When I am in a stressful situation, I need to take a minute and calm myself down before it turns into anything. Throughout my first year here at New Tech, I have been very stressed! It probably doesn’t help that I am a naturally anxious person but nevertheless, I need to practice coping with my anxiety. This year I have been working on stepping back, taking deep breaths, and calming down when I start to feel stressed. So far, I have only done this successfully once or twice. Often, when you are in a stressful situation you can’t think straight, so it is quite difficult to do this.
My mom also deals with anxiety so she has taught me a couple tricks. One that she taught me that I have noticed works is using your five senses. You count five things you can see, four sounds you can hear, three things you can feel, two fragrances you can smell, and one thing you can taste. This trick helps ground you and bring your mind back from spinning. According to the ADAA, laughing lowers stress hormones and strengthens the immune system by releasing health-enhancing hormones. This means that if you are feeling stressed, once you have started to calm yourself down, you should get a friend to make you laugh or just to keep you company and make you feel better.
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Throughout most of my freshman year at New Tech, I have been trying to get a grasp of what agency actually is and how it can affect and benefit my education. If someone were to ask me what agency is at the beginning of the year I would tell them it had something to do with keeping yourself on track. When someone asks me what agency is today, I would say it is that and preparing yourself to be an adult, exercising your motivation, and practicing your ability to take information and being able to translate it into your work.
One way you can demonstrate agency is using effort and practice to improve skills, improve work quality, or performance. I believe I did this many times throughout the year. A more recent example of a time I did this was in our Odyssey project, I painted my final piece and I felt like there was something wrong about it. Everyone told me it looked fine and I should just move on with the project, but there was something off. I then redid the piece and I am now so happy with it and how it turned out. Another way to demonstrate agency is actively participating in the activity/discussion, team meeting, and independent time. I think that I did do this for the duration of the year. When my teachers give us the time to meet with our teams for meetings or work time, I take advantage of that and really work to get whatever project we are working on done. My team and I, for our current project of making a film about Romeo and Juliet, are being very good about using our class time. So far, there has not been one day where we haven’t got a lot done in class. We have filmed scenes, recorded voice-overs and started editing using class work time. Overall, I think I have really developed an understanding of the meaning behind “agency” and have exhibited it in my work. In my BioFitness class we have been working on making a website to inform the public about different invasive species in Napa Valley for the Watershed Information Center and Conservancy. My group studied the Tree of Heaven for our species. Link to our website: http://treeofheavennapa.weebly.com/ Over the past couple of weeks, my Digital Media class made epic movies for Fair Housing Napa Valley. In this project, we needed to convey a message about how fair housing is a real problem in our society today and there is help if you or a loved one is experiencing this I felt like my team for this project really understood how to collaborate with one another in a team. Everything we did throughout this project went relatively smoothly. Everyone would take turns speaking their ideas and listening while we figured out what we want to say with this film. We would sit down and figure out the storyboard and everyone pitched in and added their suggestions. At first, a couple of us has completely different ideas about what to do, but in the end, we combined both ideas and I believe we are all happy with how our movies turned out. None of us went off doing other things during filming or work time. When anyone needed help or didn’t understand something we would help them. For example, in our movie, we had to include a “bird’s eye view” shot which is a shot taken from a higher viewpoint. I am rather short, therefore it was very challenging to hold the camera and see what I was filming that high, so one of my taller team members stepped in and helped me. In this project, we got one week to film and another to edit. During that last week of editing, everyone was scrambling to finish their film before the deadline. My team did our best to keep each other on track and provide feedback when we were individually editing our movies. In the end, everyone finished and I think all the movies turned out relatively well. |
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