This week was full will surprises and disappointments. Lately, I've been struggling to keep up with my schedule as school work progressively increases with the year passing by. I did not have enough time to study for classes and at the same time to have enough sleep. When I get back home from football practices, it's already around seven o'clock at night. With dinner, shower and other things, I really can't start doing my homework by eight. I struggle to manage my tiredness from affecting my academic performance.
As a result, I did not do that well on multiple tests. In chemistry class, we reviewed the moodle quizzes to prepare for our upcoming test. I did overall pretty good on those quizzes, but for some reason I felt really sick and fatigue on the day of the exam. I thought I did well on the test at first, later when the test was posted. It caught me with surprise. I failed it. Due to the game on Thursday and the film discussion with the coaches on Friday, I did not have a chance yet to go over the test with Dr. Finnan. I really believe that I am capable of doing better on that test. I don't blame others for my own failure, I think it was my lack of concentration and focus that tripped me up. I decided not to do the retake because I deserve the grade that I received for my lack of focus and concentration. Later on the week, we went over the Lewis model and covered the ideas of valence electrons. It's pretty simple but this time I just need to concentrate on not to mess up on the day of the exam. On the other hand, I took a math test last week as well. I did bad on the exam too. I looked over it afterwards, I understood all the problems and am capable of solving them. It was all the small mistakes that I messed up on ending up ruining the entire problem. I really need to focus up.
Despite all of the disappointments, I got a new phone last week. The phone is awesome. Now I can actually do the moodle quizzes and use other online resources wherever I am. The other big thing happened was our skyline football team beat our cross town rival, Pioneer. We did an excellent job on executing our plays and defensively I did well on my own assignment except for just some small mistakes that I made. I really like the game of football because it relates to not just athleticism but life as well. There are always failures that will beat us to our knees sometimes in life. The test scores discouraged me greatly recently, but that is not the point. More importantly is how we stand back up from our failures, from now on, I am giving out my one hundred and ten percent effort to bring my standards back up.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Reflection Blog 9/22/2013
It's been nice week overall. I am slowly catching up to the flow of the school year. Although junior year is pretty stressful to stuff everything into my schedule, but it's all part of growing up. Football has taken up literally half of my daytime, I usually can't get back home until around 7 pm. As a result, I really have to be organized and focus on my schedule and studying.
When I get back home, I first clean out all the food in the refrigerator, take a shower, then lastly sleep. I enjoy doing my homework in the morning. Every morning I wake up before the sunrise to finish up my assignments. Not only it's nice and calm to do my work in the morning, I focus a lot better in the refreshing dawn. Chemistry really isn't that difficult to understand for me, it's pure logic and algebra. On the other hand, I struggle more on anatomy and precalculus. It's just really annoying to memorize all the words and formulas. Anyways, the past week in chemistry class, we've done lots of pogils and learning new ideas on stoichiometry. It's a piece of cake. It's purely on setting up the equations then to solve them. In class, we did many whiteboards discussion, which helps me a lot because I can't visually see what my the problems or mistakes are. On the moodle website, I really don't pay that much attention on the lectures. Instead, I focus more on the powerpoint because it's more thorough and saves more time. I am a visual learner so I don't like it when people are giving out lectures. I do better when I am the one in charge of what I am doing. Whenever I am doing my chemistry homework, I do my homework while reading the powerpoint online. That way, I can see what my mistakes are and what I need to fix. It's applicable to me. Also, Dr. Finnan's email posts for the daily homework and what we are doing in class really helped me out a lot in the past week. Due to my football game day, I can't really finish up the work I need to finish on a certain day. With the reminder, I can know what is coming up next and finish things ahead of time. It's really handy.
There were also time in the past week where I felt a little bit stressed out. I smashed my phone in front of my mother because we got into an argument. I should never have done that. Now, I have to use my sister's old pink phone which is completely going against my style. In the future, stressful things will happen a lot more frequently, so I should really find another way for relief.
When I get back home, I first clean out all the food in the refrigerator, take a shower, then lastly sleep. I enjoy doing my homework in the morning. Every morning I wake up before the sunrise to finish up my assignments. Not only it's nice and calm to do my work in the morning, I focus a lot better in the refreshing dawn. Chemistry really isn't that difficult to understand for me, it's pure logic and algebra. On the other hand, I struggle more on anatomy and precalculus. It's just really annoying to memorize all the words and formulas. Anyways, the past week in chemistry class, we've done lots of pogils and learning new ideas on stoichiometry. It's a piece of cake. It's purely on setting up the equations then to solve them. In class, we did many whiteboards discussion, which helps me a lot because I can't visually see what my the problems or mistakes are. On the moodle website, I really don't pay that much attention on the lectures. Instead, I focus more on the powerpoint because it's more thorough and saves more time. I am a visual learner so I don't like it when people are giving out lectures. I do better when I am the one in charge of what I am doing. Whenever I am doing my chemistry homework, I do my homework while reading the powerpoint online. That way, I can see what my mistakes are and what I need to fix. It's applicable to me. Also, Dr. Finnan's email posts for the daily homework and what we are doing in class really helped me out a lot in the past week. Due to my football game day, I can't really finish up the work I need to finish on a certain day. With the reminder, I can know what is coming up next and finish things ahead of time. It's really handy.
