Best of Week: Group Collaboration

While it was not necessarily part our curriculum/intensive learning, I thought the most valuable thing I heard this week was your (Mr. Allen's) advice about group collaboration + food. If I had tried to approach this essay by myself, I would have most definitely had a panic attack and ultimately failed miserably. However, I planned to work with a group of friends after hearing about your late nights with nachos and coffee. Knowing I wouldn't have to go after this alone was a big comfort for me. I got together with some classmates on Saturday afternoon, and we did indeed have food to accompany us. In between our random online wanderings, we actually got some really good ideas out about King Lear. We had good discussion and were comfortable in the environment of one of our friend's houses, surrounded by people we knew. It's important to know that even in things seemingly intolerable, like schoolwork, fun can be found and maintained alongside productivity. I hope I will be able to apply this concept of low-key collaboration later in life, be it in college, or possibly even with colleagues (assuming I will get a job somewhere). I definitely think this was the best idea of the week because it can be applied to more than just specifically King Lear. 

Connection: King Lear and Arrested Development

The connection I am going to make is between King Lear and his daughters and Lucille Bluth and her children in Arrested Development. It may be a stretch, but in the show, the children are frequently trying to suck up to their mother in order to gain control of the company which changes administration frequently. Michael Bluth is probably the only competent sibling, but he has too much sense to shamelessly try to please his mother like his brothers and sister do. In this way, he relates to Cordelia who refused to drench her father in mindless praise just because he asked her to. Lucille is very quick to become angry at her children and quickly becomes enchanted with another and gives them power over the company. This shows her likeness to the king because both are very quick to act and react, sometimes (most of the time) irrationally. Both characters are quite selfish and spoil themselves. They are both rather shallow and neither of them is very thoughtful. 

TED Presentations

Phew. Thank goodness that is over! While the TED project was very interesting and I really enjoyed my video, looking back on the project I think I will mostly remember what went wrong and how stressed I was. I will start with the things that I enjoyed, though. First of all, I loved my video. I thought it was incredibly interesting and the whole foundation that it was about is really cool. I also liked how we were divided into 3 presentation groups. It was nice having a smaller group of people to present to and  not sitting through as many presentations. The guidelines and the website were also extremely helpful in providing a predetermined format. There were, however, many negative qualities about the project in general. First of all, having all four grade levels participating was not ideal. Even with the rubric, not everybody contributed their fair share. Also, some of the freshmen were incompetent or trying to take control (they're FRESHMAN...  trying to tell everyone else what to do... that's not how it works!!). Also, 15 minutes was not nearly enough time to make a presentation. While I was very satisfied with the amount of information we had on our site, I feel like we couldn't showcase it in the presentation because we had to frantically rush through to provide time for discussion at the end. In doing so, we didn't have time to mention one of the required elements, so I am fearful that that affected our grade. Also, being the first presenter in our room, we were under the impression that we really needed to leave the 5 minutes for discussion, so we did our best to do so and ended up having about 4 minutes. The other groups, though, talked right through their discussion time and then one of the teachers in the room said that they didn't have time to discuss, even when some of the groups tried to start a discussion. In that respect, the presentations didn't work very well. I was thinking to myself that it would be a good idea to maybe make the presentations half an hour long, but then I immediately thought that there is no way I would ever want to sit through 5 or more 30 minute presentations. I am not sure if this project is worth doing again, since it was more of a frantic compilation of words than an actual learning experience. I like the point that Leanne brought up during the whole-group discussion- we should actually DO something instead of making presentations about videos. Overall, if we are going to do these presentations again, we should cut out the freshmen and possibly the juniors and/or seniors. To be honest, I think it would be seriously AWESOME if we could do this project with just our class. I feel that there would  be a lot more quality and less frustration.