Stephanie's Blog

This week I wanted to reflect on the topic of Thanksgiving, which is a fitting topic because we have much to be thankful for as we approach the last few weeks of the semester. I think a lot of times we take for granted things in life, and in this post I want to reflect on some of the things I take for granted but am most thankful for. First, my education, is something that is truly a blessing because I have been able to show off and better the talents that I have been blessed with. I am very thankful that I got to go to an amazing high school and the best university in the country. There is so much to be thankful for within this, because all of my hard work in school is finally paying off and I have officially accepted a full time job starting this summer. It is truly amazing to see how far I have come in life, and I wouldn't have been able to do this without my amazing educational opportunities. Second, my talents, which goes along with the first thing. This is something that ...

This week I read the article by Psychology Today, 10 Reasons to Stop Judging People , by Barbara Markway. This article interested me because in today's society it is very easy to judge people and be judgmental of somebody's actions, but in reality there is a good chance you don't know anything about them. I was curious to see what this article had to say. The 10 things you can do to stop judging people, according to this article are: 1) Don't Blame Yourself 2) Be Mindful 3) Depersonalize 4) Look for Basic Goodness 5) Repeat the mantra "Just Like Me" 6) Reframe 7) Look at your own Behavior 8) Educate Yourself 9) Give the Person the Benefit of the Doubt 10) Feel Good About You I think that the first one, don't blame yourself, is a great one because sometimes it is hard to control your thoughts and you often will find yourself judging people and it might be over something little. In the end, the more aware we are and the more we recognize that w...

This week I read the article from Mindset Works, Learning and Performance Zones in Sports , by  Jeremy Frith and Eduardo Briceño. This article  initially  stood out to me because sports have always been a big part of my life and I think that  they are signifiant to developing into a well rounded person.  I really liked this article because it emphasized the importance of practice makes perfect. It also introduced this concept of spending time in the "Learning Zone," which the article described as things like  practicing drills that target specific skills and playing modified games to advance our understanding of different aspects of the game, along with soliciting and receiving feedback and reflecting. This is applicabel to things in everyday life in which you want to  improve  upon, because without practice or spending time in the learning zone, you  won't  be able to get better. I also think that this is important...

To finish up the Czech folktales unit, it started with a story called The Man who met Misery. I thought that this story was very interesting because the very first line of the story was " there lived a rich man, so rich that you might almost say he oozed gold," which in my opinion definitely made me want to keep reading and see where this story went.  Overall, this story was really humbling and inspirational because they used this story as a way to show how to be appreciative of what you have. In the story, the boy of the rich man only met Misery when all of his money that his father had given him had started to run out. From there he learned a lot, as the reader did as well, which shows an important part of the Czech culture. The next story, Nine at a Blow, was really cool. A tailer killed nine flies at one time with a stocking and then goes on his way into the world, gradually receiving things from others. Eventually he runs into a giant that he tr...

This week I wanted to get ahead and dive into the European Unit. The Czech Folktales immediately stood out to me because of my ancestry in Poland. The Polish and Czech have many similarities culturally, so I wanted to see what kinds of story telling techniques and story plots the Czechs told. The first story in this part of the reading was Sleepy John. I thought that the character development in this story was really cool because initially you have John who sleeps all the time. This gets him into some unusual and difficult situations, but he manages to overcome them. By the end of the story, Sleepy John has obtained the entire kingdom. As a whole, I thought it was really cool that a character that was initially thought to have some negative characteristics turned out to be an awesome and smart character. Maybe he was just tired all the time from all the crazy situations he gets himself into. The next story was Silly Jura. This trend in the title names started to attract my attentio...

Once there was a group of raccoons. They lived far from other raccoons, but they shared a friendship that they would always treasure and they always looked out for each other. The King raccoon has just passed and as a result, there was much dispute over who should be the new king of the land. When word had spread to this group of raccoons, they travelled from afar and when they got to the land, they discovered the challenge that awaited them. Among the largest of trash cans, there was a bag of cool ranch Doritos that must be obtained, for whoever could remove this bag was for sure the indication of who should be the next king. Among this group of raccoon friends, they all decided that they would try to become the next king, and they would as a result, help out each other and make sure they were all guaranteed wealth and happiness. Arty was among them, and he was the most fragile of the group. However, Arty stepped up to the trash can and removed the Doritos bag with such great ea...

For extra credit reading this week, I chose to read Part A of the King Arthur unit. While I am familiar with the overall ideas and basic storyline behind King Arthur and his knights of the round table, I have never actually read this story, so I was curious to see what the style of writing was like, and if it matched the pictures I had in my head already. There were 3 main stories I found to be the most interesting. I found it interesting that in the first section, it mentions Christmas. Later in the story it mentions Candlemas , which I googled and found is a Christian Holy Day celebrated on February 2nd. I think the point of mentioning these two holidays was to represent the time span that this story occurs within. I found the first story overall very familiar in the sense that Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone is one of the more common images he is associated with. The second story of the Questing Beast was less familiar and I found it very interesting. I came across the...

