Month: April 2019

Pavel Nunez

Dr Carrie Hall

2/6/19

English 1121

                                   Don’t give up and in the end it will show

Sometimes in life I always get I never give up and that’s just how it is . But it wasn’t motivation that helped me , it was the effort that lead me to that  .A quick example of this would be the time Where I was walking upstairs to my next class which was in the 8th floor, I refuse to take the elevator that day because there was a lot of people in. But as I was going upstairs and I was tired but as I went up the stairs I saw a 10 dollar bill below the staircase where almost nobody could see it unless u looked a certain angle. I picked it up… I felt like the luckiest person in that staircase, It must have been a coincidence that day because I forgot my money at home.Going to the main story of my luck, the time this happened to was actually recent, When I passed my  Computer System Technology class. So it was the beginning of the semester of 2018 and this class was required for my major so I said to myself “ This class should be easy”. I was wrong(like really wrong) ,but that didn’t stop me from having doubts. It was an 8 AM class so that wasn’t really a good choice but I wanted to get out early so that was the trade off. At first the class wasn’t too difficult the following 2 months because we were doing basic stuff. But after that it was complex and there was a lot of rules to cover when coding, and I noticed people around me were far worse where I was. Some people would look over my screen after showing the professor my program that runs correctly. Sometimes they would ask me for help and I helped them but it was still difficult for them( I don’t blame them). But overall i knew what I was doing even though it was difficult to comprehend the material being given to me.I knew I couldn’t give up on this class because it was a class for my major in this school. Sometimes I would leave early because I already did all the classwork which was a good thing. Fast forward to November 6(which was the last day to drop a Class), I was debating whether or not to drop the class because I didn’t really like my major anymore(Computer Science) because I don’t think I would like sitting behind a chair just typing 100’s of lines of code for a complicated program while also being behind a computer screen all day long, I should’ve thought of that sooner but it didn’t come to mind until it was too late. I decided not to because that would’ve been a waste of time and money. The next day out of the original 30 students that signed up for the class only 8 people remained. But my friend that was in that class actually dropped it since it was too difficult for him , so basically he gave up since he  probably wasn’t motivated enough to finish and pass the class. It was sorda disappointing that my only friend in that class decided to withdraw but it was his poor decision. Furthermore I had a test coming which I didn’t know about because I was too lazy to check the syllabus, I didn’t know what was going to be on the test so I just accepted my fate that I was going to fail the test. The day I took the test, I didn’t expect it to be almost the same exact things we had to as classwork, So I dodged a bullet on that one and I passed the test for it.So finally it was near the semester and I had to take my final. Suddenly this person who I thought supposedly dropped the class showed for the final after nearly being absent for 2 months, I honestly thought he gave up on the class My professor was actually quite mad at him but he couldn’t do anything so he just let him take the test, When the test started he only took a couple of minutes it finish it and left the class, even though there was around 15-30 lines of code that you have to write down for a few problems. One was about making a program that is able to calculate the GPA of your classes by entering the amount of classes, the grade for each class, and the amount of credits each class was worth. Another was typing the Radius and the Height for a given shape and putting the formula for each shape to find the volume of all the shapes, all of this was basically impossible to write under 20 minutes). Some people had to resort to cheating( No names) by looking up the program for the specific problem, the professor was just using his laptop and actually caught someone using their phone, He gave him a warning instead of giving him a 0 ( which was generous.), I said to myself “Wow, he was lucky”. I give him some credit though for building the motivation to cheat on a test which your not suppose to do .So after finishing I just went home to sleep and hoped I passed the class. Then I checked my grade and I got a B+ thinking I would get a C or maybe lower. But in the end I passed.

Overall life isn’t about the motivation on things you want but how much you effort you put in to get there .

Erik Yan

Dr. Carrie Hall

Final

4-29-19

Video Games Taught Me More Than School Ever Did

School taught your basic subjects of math, reading, and writing but it was always through textbooks and listening to the teacher. I think the best way to learn is to make the process fun and relatable. Something that made learning fun for me were video games. Video games do not look like they would teach you anything that is taught in school but they instead, teaches you social skills that school just doesn’t seem to teach.

