Final Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0DgRnLOh0o&context=C344a249ADOEgsToPDskJvTYzFkFOZ2L57XAsuPivi

Self-Assesment

  In my first semester of college, I learned a lot about myself and my learning process. I procrastinate a lot. In high school it was one thing, I could get away with it, but in college, you cannot do that. It affected a lot of my grades. I would wait until last minute, so my work would not be the best that I could produce. I also learned that I have to keep track of what is due because I forget a lot of things easily. This hurt my grade a lot in this class especially. I would always forget to do my blog posts, so my grade went down because of that.
  One of the things that I have had the biggest trouble with so far is waking up early. I cannot seem to get up when it is before 10:30. I missed some classes because of this so I knew not to sign up for any classes that were too early for me next semester. I am noit sure why I cannot get up early. I used to have to do it in high school, but I cannot seem to here. It may be because I am staying up later here because I am around all of my friends, but whatever it is, I hope to overcome it in the future.
  My biggest achievements so far this year has been getting my work done when it gets time to crack down. I was able to do a few papers last minuet, and recieved good grades on them. I know it is not a good thing to say that I waited until last minute, but I was proud that I got them done. To help me with my success, I used my friends a lot. Most times when I had an essay, they also did, so we would sit together in the lobby and we would make sure that we were all focusing on what we needed to get done.
  To be honest, my time management skills have been less than satisfactory. I wuld continually put things off until the point where I was almost pulling an all nighter just to finish it. I spent a lot of my time this semester hanging out with my friends, which also caused me to slack on my school work. Because of my slacking, my grades are not going to be where I wanted them. But I now know what I should and should not do next semester in order to get my grades where I want them.
  My grades this semester have been low, but I have learned a lot in my classes. My english class taught me a lot about college writing that I will need for my college career. Inquiry helped me learn new skills to help me succeed in college. My math class this semester helped me decide that I want my second major to be math. My last class anthropology did not help me too much, but it did teach me that when you have difficult teachers, you have to learn on your own and make the best of it.
  I have to say that I am not where I had hoped to be in my college career. I wanted my grades much higher, but I have learned from my mistakes.I want to bring my grades up from here on out. I have to apply myself and stop with the procrastination.
  My goals for next semeter are plain and simple. Better grades and no procrastinating. I want to get my work done early so that I will not forget about them and so that I put my best effort and work into them. This will help me with my grades also.

Final Video Draft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbCWlxOeQlc&feature=youtube_gdata

Learning Community

   I really enjoyed having a learning community for my first year here at Southern. I liked having a group of people that I saw every week in two of my classes and I will miss having them there all the time. It was nice walking around and seeing people that I recognized from my class, and I have heard a lot of people say that they are quiet in all of their classes except for anthropology and inquiry. I think that this shows that people felt more comfortable around people in their learning community. This may be because we see eachother so often, but in my opinion it is a good thing to hear. I met some really nice people and I hope that I have other classes with them.

  One thing that I will miss a lot is when we go to Inquiry together and vent about our problem. I feel as if we all felt so comfortable being ourselves that it will be a really different feeling when we do not have that anymore because the semester is over.

Favorite Teacher to Many

  I have not thought much about what my ideal life after college. The only thing that I have really thought about was the fact that it may be hard for me to get a job because teaching jobs are limited. But if I had to think about it and imagine it, it would most likely be like this.
  I want to be the best teacher that I can possible be. I want all of the kids to want to get me as a teacher. I want to be like my favorite teacher when I was younger. In my old school, on the last day you would spend the entire day meeting your new teacher and your new classmates. We would all hope for the nicest most friendliest teacher that all the older kids would talk about the most. In fourth grade, I wanted a specific teacher so badly. The last few days of school all I would talk about is how nice she was and how great of a teacher she would be. When we found out who was in what class, of course I was one of the last ones to find out because my last name starts with a "T". Then I found out that I got the teacher that I wanted. I was so excited and then it came time to split off and meet our new teachers. As soon as I walked into her class I knew that she was exactly like everyone said. Her room was all decorated and she had such a fun and bubbly personality. She was the most fairest teacher that I have ever had.
  I want to decorate my class just like she did and I want all the kids to get excited when they find out that they will be in my class.

