One Hundred!

As of today, if you have completed every one of the journal assignments, you will have completed 100 journal entries. This serves as a record of your thoughts and feelings about the topics that were covered in this course over the entire academic year (even if you delete your blog, I have saved it all). Whether you realized it at the time or not, this journal writing was one of the most important elements of this class. It was intended to encourage you to think on your own terms about the topics we covered in class, and to express those thoughts in writing. Looking back at the experience of keeping this journal, write about how you feel about the practice of writing daily about your life, whether related to school or not. Do you think it is a valuable habit? Why or why not? Explain.

• The practice of writing daily about life can be both good and bad. First, if you have a bad memory, writing a journal would definitely be good because it reminds you of what happened before. Second, writing daily about your life provides material for you to remember what happened in the past even if a lot of time has passed. However, one of the bad things for writing daily in a journal is that if you write something personal or private, or some secrets in it, someone who accidentally finds it might see them, and it might cause you some trouble. However, I still think it is a quite valuable habit because it allows you to practice your thinking and improve your writing skills. It also tests your memory because you may sometimes forget to write or type your journal of the day. 
• I'm extremely glad that I have finished all my journal entries for the year (I have just checked my blog and if I exclude this journal entry than I have exactly 99 entries; in other words, with this journal entry I will have completed my 100 journal entries for the year)! I sometimes (actually, a lot of times) forget about my journal, and I'll have to make it up the next day, or the day after the next day. But I'm still glad that I made them up and completed my 100 entries!

Final Exam

How do you feel about your final exam? Are you ready? What parts do you feel unsure about? What parts are you confident about. If the teacher were to say as he was passing out the exams, "Don't worry, this exam is very easy," how much would you want to kill him?

• I would say that I feel quite fine about the exam, except that I am a little bit nervous, as I always am before exams. Though I say I feel quite fine, I would definitely say no, I am not ready for the test. This is because I will never be ready for any test. I know this is a weird logic, but who cares? That's what I think! Anyways, the parts that I feel unsure about are the comprehension parts where the question asks about the content of the story. I feel unsure because I sometimes don't really understand a feeling, tone, or mood, or what a character or the author is trying to convey to me. What I am confident about is the vocabulary. This is because I have spent a really long time looking up the words and memorizing the words, so I feel confident. Finally, I would say that if any teacher passed out the exams while saying "Don't worry, this exam is very easy," I would definitely want to kill him, because if he thought that it was easy, then why even give out the exam!? Can't he just be nice and say, "Oh, you guys are good, so you don't have to take the exam"?

Group Work

Yesterday you were asked to write about situations in which strangers had to work together for a common goal. Many times as students you are put into groups to perform various tasks. How do you feel about group work? Do you like it more than working by your self, or less? Why? What makes it better or worse? Do you think you are a net contributor to the groups you are in, or do you tend to just let others in the group do most of the work? Why do you think teachers make students do group work so often? For example, do you think they are really trying to teach students to learn how to work together, or are they just making their own jobs easier by reducing the number of projects to grade? How do you think group work in school will prepare you for life after high school? Given the fact that in college you might have to work in groups even more than you have had to in high school, and after college you will certainly have to work in groups, how do you feel about the value of group work? 

•  I do not have any particular feelings towards teamwork. My feelings for team projects mostly depend on the situation. If the project is really hard, then group work is good since I can kind of depend on someone else to do it for me (evil, I know, but it works sometimes). However, if the teammates that I work with are incapable of doing the job and lazy, then I would rather work alone than in a group. I would say that I am usually one of the contributors of a project, unless I'm in the same group as "nerds", which include people such as Sarah and Alyson, etc. XD I believe that teachers tell students to do group projects because one, they want to grade less assignments, and sometimes two, they really care about the students and want them to learn the skills of cooperating with each other. I would say that most teachers do this because of the first reason (just my opinion, though; never know what the teachers are thinking about). Anyways, no matter what the reason is, learning to do group projects is an important skill for a person. We can only survive in this cruel world if we learn how to cooperate and communicate with our superiors and partners. To sum it all up, group work is something that everybody needs to know, even if they don't like it.

Strangers Together

Throughout “102 Minutes” the authors emphasize that people are strangers and that they are alone. However, they also point out that the rescue depended on the efforts of many people. What main idea is suggested by these two points? Can you think of an example from your own life or experience of how people can simultaneously be both strangers and collaborators?

•  The main idea that is suggest by these two points is that even though people are strangers and may not know one another (or maybe they dislike each other even without knowing others), strangers sometimes have to work together with other no matter what when the situation calls for it. 
• One of the examples in my own life where people can simultaneously be both strangers and collaborators can be found in MUN, or Model United Nations. When we first attend a meeting, we do not know anyone who is there, since we come from different places. However, we are at the meeting in order to work with others in order to solve a problem or an issue that is plaguing the world in the current world. We have to be able to communicate with others and merge our ideas together, and we slowly turn from strangers into allies, and from allies, we turn into friends. In MUN, lobbying is the experience where we have to be able to find people with the same point of views, and then we merge our solutions for the issue (our resolution). Then in the debate, we have to try to support our own allies, and try to pass our solution. I believe that MUN is a great activity where we can turn strangers into friends by working together and collaborating with each other.