There were also time in the past week where I felt a little bit stressed out. I smashed my phone in front of my mother because we got into an argument. I should never have done that. Now, I have to use my sister's old pink phone which is completely going against my style. In the future, stressful things will happen a lot more frequently, so I should really find another way for relief.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Weekly Blog Reflection 9/15/2013
It's only the second week of school, we've already took a test and many other online quizzes. Through out the week, we learned mainly about molarity and concentration. At first, I was very confused about this unit because the one lectures were very boring from my perspective which causes me to not want to learn. Later on, we did a lot of calculations and mathematical formulas to figure out the unknown variable. We were given many questions and practices, especially homework which was very unpleasant personally. Near the end of the week, we were told there was a lab coming up so we had to do all these readings and procedures about the experiment.
Surprisingly, I enjoyed the lab a lot. Unlike the online lessons and quizzes, you gain experience not only with the studying materials but with the laboratory techniques and applying theories, along with formulas to solve real world problems. Our first lab in the class is basically finding out the concentration of a solution using a colorimeter. During the experiment, as a class, we came up with a beginning question and collected a class data so that we could make sure our measurements were correct. As we were doing the lab, the concepts about molarity and concentration became clearer to me. The idea of concentration is that as the amount of solution increases while the solute remains the same, the concentration decrease. A real life example would be like making lemonade, if the drink is too sweet you would add more water to bring down the taste or the concentration of the lemonade. Molarity is similar to concept of concentration but dealing with the number of moles of solute per liter of solution. Dr. Finnan instructed us to find out the mass of powerade and gatorade in grams after the lab, which was really what the whole lab is about, applying our knowledge into real life applications. I had no clue what we were doing at first, but later on the online lectures came into my mind. Then, everything became transparent, all we had do was really just to set up the equations and balance out the units. In the end, it was the lab that really taught me everything I need to know from this unit.
After this entire second week of school, although I was physically really tired and beat up. I learned how to be more organized with my schedule and take better notes in class. Lastly, advanced placement classes are really no jokes. It demands more work and concentration. My participation in class really wasn't that interactive at all. I think I can really do a lot better if I can concentrate more in class and do more work or practices after school. All of the new ideas I've learned from my chemistry class this week were pretty simple to me, but I just need to practice more with setting up formulas. In these couple quick days of school, my understanding and definition of hard work has really changed significantly, but I guess this is what part of growing-up is all about.
Surprisingly, I enjoyed the lab a lot. Unlike the online lessons and quizzes, you gain experience not only with the studying materials but with the laboratory techniques and applying theories, along with formulas to solve real world problems. Our first lab in the class is basically finding out the concentration of a solution using a colorimeter. During the experiment, as a class, we came up with a beginning question and collected a class data so that we could make sure our measurements were correct. As we were doing the lab, the concepts about molarity and concentration became clearer to me. The idea of concentration is that as the amount of solution increases while the solute remains the same, the concentration decrease. A real life example would be like making lemonade, if the drink is too sweet you would add more water to bring down the taste or the concentration of the lemonade. Molarity is similar to concept of concentration but dealing with the number of moles of solute per liter of solution. Dr. Finnan instructed us to find out the mass of powerade and gatorade in grams after the lab, which was really what the whole lab is about, applying our knowledge into real life applications. I had no clue what we were doing at first, but later on the online lectures came into my mind. Then, everything became transparent, all we had do was really just to set up the equations and balance out the units. In the end, it was the lab that really taught me everything I need to know from this unit.
After this entire second week of school, although I was physically really tired and beat up. I learned how to be more organized with my schedule and take better notes in class. Lastly, advanced placement classes are really no jokes. It demands more work and concentration. My participation in class really wasn't that interactive at all. I think I can really do a lot better if I can concentrate more in class and do more work or practices after school. All of the new ideas I've learned from my chemistry class this week were pretty simple to me, but I just need to practice more with setting up formulas. In these couple quick days of school, my understanding and definition of hard work has really changed significantly, but I guess this is what part of growing-up is all about.
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