Writing And My Blog
2016-2017
Learning Outcomes:
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2. Skills
5. Collaboration
7. Ethics
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During the second semester of my Sophomore year in Colegio Roosevelt, I took the Innovation Academy which you can learn more about here . In the IA, I was required to create a blog and publish a blog post weekly. Writing had always been a passion, but with this blog, I was able to put it into practice.
It is interesting to see the contrast between my first blog post and other recent ones. I always gave a lot of value to feedback. Whenever I had a new blog post ready, I asked as many people as I could to check it for me since I knew that there was always something to improve. Part of that is due to Mr. Bonnici, who was the IA teacher, and constantly reminded of the power of receiving feedback. Due to that, I was always able to publish my best work on my blog.
On the other hand, in the beginning, I didn't see receiving feedback as extremely necessary. Because of that, I passed it a few times. Needless to say, it resulted in myself regretting to have published a piece and deleting it a few days later. That's where my improvement in ethics comes in. As mentioned before, writing has always been a passion consequently I have always written passionately. Whenever I was extremely happy, or extremely sad, or extremely inspired, I had the urge to write; therefore, my writing was always very sentimental and intense. With the blog posts published and then deleted, I learned that when I'm writing something for other people to see, I need to take into consideration other people involved in the writing. After making a few mistakes, I grew on being more aware of the morality of writing.
Interestingly enough, while we had to publish one blog post weekly, we were also working on a magazine for which I had the role of editor. Along with this role, I had to read "On Writing Well" by Willliam Zinsser which contributed to the improvement in my writing skills as the semester went on.
This blog is not only a way for me to communicate with others, but it's also a way for me to connect with myself through my writing which hardly fails to make me proud. You can check out my blog here.
Writing in El Oráculo
Writing To Entertain People
Learning Outcomes:
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1. Areas of Growth
5. Collaboration
7. Ethics
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About a year ago, I joined El Oráculo which is FDR's Spanish newspaper. Back then, I didn't feel confident enough to write an article on my own yet. So, I decided to start out with my friend, Micaela. We had just come back from a CWW: Lunahuaná. It was very different from any other CWW and honestly, as a grade, we made a lot of memories on this specific trip. We decided to write "Los 19 Clásicos de Lunahuaná".
Ever since I can remember, I have like to write. Throughout my whole life, ever since I learned to write, I have kept personal journals. But that's the key word right there: personal. I always wrote very personally. Even when it was published, like in my Innovation Academy Blog, it was always very personal. In other words, I had never written to entertain and that's where my first learning outcome comes in: identify my own strengths and develop areas of growth. Micaela and I wrote this together and we totally complemented each other: while she made it funny, I made it personal, which I knew how to do best. In the beginning, it was hard for me to phrase it in a way that would entertain people rather than bore them. However, with Mica's help, I was able to little by little learn to do it. And this also reflects my second learning outcome: demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively. With Mica's help, I was able to improve and apply that skill to other articles I wrote later on. Also, collaboration was represented because apart from writing the article with Mica, we asked for other people's feedback and that improved our article greatly.
My third learning outcome is: recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions. El Oráculo is an anonymous newspaper so we work really hard to maintain that anonymity no matter what. Not only do we want to maintain our writers anonymous, but also the people we talk about in our articles. For instance, because we were talking about the memories of a trip we went to with a lot of people, we often had to mention a certain person. So we tried to change their names; we didn't write it directly but tried to find nicknames or sometimes, even mention the memory without linking it to a person. In that way, we kept the ethics of our article in mind. ​
Personal Article in El Oráculo
Writing To Entertain People
Learning Outcomes:
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1. Areas of Growth
5. Collaboration
7. Ethics
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The last article I wrote for "El Oráculo" was completely out of my comfort zone. I talked about abusive relationships which is a topic that is very close to me through experiences of friends and family. Because I'm affected by it, it was hard making sure I kept my feelings relatively aside for the sake of an unbiased writing piece.
My first learning outcome was identifying my own strengths and developing areas of growth because, as I mentioned, this article was out of my comfort zone. When I write, it is very personal so I had to review the article over and over to make sure the message was more general rather than specific to my experience. I did that with the help of my peers in El Oraculo which brings me to my next learning outcome: demonstrating the skills and recognizing the benefits of working collaboratively. Micaela, especially, always helps me with my articles. She understands my style of writing, therefore, knows what my goal is and what I should improve. Specifically for this article, however, she was personally involved too so we spent much more time working on it.
My third learning outcome is recognizing and considering the ethics of choices and actions. In the article, I mentioned specific situations and created pseudo names for those involved. Because "El Oráculo" is a school magazine, it was important that I still kept the privacy of those people so I made sure to do so. At the end, the article was published and there was no issue so the consideration was well done.
Organizing the 2018 Prom
Pre-Prom June 2nd
Learning Outcomes:
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1. Areas of Growth
2. Overcoming Challenges
5. Collaboration
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When I was considering running for grade level president for Junior year, I knew that organizing the prom would be one of my biggest challenges as superficial as that sounds. Organizing a party is hard for itself but when you're organizing it for someone else, I've realized it's ten times harder.
My first learning outcome was identifying my own strengths and developing areas of growth. I'm open to listening to people's criticism when they're said constructively and that is definitely not what I came across while organizing this party. Everyone constantly said it was going to turn out terribly, that it was so expensive, that they didn't even want to go and etc, but no one actually said what they wanted or actively asked for it. I reached a point where I just stopped being bothered by what people said and started to fix what I could fix to allow the party to turn out in a way that everyone would like it. This was definitely an area of growth because I can be quite intolerant and by organizing this party, I had to learn to be more patient and flexible because I just couldn't answer everyone the way I wanted to.
My second learning outcome was demonstrating that challenges undertaken developed new skills in the process. We, Alexia and I, faced a lot of challenges during this process. For instance, since we were controlling the number of people through a list rather than physical tickets, we had to keep it very organized. Still, sometimes we didn't count people in and at first we were super nervous about it. However, through the process we learned to be calmer, we started to solve problems efficiently. To solve that issue, for example, we posted the list on the facebook group and asked people to check their names so in the day of the party there were no issues.
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My third learning outcome was demonstrating the skills and recognising the benefits of working collaboratively. Alexia was my partner to organize the arty. I knew she would like it and I needed help since my cabinet wasn't interest in helping me. So I asked her and she was thrilled to do so. She helped me incredibly. We divided the tasks we needed to do and the process ended up being less dense for the both of us. If I had done it alone, I would be much more overloaded and overwhelmed with work.