Playing video games has taught me a handful of things. I think a game that taught me a lot is Rainbow Six Siege. My friends and I would play this every day. There are times where not all my friends are able to get on to play for whatever reason, which forces me to play alone. Playing Siege alone was difficult due to Siege being a team oriented game where having intel and communicating it to the rest of the team is key to winning. Since I was just playing with random people when my friends weren’t on, I didn’t really talk to any of the people on my team. I kept seeing my teammates getting killed but I was busy dealing with my own enemy, but once I was done with my opponent, my teammate’s enemy stopped fighting with them and decide to go finish me off. With the lack of communication, I didn’t really know and I get killed because I was the last one alive in the round. It went on like this for the whole game and in the end, we lost the game. The next game, I tried giving callouts to my teammates and we actually won the game without the other team even getting a chance to win a round. The fact that we are all strangers and were able to come together to win forced random people and I to have to talk and interact with each other. As strange as that may be, this can be carried over into the real world. Such as if I am working on something with a group of classmates or coworkers, I can communicate with them effectively to complete our task.

Since playing video games have gotten more complex than in the past, majority of games filled with so many things to do. This also helps improve multitasking skills. In Siege you have to worry about all kinds of things, such as the enemy team, traps, and if the game mode is hostage then also that. Hostage is a game mode where the attacking team is tasked with either grabbing the hostage and bringing them back to any flare outside of the map or they eliminate the whole defending team.  You also have to worry about the time and your teammates. I say teammates because in this game your team can technically kill you, it is strongly recommended not to by the game but, that doesn’t really stop people from doing it, so it is good to watch out. Having a team member kill you, whether it is an accident or not, it puts your team in a disadvantage because the other team has to deal with one less person. All these facts forces you to have to multitask. This has kind of improved my multitasking skills because it forces me to finish a certain task within a given amount of time. The timer in the game is probably the thing that helped me the most in multitasking because you only get three minutes a round. Sometimes you lose track of time when you are worrying about your own life in the game. The traps in the game can take down a significant amount of health away from you and can give away where you are to the enemy team who can just come out of nowhere and kill you. This is relatable to real life because you can have a ton of assignments due and if you just ignore one, your grade for that class will take the hit and lower. This helps me to work on all the assignments making sure that I don’t forget one.

Decision making isn’t really taught in school from my experience, I think I’ve felt more of a decision making in video games than in school. As I have said before about how you have to multitask, you also have to decide how you want to approach things and how you want to do it. There have been moments where I had to decide whether I had to get into the objective or kill the last guy on the other team because time was ticking. The objective was basically this little container in a room that you are supposed to stay in without anyone from the other team being in the room to stop you securing. This taught me about making the important decision and how it will impact the final moments of the round. In school, I’d get choices but I felt like it didn’t really matter which one I chose, the results would generally be the same. While on Siege, If I did not go into the objective while the time almost hit zero, I would have lost the round and our team would’ve been put at a disadvantage.

The most important thing I think I’ve learned is probably patience. There are times in Siege where you have to wait for the other team to come at you so that all you need to do is kill them. If you go rushing in, the other team will be ready for you and catch you off guard. School never really taught me patience because I’d get homework or other assignments due the next day so I never really put much time into the work. The work wasn’t straight trash but if I had more time, I’m sure the assignment would’ve been better.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Having an objective to accomplish in a video game brings together everyone that is playing. You won’t really find the kind of teamwork in videos in like school or somewhere else with people that do not know each other. It also taught me how to multitask better which school kind of helped but it didn’t really feel as impactful as learning it from playing games. Decision making and patience were things I felt like were something I’m glad I learned because there are a lot of decisions to make in life and some things in life can’t really be rushed so having patience helps. I find that learning these values from something other than school is more interesting to me because it is more of learning from your own interests and not having information just shoved in your face. When you learn from your own curiosity and interest, you feel more invested in it than someone giving you information. I always felt like school forced information into my brain that I was not really invested in. This led me to remember the information for that school year and then forget about it when the next year came. Learning skills at my own paced helped me to retain those skills and use it in school and work.