This week I read an article in the New York Times by Jane E. Brody, Turning Negative Thinkers into Positive Thinkers . This article stood out to me because I feel like positivity is something that is a hard quality to come by these days. While I consider myself for the most part a generally positive person, I also find myself being a realist, which can be associated with negativity. Often times I don't like to get my hopes up about anything because the reality is your expectations are not always met. One thing this article pointed out that I like was that in order to exhibit positivity, you don't always have to be positive to be healthy and happy. This is where the realism comes into play for me. Sometimes there are situations where its hard to be positive. But the main point that this article offered was that its the little things that you choose to see as positive really help you gradually, each time, live a happier lifestyle. This article also said that well-being is a l...

This week I wanted to reflect on the dreading topic of job searching. As the fall semester of senior year is coming to a close, I'm sure many people can relate to the impending worry that is finding a job. Not only is it important to find a job, but finding one that you are going to enjoy is a challenge as well. I just wanted to reflect on this topic, as well as offer some advice to anyone who may be reading this. I am also open to advice as well! The job hunt is such a difficult thing to manage and get through for many reasons. First, with applying for any jobs there is going to be a certain level of rejection. Whether or not you want to admit it, this is a difficult thing for your ego to handle, no matter how many or how little times you encounter it. For me, this in particular was really hard to manage because I feel like with how much work I have put into everything, I couldn't understand why nothing was working out in my favor. My advice for this is to just remain patien...

This week I read the article by The Medical Press, Scientist Finds Secret to Thriving . I found this article really interesting because I would never have guessed this was something you could perform a study or experimentation on to find a "secret." Nonetheless, this article said that w hat it takes to thrive, rather than merely survive, could be as simple as feeling good about life and yourself and being good at something. I think this is important because thriving is seen as a positive adjective to  describe  where you are in life, so we must look at what this article is saying in order to strive to thrive in life. Another point that this article that I found interesting was that in this study t hriving has been examined at various stages of human life and has at times been described as vitality, learning,  mental toughness , focus, or combinations of these and other qualities.  Basically, this scientist has studied a wide variety of people at different poin...

This week I did some research on the characters in my storybook project. I started looking up Poseidon because I wanted to see why he is associated with horses, since he is most commonly associated with the sea. According to wikipedia, once Poseidon was worshiped as a horse, and this is evident by his cult in  Peloponnesos . So then naturally, this led me to finding out just exactly what Peloponnesos is. Peloponnesos is  a  peninsula  and  geographic region  in southern  Greece . According to wikipedia, this region has been inhabited since ancient times and  originates  all the way back to Greek mythology,  specifically the legend of the hero  Pelops , who was said to have conquered the entire region. The name  Peloponnesos  means "Island of Pelops." This then led me to look up the legend of the hero Pelops. In Greek mythology, Pelops was a king of Pisa and he  was venerated at  Olympia , where his cult develo...

For the second half of the Nursery Rhymes unit, there were a few more segments that were introduced: jingles, love and matrimony, natural history, accumulative stories, and relics. In jingles I found Hey Diddle Diddle, which was word for word how I remembered hearing it. I thought it was really cool that there was a love and matrimony segment because there were a few that I remember that I found in this segment such as: Jack and Jill and this one: I HAD a little husband, No bigger than my thumb; I put him in a pint pot, And there I bid him drum. I could not for the life of me  remember  where I had heard this before though.  In the natural history segment, I thought it was cool that this was two segments and there was only one in both that I had heard of and it was Baa Baa Black Sheep. This one was very much exactly like I had heard it before. Each of these had something to do with animals, but I was confused at first as to why the segment was called natural hist...

This weeks reading came from the Nursery Rhymes Unit. I chose to read this unit because I was interested to see how familiar I actually was with the nursery rhymes that were presented in this unit compared to the ones I heard as a child, and I wanted to see if there were any new, fun ones. Here is a list that I made prior to the reading in order to see which ones I could check off from this unit: This Little Piggy If You're Happy and You Know It Five Little Monkeys The Itsy Bitsy Spider Baa Baa Black Sheep Baby Bumble Bee Since these were nursery rhymes, all of the writing rhymed! I think this would be a fun thing to do for my storytelling this week. What I learned from the reading this time was that the nursery rhyme unit was split up into different segments: tales, proverbs, songs, riddles, paradoxes, charms and lullabies, and games. One of the main ones I had heard of from the tales segment was Little Jack Horner. I had forgotten about this one, but once I read it I...

Once there was a coyote, and all he wanted in life was a friend. He often caught himself watching all of the other animals, saddened, thinking to himself, "I wish I could fly like the bird" or "I wish I had such beauty as the ." But all of the other animals were warned about the coyotes kind. They were warned to stay away, because he was a dangerous creature. The coyote wanted to prove to the town that he was actually good, so he devised a plan that would surely show all the other animals that he was not bad. The coyote began to gather flowers and plants of such beauty, and he began to weave them into a banner that he planned to hang above the two main trees in the village. As he was setting up this banner, he noticed a roadrunner trot by and as he was admiring him, he forgot to attach the final piece of vine that would fully attach the banner. The other animals began to notice what the coyote was doing so they approached him. As the coyote was standing by, he...