Radio Station

  One assignment that I never thought I would do was to find a radio station and listen to it. Then this week I was in my room on Facebook and my upstairs neighbor put up a status saying that he had a radio station and to listen to it.The show is on Wednesdays at 9:15. The show is called Jamz-Center and they played old songs and new ones. You can listen to this station online at WSIN Radio : 1590 AM
  I would for sure listen to this radio station again and not just because the person is someone I know, but because they had good music and it was interesting in general. I would give the show an A because they took calls and talked about interesting things.
  I recommend that people listen and enjoy this station.

True Life: SCSU on the Weekends

  I got my idea from Kelsey in class on Tuesday. I am going to make my video like the MTV show True Life to make my movie more original and less boring. I am planning on finding the music (hopefully) and make the title as much like the show as I can. I am going to improve my video by actually getting people to be video taped. My last video was all quotes because only one person was willing to be filmed. The True Life idea will add originality because it is not just a video with people answering questions, but it has originality. I am going to try to find commercials that have at least something to do with my topic so it is like you are really watching a television show.
  I could not work on my project over break because I have to ask people from SCSU the questions and I did not see anyone over break. I made questions to ask and now that I am back I have been working on it. I recorded two people already so it is already better than my last video. I will also use this picture as my first slide and add words to it.

Final Project

  For my final video projects, I have decided to focus on the problem that all residents on campus face, boring weekends. Many students who live on campus go home on the weekends not because they miss their family, but because there aren't many activities that you can do on campus. As residents, we pay so much money to live on campus, and we do not spend the entire week there. As someone who stays on the weekend, I can tell you that the campus is dead. No one is ever there and it makes it even more boring.
  For the solution, I want to focus on asking people who go home why they go home, and what could be changed on campus to make them stay for the weekend. I also want to ask people who stay on campus for the weekend why they stay, and what they do while they are here. I want to see how many people stay because they want to, and how many people stay because they can't get a ride home.
The way that I am going to do my video is:

-Title Page

-First question (Do you go home on  the weekends. What do you go home or why not and what do you do on campus.)

-Interviews and quotes to answer the question

-Second question(How could SCSU get you to stay or make the weekends more fun.)

-Interviews and quotes to answer questions

- Facts about things that SCSU offers on weekends and information about shuttles and where they go.

-There will be pictures of activities that have gone on during weekends and other things.

  I am hoping that this video will convince people to stay on campus weekend and show people that there are activities that go on. It might make the weekends more fun if people were there and it may even convince groups like RHA to create more activities on the weekend because more students are staying.

Meeting With My English Teacher

  This past Monday I had a meeting with my English teacher about redoing one of my papers. She has this rule where you can redo one of your papers, and instead of averaging out the scores, she will just throw the old score out. I was scheduled to have my meeting with her two weeks ago, but when I went to her office, there was a note saying that she was running late, so she would not be able to make the meeting. When I rescheduled the meeting, the day that I happened to pick was the day that we were having class in the library class room, so we had our meeting outside of the room by the desks, so I did not meet with her in her office, but I did meet with her.
  We went over what I had to improve on my essay in order to get a better grade on it. One of the major things that I had to improve was the length of my essay. It was too short, so she said that no matter how good or bad the actual essay was, she would not have been able to pass it either way. Just knowing this I knew I had a lot of work a head of me. Then she gave me some tips on how to improve the length of the essay and she pointed out some mistakes that I clearly missed. She told me that if I point with my finger, and read the essay backwards, I would be able to find my mistakes, like using the word you, better and easier then just reading it because my mind will already know what it is expecting to read because I wrote it. This meeting was extremely helpful and I am glad I signed up for it.

