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.
0 Comments
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/ On March 31st, Gia Peralta came to our Bio Fitness class. She talked about many things, most of which were along the lines of what it is like to be an epidemiologist for the CDC. While she was here, she showed the class the slides she used for one of her presentations on a case she worked on. In those slides, you could really see the process they used for that particular case. If you break down that process in steps and compare them to the hero’s journey, you can see a lot that could relate to both. For example, her case was broken up into: something happens, trial and error in figuring out what is happening, figuring out how to stop and prevent it, then actually doing whatever needs to be done to stop and prevent it. These steps can be summed up in hero’s journey terms as Crisis, Call to Adventure, Trials, Result and Resolution.
The Crisis would be the time when all the people were being affected. The Call to Adventure would be when those people went to receive medical attention and the CDC got involved. The Trials would be when the CDC tries to figure out what is happening to these people, how did they get this, how to cure it, and how to prevent it. The Result is the final diagnosis and a plan in motion that is preventing it from spreading. And last, but not least, Resolution is how to prevent this from happening again and keeping the public healthy. For my oceanography art and research project my team mate, Gillian, and I made two separate paintings. I did a healthy coral reef and she did a dead coral reef after it had been affected by ocean acidification. For my final art piece, I painted a flourishing coral reef with sea animals around it. I covered the canvas with bright colors and made it full of plants and sea life. Our audience is the students in Napa Valley. They have not yet viewed our piece, due to it being a video. I will be putting the video up on here soon. This is my final watercolor painting: This is a simplified diagram of how ocean acidification works:
Due to a delay with receiving our materials I am currently not finished with my painting. At the moment I only have the base done but I still want to go in and add more detail, such as shadows and texture.
The process we are using for our art piece started with getting the materials. Next we watercolor paint the two canvases with the first one being a healthy flourishing reef and the second being the result of the long term damages of ocean acidification. After we have finished the paintings we will film us pouring a dark substance onto a pane of plexiglass that will be in front of the healthy coral reef painting. It is nice how the development of the paintings and the how they are turning out exceeded our expectations. I am hoping the audience will understand the overall message we are trying to convey with the art and how we are affecting global warming which as a side effect is triggering the ocean to become more acidic. We are incorporating our two focus points with population size and noticing the decrease of coral in the second painting compared to the first, and human relationships with ecosystems and seeing how we are at the root of this detrimental problem in our oceans. At the beginning of our oceanography project we had to choose two focus standards. The standards I chose were Population Size and Human Relationships with Ecosystems.
We are using Population Size by looking at the amount of healthy and the amount of bleached coral. We are also looking at how many other species are being harmed my ocean acidification. We are using Human Relationships with Ecosystems by looking at how we are influencing and tangled up this nation wide problem. The art piece my team would like to create for our Oceanography project will be a big watercolour painting of a coral reef or a underwater scene. It would be behind a sheet of glass or plastic which we would pour a brown or black substance onto. We will then pull the painting out from behind the poured on sheet of glass and show the audience how the ocean is being affected with this. We are going to videotape this process and show it as performance art.
The materials we need for this are: a large watercolour canvas, a sheet of glass or plastic the same size as the canvas, watercolour paint, corn starch, masking fluid, and round brushes ranging in size. Once we have all the supplies, it should only take us a couple weeks to finish the paintings and then we can start videotaping and editing. We would like to persuade the audience to help slow climate change and be more conscientious about how their actions can affect ocean acidification. We will do this by either performing a persuasive poem with our art or hitting them with the cold hard facts of the effects of climate change. Our topic for the Oceanography project is Climate Change and how it affects the ocean. The subtopic we chose to cover is ocean acidification, and the causes and consequences of climate change. This is detrimental because as our world heats up (roughly 1.4 degrees fahrenheit in the last century) heat waves and droughts will occur much more often and at higher levels as our seas will rise. As Carbon Dioxide is released from our atmosphere, the ocean’s pH levels will decrease. This topic is of importance because as this continues to happen the sea life and plants will soon die off.
We want to reach our community, classmates and administration in order to bring awareness to Napa County and help our environment. We want them to understand that the changes they can make in their daily lives can slow global warming and help save our oceans and the earth. Sources: earthobservatory.nasa.gov (global warming information) climatekids.nasa.gov (global warming information) |
Catagories
All
Archives
March 2020
|