No class on Monday, but we have a makeup class on Tuesday!
For Tuesday (no class Monday):
WRITE:
- Send me your quote sandwich that you worked on in class via email (here is the handout if you need it).
- Write and Post a Blog Post (at least 300 words):Â
What is something you were interested in when you were a kid? Are you still interested in that topic? How did asking questions help you learn more about that topic?
If so, how has your curiosity changed and grown over the years? And what role did the educational system play in your curiosity (good or bad)?
If you are not interested in this topic anymore, what do you think happened to that interest? Do you remember the specific time you LOST interest? What did you become interested in instead (and why?)
Reply to this Agenda with your Blog Post (as a comment).
THINK: Start thinking about a topic you are interested in, something you might want to know more about. This can be something heavy, like police brutality, or it can be something that seems on the surface more light-hearted, like ballet. The only criteria is that you are actually curious about it.
This may seem like strange advice, but it can be helpful to go for a walk and think about topics you’d like to write about. Come home and jot down a few notes. By Wednesday, October 11th, you will be expected to have some idea of a topic you’d like to research, even if it’s a bit vague.
For Wednesday:
Decide on your overall research question. My comments should help you do this. You can also use the City Tech Library’s Guide to Developing a Research Question to help you narrow down and finalize your research question.
Set a timer. Spend 15 minutes writing a substantial paragraph answering the following: How did you get interested in your research question? Why are you interested? What answers and information do you expect to find in response to your research question? (These notes are for you and will help you write the introductory section of the annotated bibliography.)
Look at the student samples. This one, this one, and this one. Before you even read the pieces, notice the formatting and technical elements. Discuss what makes the pieces look finished and professional.
Read the student samples. Decide which is the “summary” section and which is the “rhetorical analysis” section. Then find one phrase that indicates when the writer is summarizing a source and one phrase that shows the author is expressing their opinion of the source. Quote these phrases and incorporate them into your answer.
Upload your research question and notes to these questions to your Google Folder, or email to me.
As a kid, what interested me the most was dinosaurs. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember that I had a poster on my wall, showing different types of dinosaurs, their weight, measurements, and how long ago they lived. I enjoyed learning more about them through books and the museum of natural history. I liked the Jurassic Park movies too. The one question I wondered about the most was how the dinosaurs went extinct.
Growing up, I didn’t lose interest entirely. It was more of a gradual decline. In the past few years, I mainly stopped researching about dinosaurs. I just veered more towards watching media related to dinosaurs. For example, the Prehistoric Planet series on apple tv.
School didn’t have an effect on my interest. It was neutral.
What is something you were interested in when you were a kid? Are you still interested in that topic? How did asking questions help you learn more about that topic?
As a kid, I was interested in a lot of things I was all over the place so it would be hard to explain. I think the only thing I could remember was digging for rocks and worms for some reason, to this day I never knew why I did that like I was always playing in the dirt looking for things but I know for a fact that my mom hated it.
Now sense I’m older I’m not interested in rocks or playing in the dirt. I think Asking questions help me learn more a topic is by going more in detail of what that person is trying to say.
If so, how has your curiosity changed and grown over the years? And what role did the educational system play in your curiosity (good or bad)?
I don’t think it changed I think I just got older and lost that interest but there is a small part of me that would like to learn about bugs and their behaviors. I think the role that the educational system play was having picture books that was mostly about bugs and gardening. At the time it was good because you got the chance to go out and find these things and look at them.
If you are not interested in this topic anymore, what do you think happened to that interest? Do you remember the specific time you LOST interest? What did you become interested in instead (and why?)
I dont remember a specific time that I lost interest but I would say some time in middle school maybe.