The Education Process by Shauntai Smith                                                                                                                                                                                          So, it’s going on three years and I’ve been dedicating my precious time, hard work and patience to the most crappy school known to mankind, New Dawn High.  If the beige prison walls weren’t enough to drive me insane my teachers definitely passed that test with flying colors. As you can probably guess this was not my favorite place to be. For starters, everyone began at 7AM and left at 4PM which is awfully long compared to the average school day and for some strange reason the fact that this didn’t bother anyone else bothered me even more. As I began to rest my legs on a chair that was laid out before me, I couldn’t help but think about my future, my life and what I wanted it to be like. My fellow classmates were “grown”, either they were in their early 20’s, the loudest babymothers you’ve ever heard, babyfathers trying to get their life together, pregnant girls, dropouts, drop back ins, thugs and so on the list goes. All the kids were either sleeping or sleeping, exactly.                                                                                   I hated it there. For three years I felt misunderstood like no one including the teachers got what my “problem” was. I had no intentions on coming to this school you know, my teachers could feel my uninterested aura every time class begun. How could learning things like how to perfectly dissect a pig or finding the circumference of a sphere be valuable to my life? I couldn’t focus because as they read from their over-sized textbooks that could barely fit into their hands my mind would fade out,blocking their words like it was nothing. I was the smartest, always thinking ahead of my classmates so I knew I wasn’t the problem. I then grew tired of what was expected of my education process. A little talk with my kind, loving and extremely supportive parents led me to really think about my next move.                                                                                                So, I dropped out going against everything society thought to be true about the learning system being “needed” for one to succeed I thought to myself “you gotta make ditching school count for something”. Every morning I got my ass up with only one thought in my mind, money. I had no idea that I was in for a rude awakening but let me get to that part. It’s Friday! I could feel my check already in my hands before it actually got to me. Shopping, Chipotle and even a bit of weed all circled continuously in my head as I stood in line to grab my envelope with the words “shauntai smith” on it. I’ve never seen my name on anything regarding to money, just turning 17 I had no idea what to expect but I knew whatever came out of that envelope was mine, all mine. I reach for my envelope and there it was staring at me and sadly to my surprise I stared back in disbelief. It wasn’t a very good number at all. A total of $296.75, more like a total of disappointment.                                           My nose began to burn. I was fully aware that I was a few seconds from  crying and thinking of how much the money did not match the pay nor the amount of energy that was expected at all times. How much could I expect from a job that let a high school dropout like myself come work for them at 17. I was a baby compared to my fellow coworkers. They had children, rent, mortgages and yet they were still were comfortable. They collected their money every week happily without a complaint in the world. At this point I began to question everything. Do I really want to be here, working my ass off for hours and hours to receive a shitty paycheck or do I want to feel good about the work I do along with a higher pay-grade? The one thing I knew is that I did not want to be like these women who were stuck under these circumstances because they couldn’t or didn’t want to commit to school as well as furthering their education. Being 17 definitely gave me an advantage in life, countless room for growth and promising opportunities. I still had a pretty good chance to get my life back on track, this pushed me to make another decision and this one might just be my best one yet! Trying to grow up too fast wasn’t in my best interest and this dreadful draining place was not where I was meant to be. The next morning I enrolled myself in a GED program.                                                                                                                         I’m aware that pursuing my GED wasn’t going to be an easy task, shit if anything it would be tougher to gather all the information i’d have to learn within 9 months in only 2 . This new school had everyone be registered to take the test in 2 months to eliminate the feel of high school (music to my ears). The school understood my concept, all I wanted was to get a diploma so I can study a subject of my choice for once in 12 years. Two teachers taught all four subjects and they got the job done! They made everything easier to memorize and took the complicity away from subjects. I sat in the front of every class, breathed in every technique and material my instructors had given us. I knew I could not play around with my future anymore. I couldn’t be the old lady at some job getting paid less for more. Day in and day out I studied my life away, attended each tutoring session I could get my foot in. At this point in my education process putting my inner feelings to the side to receive that diploma I was so ready to get was the top priority. The day for testing came quicker than the flash! My baggy sweats and furry sweater comforted me in my long hours of sitting down and answering questions. I received the news exactly 2 weeks from the day I took it and to my surprise I passed. I passed everything, all five subjects in one shot. I realized that it was not about me in particular, I didn’t have to be the best I just had to want it more than anything else and let fate take it’s toll.