College Life

  For Hanna, Erin, Kelsey, and Ashley's group I read about college life and how to balance studying and social life. They talk about a lot of things that relate to me as a first semester freshman. They talked about how it seems like we have a lot of free time because our schedules are so spaced out. This relates to me because I feel this exact way. I am not use to have two classes so spaced out in one day, or only having three classes back to back in one day for such a short period of time. And then I have a three day weekend because I have no class on Friday. This all sounds good in general, but it's all so weird to me. I have free time, but at the same time it does not feel like I do at all. The articles suggested that you join clubs and get involved. I have done this, an although it has helped me be more social, it makes less free time for me. I love going to my meetings, but there are those times when I just can't because I have too much work to do for my classes. They also suggested for people to keep their doors open when you are in you're room so people can come in and visit. I agree with this because my and my roommates had this idea at the beginning of the semester, and it worked a lot. We still do it not too. We also like to sit out in the common area or lobby because then you just say hi to a lot of people, and you start to make conversations and new friends. I also watched the movie that they had up for us, it was a little weird. They talked as if they were on a hunt for animals in the wild. It was amusing and I got the point that they were trying to say.

INFJ

  For this week's class, I took a test for Louie, Mike, and Dane's group. The test was to see what type of personality you have. I got the personality of INFJ. The website says that this is the personality of a counselor because you tend to sympathize and empathise with other people. This description somewhat fits me because I want to be an elementary school teacher, so type of personality will fit in perfectly with that type of job.
  After I took that test, I read out left side brain people and right side brain people. The articles basically say that people who use their left brain more prefer certain things and are better at certain things and people who use their right side of the brain are better at the things that the left sided brain people are bad at. After comparing the two lists and reading the articles, I realized that I have qualities from both, for example, I am both a dog and cat person, but I am more of a left sided brain person.
  I am better at algebra than geometry, I need total quiet to read, I am good at math, and I would rather be serious than clown around. All of these traits coincide with the left side of the brain and not the right. The left side of the brain also control the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body. This makes sense because I am right handed.
  If there was an in between, such as a middle brained person, that may describe me better because although the left brain does describe me better then the right, there are still many things from the right that describe me.

Kids Then and Now

  This week, I am partnering up with Adriana and Stephanie to do a project about parenting skills and how they have changed since we were younger. From that topic, we took it a step further and add three sub-categories: different types of parenting skills, kids and social networks, and kids and reality television. I decided to do the main research on the topic of kids and reality television. I wanted to do this section of our project because I have heard first hand about what types of shows kids are watchng now. I coach 10, 11, and 12 year olds and I am always hearing about the new episodes of Jersey Shore or The Real World. It always amazes me because I know that when I was their age I was not watching those types of shows. I was watching Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. And what amazes me even more is that their parents do not seem to mind as much as you would expect them to. Some of the parents even watch the reality shows with them. When I was there age, my mom would get so mad if she ever caught me trying to watch shows on MTV because she saw them as innapropriate, as do most other parents. For this reason, my group and I believe that parents are way more lenient then when we were kids.

Alcohol Readings

  I found the readings for Dion, Jason, and Nick's group really interesting. A lot of the facts that are in the article are things that I did not know, and would have never guessed. There were a lot of percentages of college students who drink, and the numbers are so much higher than I would have ever expected.
  I learned that there are a lot of college students who binge drink. One person in class today talked about one possibility as to why so many college students binge drink. They said that it may be because so many college students do not drink in high school because either their parents had real control over them, or it was hard for them to get their hand on alcohol, so now that they are in college, there is alcohol all around them, and their parents are not here to stop them from drinking when they want. They are doing what they have wanted to do since high school, and a lot of students expect college to be about drinking and partying, so that is what they do. This makes complete sense to me because I have seen it happen. There are people who used to drink in high school and go to house parties, so when they came to college, drinking and partying were not as big of a deal. And then I have seen people who were sheltered in high school, and they came to college and it is an entirely different experience because they do not have people to tell them that they cannot do this or that, so they do as much as the can whenever they can.
  This is why I believe all of the facts and statistics that are in the reading that they gave us to read.

