Month: October 2019
Urban Gardening First Post
LO3:
My group (Fin, Derek) and I planned to accomplish two things during our service period. Primarily, we agreed on planting chilies. Chilies are useful plants that can be repurposed to help other groups within the community. They will have the ideal growing humidity and air temperature in Singapore. They are quite resilient plants and our rooftop garden has had successful histories of planting various chilies. Aside from just growing a big batch of chili, Fin was able to procure a dried chili from the garden, from which we were able to get an adequate quantity of seeds for planting. We decided that having three separate groups germinated through different methods, namely :seeds we have at hand from the filing cabinet, seeds procured from previous fruitions, and cuttings from existing chili plants, will help us determine the most efficient method of chili planting.
Fin and I have different service periods than Derek as his is only half of the duration that we are going to be in Urban Gardening for. So Fin and I will try to revive or rather improve the growing condition of a dragonfruit plant in the garden to have it grow some fruit.
This is our document storying information that is used for the planned service projects.
PSE Unit 1
Identity:
Who are you?
By looking at me what would you know…? Or not know?
What ‘s above the waterline?
An asian 16 year old boy with glasses and hoodies. You can tell that I like video games and cooking videos for how much I like talking and watching content like that. You would assume that I am good at math due to the general asian stereotype and you would be comparatively correct.
What’s below the waterline?
Self Talk:
The most important thing I learned personally is to not expect the absolute maximum return of investment out of everything I do. Sometimes, certain investments will not give you the most satisfying results, but they help you learn in aspects like efficiency and help you identify your strengths. Expecting to be the best at everything is just going to make you extremely tired and down all the time. Knowing that you tried your best and satisfy urself before heading to the milestone is an important process in progressing.
Personality types
Which personality types did you align to?
When dealing with things that are not deeply impactful, or are not related to academics or things I really care about, I am more of an acting personality. I would explore different ideas. If I am working in a study group, I would be paying a lot more attention to details because I believe details have great impacts on the outcome of most projects and they take much less investment for the return they provide.
What is optimism?
I have caught negative self talks but rather as jokes when playing games with my friends. If there were serious negative self talks, I would try to do a complete assessment of my abilities in this area and give myself a clear placement in terms of skill level so that I can effectively stop these discouraging self talks. Positive self talks inspire you to become better rather than disclaiming that you are bad, thus going down a slipper, dark slope. They help you recognise your advantages and disadvantages in learning which is a critical part of self assessment and self management, both of which are critical parts of the ideal mindset of an IB learner.
PG56 Response on Cosi
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JTP1GxqrSxU8PV7G7w5k9LuBNVngUeoe-5c5M0t4qzQ/edit?usp=sharing
Circuit Training First Post
This is an example of what we do in Circuit Training. Currently we are just doing combos of exercise and training that escalates in difficulty as we progress. I can feel the improvement in my stamina. I do gym at home as well, and the gym routines given by my coach helps me outside of school as well. I have no concerns as of right now, but I am willing to start trying out harder and more intense training. A major area of improvement for me would be my form during core and muscle workouts.
LO2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
My goal for the season would be to increase my stamina and be able to develop a constant routine I can use at home from what I have learnt from my coach. The most challenging part of a workout for me is the aerobic part of the session, which is often running. I have had knee injuries as a child, along with improper running habits, making running more than 1 km a time a stressful and challenging assignment. However, I have learnt that substituting running with other aerobic exercises such as rowing can help reduce burden on my body, and I can do that for others parts of the session according to what I and my coach see fit for my conditions. I also aim to have better form when exercising to make the sessions more demanding but also more efficient at the same time.
National Cipher Challenge First Post
In the past few weeks, our group leader has taught us how to identify and solve mono alphabetic and transpositional ciphers. We tried many questions differing in difficulty, and progressed from doing basic ciphers by hand to using online tools to help with mass translation of text after solving the key.
LO1-Identify their own strengths and develop areas for growth.
My particular strength in this activity is that I am extremely interested in Math. I have participated in challenges like UKMT, CEMC, Olympiad and AMC, and achieved gold medals or merits in many of them. This experience trains my mathematical sense, and inspires creative problem solving as a mathematician.
My worry right now is regarding my concentration during the activities. I am sometimes not focused enough during the activity to solve puzzles efficiently. I will work to improve on that issue by doing more exercises given to us by the activity leader to further spark my interest in the activity.
My goal is to become more sensitive to patterns and possible encryption methods. This really has no deadline, but it contributes to number sense and logic which I will consistent work on during the activity.
4th October 2019
I read a really interesting insight into representation of the mentally ill today from Sinuan. She said that the idea of misrepresentation can be dangerous but mostly due to the nature and intent of people that are adopting this representation. The idea of mental illness will lead to severe violence tendencies can be used to either defend inabilities of mental ill people to control themselves, or as Roy said “up his lithium”, which is to drugs the patients even more as a “precaution”. Perception by the audience matters greatly as representations of sensitive issues like race, gender, mental illness, and religion can invoke hatred and disgust just as well as it can call for empathy