I can say I was interested in WWE back when I was a child. I remember watching 1 video about Team John Cena vs Team Authority. The amount of conflict and suspense that was in this one video caught my attention and I started watching more since then. I got so into it to the point where I had a collection of figures, a whole Entrance/Backstage set-up and a WWE ring to have the figures fight and stuff. My cousins shared this interest with me back then and we would play WWE2K video games. Adding to that, we would have our own wrestling match. I am surprised that as us kids were wrestling, there weren’t as many tears being shed. As of now, I am not as interested in WWE. I didn’t really ask questions about it, just people telling me it was fake but this wasn’t the reason I lost interest in it. The real reason was that at the time some wrestlers were injured and went on break, others just left the company and the story was just dying down for me and I didn’t really care on how many episodes I missed. It started off as a few missed episodes, then went on to double digits, meaning more than 10. I tried to go back to it but while I stopped watching, some new wrestlers came in and the story was everywhere, so I didn’t really get it and wasn’t as interested enough to try and catch up to the story. This all might have happened back in 2018, when “Roman Reigns” left to go battle leukemia. When he came back, I already lost interest. After this, I don’t really remember what I became interested in. Probably I got more into Marvel or Soccer. Maybe I was too distracted with school that I didn’t really get time to be interested in something new.
When I was little and learned how to play chess, and my teacher made play against the computer I always wondered how the computer knows how to play the game better than the humans. I was really interested in the topic, and I thought that it would be practically impossible to program a computer to respond with the best move. So how does the computer know which move to play. I asked the internet, “How does the computer know which move is the best in chess?”, the internet responded with that it is an Artificial intelligence and that the computer basically knows how to play the game better than the humans who invented it. There is much more to it. My teacher at school always told to pursue what interested me as it can broad my knowledge and you can never know what can be useful. I lost interest in this topic after I learned everything there is to it. I read a book called “Deep Blue” by Garry Kasparov, which explains the origin of the artificial intelligence and its significance in chess. How it functions and how chess as a game was shaped because of the AI.
A topic I was extremely interested in as a kid was space and aliens. For there to be other planets and potentially living creatures on those planets fascinated me. Furthermore, when thinking about space it doesn’t just stop at the Earth and the Moon. You have planets that orbit around the solar system, then you have solar systems orbiting around a galaxy, and finally you have hundreds of thousands of galaxies that make up the universe. The fact that there is so much to learn about the topic of space made it even cooler to me. Also, alien movies like E.T, Echo, Wally, and Lilo and Stitch increased my interest in the topic as well. These movies made me think about how different aliens can be from us. Not only that but the possibility that aliens can be either friendly or evil. The educational system played an impactful role in my curiosity because it provided me with a science class that educated me about the solar system and the planets in the solar system. Unfortunately as my age increased my interest in the topic decreased. I believe as you get older you start to care more about the things you have control of and less about the things you don’t have control of. Considering how small and insignificant us humans are in the grand scheme of space made me lose interest in the topic. However, I still have interest in the idea of there being aliens in space. This is because of all the alien stories you see and hear on social media, such as UFO sightings or alien encounters. To this day I still go on youtube occasionally to see any updates about aliens or to watch old videos about alien stories.
When i was a little kid i was really into cars which i still am. I still like cars a lot and plan to have a big collection. Asking questions helped me learn a lot because it introduced me to learning about the parts of cars and how they work. With me asking questions I also got tips and tricks for driving. My curiosity over the years changed over the way that I want to learn how the engines work and the wiring. I also want to learn how to modify the ECU. The educational system didn’t really help me learn about cars because teachers would always say knows not the time or this is not a place to talk about those things. I feel like the educational system could have helped me learn even more about cars and go into debt. Instead the educational system would always tell me not to talk about cars in class and forced me to go learn about these things on my own. But I would ask questions to people who work with cars and have them so that way I can learn more and more about the things I like. Over the years I also learned to talk more in dept about cars and how to drive and how to even work on some parts.
When I was a kid, I was really into exotic cars, my dad would show me exotic cars that he really likes, and it’s his dream to own one. It’s my dream too, to own an exotic car specifically a McLaren, my all-time favorite. Over time as I grew up, I learned that there’s more than exotic cars, like JDM, hypercars, megacars, etc. As of right now, my favorite are JDM cars. I learned a lot about car parts by asking my family and friends since everyone I know is obsessed with cars. My curiosity over the years about how car parts work and how they help the car. In high school, I didn’t have an automotive class, but I liked to visit when I had free time and join their class, I still learned a lot from the teachers, one of them bought a used car just for us to use it to study and learn the parts. I feel like schools should have those classes that can help some students who want to go to a trade school and help them start slowly.