High School to College in the Blink of an Eye

 It feels like I was just in High School hanging out with my friends and knowing everyone in my school, and now I'm on my own in college. I do my own laundry when I run out of clothes to wear and I have no other choice but to wash them, I have to motivate myself to go to class everyday even if I do not feel like it, and I have to make my own food when I do not feel like going to Conn Hall because it gets tiring after a while

 It also feels weird not being at home. I can't sleep in my own bed and have my family and pets around me all the time like I am use to. I miss waking up to my cat and dogs cuddling with me in my bed. I also miss my bed in general. It was so big and comfy and on the floor, unlike my high lofted bed here. I hate when I wake up and I can’t just get off my bed and walk, I have to climb down just to go to the bathroom.

One thing that I love about being here though is having all my friends around all the time because they live all around me. I feel like I am living in a small town with all of these neighbors around with little restaurants all around you and everything you need. It is like being in your own little world, and when you go out of your little town, you forget things, like that you can’t use Hoot Loot everywhere you go, and it happens a lot to me.

I also enjoy living with my friend of five years. It is nice to have her around, even if there are days where we need time apart so we go home.

Slipping and Sliding to Class

With the sudden snow in the middle of fall, I was talking to some upperclassmen in my building. He was telling me and my roommates about last winter and we learned some interesting facts about Southern that other freshman might want to know. He told us that Southern does not like to cancel school. They are the last of all the state schools to cancel school. If they do not have to, then they will not. This worries me because I am very clumsy, and I tend to slip a lot in the winter. I am not looking forward to it because I have noticed that when it is wet outside, the granite stairs get very slippery.

To make matters worse, the kid also told us that the bridge is “like a slippery death trap.” According to him, the bridge is always slippery, even if they put rock salt down and the bridge occasionally gets black ice. I feel as if that is completely unsafe. So many people use the bridge, and if it is really that slippery, it makes me wonder how many people will slip and fall this winter. I may just feel safer just walking in the street and using the cross walks because at least there is rock salt down so it will be a little easier to walk. Another possibility in order to avoid falling, besides walking like a turtle, is to take the shuttle. My only thing about this is I would have to know the bus schedule, and I feel like a lot of people, especially upperclassmen, do this, so there would not be that many seats left on the shuttle.

The more that I thought about it, the more I realize that just because the school does not close, does not mean that the teacher will not cancel the class.

Say Hi to The Chainsaw Guy

  Last Friday, I went to Lake Compounce with my friends and Southern for the haunted grave yard. Now I hate scary things. I do not watch scary movies, and I try to avoid being scared as much as possible. Me and my other friend, who is the same way as me, were told that the scary would stay in the haunted grave yard. It turns out we were lied to. There were people in costumes all over the place. Me and my two friends went on rides the majority of the time and we sure did not go into that haunted grave yard. The only hard part was avoiding the people walking around intentionally trying to scare people.

  In order to do this, we all walked arm in arm looking around like the most paranoid people ever. The first creature that we saw was a odd looking thing. From behind you could not really tell what he, or it, was. We followed him for a while, and then we discovered what he was. He went in-between the bushes and blended in, he was a bush. He would hide there and scare unknowing people who walked by him. We walched him scare a few people, and then we continued to walk so that no one would try to get us.

