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.