in resume form. I've only had a few jobs before, and all of them include serving food to people, which has nothing to do with any of my life aspirations or goals for this project. With that being said, I'm glad there was an "additional skills" section in the resume template I filled out. I was at least able to show somewhere that I'm capable of more than scooping ice cream or folding napkins.

I chose to read "The Glass Castle," a memoir by Jeanette Walls. I'm enjoying it so far, because of the way Walls makes her far less than ideal family situation growing up sound beautiful; which is in a way what I want to be able to do with photojournalism. I want to be able to capture a beautiful story within an image, regardless of its superficial appeal.

I'm excited to write a research paper on photography for this project. I plan on doing research about lighting, framing, subject choice, and maybe even the history of photography. I think I will hugely benefit from learning so much about taking pictures.

Library Card

While visiting the Langley Adams Library, I had a flooding memory of the last time I was there, which was kindergarten field trip. My entire class and I were shown every section of the library, by the woman who was working at the front desk. Then after, we lined up in alphabetical order to receive our first ever library cards.
Considering that it's been around 12 years since I've been to the Langley Adams library, my memory of it was a little foggy. Thankfully, I had no trouble navigating through the various arrays of bookshelves on my own, since the sections are well organized. Also, as soon as I walked through the doors I was greeted by the librarian with a welcoming smile asking me if I needed help finding anything.
In conclusion, I would consider my library card experience a stress free and positive one.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Grace, I'm 17 years old, and I dream of one day being a professional photographer.
Ever since I was a little kid, I've wanted to explore every inch of this planet, discovering all of what it has to offer while taking pictures, displaying as much of it as I possibly can.
The following is a quote from a Photography book called "Places to go and People to See."
"Every time we click the shutter, a camera doesn' just capture a moment in time. It captures our moment in time. Photography aficionados that we are- take a peek at our art-filled salon walls and coffee tabled piled high with books - we've learned that amazing photos can happen both under the most artfully planned circumstances and by pure and crazy chance. They can express larger-than-life moments and shine a spotlight on tiny details that we can remember forever. Whatever our point of view is, we like to make it an inspired one."

I'm not positive what my project is going to be, but my goal is to inspire by sharing my point of view with others in the community while empowering others.