Brandon Ma

2/7/2019

Dr. Hall

English Composition 2

Ethnicity overwhelming grip

There are many factors that we as an individual can not change if we wanted to. Such as our religion, gender, ethnicity, or the choice to live out the life that we wanted to. Coming from an Asian background, it has been difficult for me to be happy with myself because of family pressure and expectations. I was not a higher achiever compared to relatives in my family or was I a hard worker. However, everyone should not be treated indifferently because of their lack of academic performance.

Every individual in their society will face different hardships. For a stereotypical Asian, we are expected to go to school and work hard to earn a good respective job that is acceptable in the family. However, individuals that put pressure on themselves to achieve their parent’s expectations often lead them to be constantly stressed and depression. It can be shameful to the family if the child did not study hard in school and turns out to be a dropout. Such as the quote from Mother’s Tongue, “Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys — in fact, just last week — that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English”(Tan). Going to school everyday and my depression made me give up trying to achieve high grades in school to show my family for recognition. I was not particularly good in any subjects before college and failed a vast majority of the subjects such as english, science, and even math. I wasn’t able to reach that academic success that is perceived by the social norms. Throughout my elementary and middle school, I struggled in academics to the extent I was in probation in my 8th grade year. I was never a bookworm and my lack of  passion in learning made it more depressing. Being yelled at by my family, especially my father, for doing terrible in school had changed my perspective in many ways. I was sent to these after/summer programs that are suppose to provide extra learning called “Kumon” that was located next to my elementary school in Chinatown. I would always remember being put under a lot of stress to the point I had many mental breakdowns at the center. It felt like hell to stay when i was pushed to my limit, that I was told this “you are unable to leave until you get a 100% on this quiz”. I was there from 4pm to 6pm, constantly repeating the same quiz, It was just me and a few others after their closing hours still answering questions on their booklet. I felt trapped and what had became of me was in agony, I felt so frustrated that my tears wouldn’t stop leading to my booklet covered in tears. If you were to lift up the booklet, there would be a stream of water flowing to the bottom and off the booklet. In the end, I revolted against my parents for taking me to this program, I never felt that I learned anything at the program and it became unbearable to commit. In our world, having an higher education is the key to success, getting better paying jobs and respect.

When High school came along, it has opened a new doorway to me to appreciate the things around me. Changing my environment from middle school, I had experienced a vast diversity that I wouldn’t have in elementary or middle school. As time went along, I adapted and appreciated the friends that I made. I haven’t been very distressed about my grades too much because the teachers weren’t grade heavy. They do not give a bunch of assignments and the school wanted the students to appreciate more than just work hard and study in school. Many things that happened in my education, was around the time that I arrived in high school, that everything has shifted. Students were encouraged to learn at their own pace because everyone learns differently. Because of that classes had to slow down, thus some units in the year has been removed by the teacher. I appreciated with what I had in high school because students are not too competitive and students are supported more to achieve their high school diploma even if they didn’t want to. The teachers wanted students to appreciate life and not constantly going home and doing homework all night long before tomorrow’s deadline. While my school is a trade specifically, we also worked towards something that is more hands-on work if we are not academically successful. So I had a lot of free time to hang out with my friends and wasn’t bound to my school.

In conclusion the school education system, where students would cram everything for a semester and afterward neglect it. There should be a system for students to learn something that they are passionate in before they reach college instead of learning the common core. Also, the grades shouldn’t be the only reason why people sacrifice their mental and physical health to achieve high standards to be acknowledged by their peers and teachers.