    After we went on a few more rides, my friends wanted to go on this rollercoaster that goes upside down. Now I hate heights, so me going on all of the other rides was unlike me enough that I did not need to go on this roller coaster. I walked through the line with them and then went through the exit when they went on. While I was watching them, I kept looking behind my back, and it is a good thing I did. Behind me was this zombie looking guy with a chainsaw. He scared two grown men behind me who screamed like little girls and ran. When he started to approach me, my heart was pounding. Now I know they aren't really zombies, but it was still scary. So I did the only thing that I could think of to get him away from me. I turned my head, smiled, waved, and said "Hey!" After he looked at me for a little while, he turned his head, waved, and walked away. It felt so good to know that all I had to do to get him away was wave.

Midterms and Beyond

  I can honestly say that I am not proud of my midterm grades at all. I honestly believe that I could have done so much better and I know why they were the way they were for each one. The reason for each one is homework. I either forgot that I had it, or I would try to do it and not fully understand it, and the computer doesn't count partial credit, so for my math class I can't really do anything about it. I was honestly expecting the grades because I knew I was behind on my assignments.
  For this next half of the semester, I will be doing all of my homework and my papers ahead of time and not wait until last minute to complete them (which is why I am completing this assignment now). For my math, I will do the assignments as soon as I get them, even if they aren't due for a few days. This will also help me because if I don't understand it, I will have time to ask my teacher how to do it because if I wait until the night it's due, I won't have time to ask. For english I will check my syllabus everyday even if I am sure that I don't have any that day, or I think I already did it because she sometimes gives us more than one in a day to do. For inquiry, I will do my blog posts all at once when I can so that I don't forget when one is due, because that is my biggest problem. I feel good about anthropology, it is just hard for me to do the homework when I don't understand the reading. For this I may need to read it one day twice, and then the next day read it twice again before I do the assignment just to make sure I cover everything.

Something New and Exciting

  This past weekend, I did something that I never do. I am an extremely shy person. I hang out with certain people with my full personality showing, but as soon as I get around new people, I stay really quiet and out of the way. This past weekend I went to a murder mystery even in my hall with my roommate. After it was all over and done with, we were asked to help out with a banner for homecoming. We decided to stay along with all of the people on the eboard and a few other residence. I decided to be my normal self instead of hiding my true personality.
  It turns out that there are some really cool people in my residence hall that I never even knew lived here. We worked on the banner for five hours and we were all laughing and dancing the entire time. For the next few days after that, we all continued to hang out in the basement and work on the banner so that we could make it the best that we could. We finally finished it today and it came out amazing. I made friends with a lot of people that I will most likely hang out with more.
   If I hadn't been myself, people may have not noticed me or not really got to know me. From this experience, I realize that I should really do that more often. I am in ollege and being shy all the time just isn't a good way for me to make more friends. We all hung out so much in the past four days that I would honestly say that if we ever had to do another major thing with our hall, I would hope that it would be with the same people.

Troubleshooting

  I have never really used Window's Movie Maker, and it turns out it's not as easy as I thought it was. I started last week and I made all of the title slides with no problem.  I changed the slide color, the font size, and the transitions into each slide. The problems came when I tried to add music. I was attempting to add music to a specific part and I only wanted to use a specific part of the song. For some odd reason, I could not figure out how to do it. To this point in time, I still have not figured out how to do it. I have to play around with the music more, but for right now, I am more focused on cutting my videos and putting them all together to make it one amazing video. If it truly comes down to it, I am sure that someone will know how to fix this and I will be able to ask when it comes time to ass all of the music because at this pint, I was just fooling around with it to see if I could do  it because I am not sure what music I want to put in it quite yet.

Library Skills

  Last week I learned a new skill that I am sure I will be using very often, how to find a book in my school's giant library.We had to find a book on critical thinking that we can use to help us make our videos for our midterm. Finding the book wasn't as hard as I had expected. Once I went on the library website to see if the book was available and where I could find it, all I had to do was look at the letters and numbers on all of the rows in order to find which book I was looking for.This will help me when I have to write papers for all of my classes, so I'm glad I learned it because I didn't know that you could use that website to look for not only books, but articles and other things that would help me with my papers.