Since I started junior year, I have felt like Harry Potter’s uncle. Not because I am fat and British, but because no matter what I do, I am always getting mail from schools! I can’t stop it, colleges are coming at me from every direction at every hour of the day. None of the emails I get really interest me. They all claim to be some liberal heaven with cutting edge everything and all of the diversity in the world. I’m not sure where I’d like to go to college. I want somewhere that allows me to feel like I am on a bustling, lively campus but also has beliefs in equitable education. I am not fond of the idea of sitting in a lecture hall with 500 students, even though I will probably need to be, so for now I’m looking into schools with a more “progressive” take on undergraduate learning.
My favorite schools so far have been UC Santa Cruz and Stanford. I love UCSC because I know I would be happy there. A lot of family lives in the area but I am a good distance from home, it’s on the beach but also in the forest, there is lots to do that doesn’t involve consumerism, and the school itself is beautiful. As for the education, they are split into colleges so it might not be as bad as, say, UCLA. It’s not very prestigious meaning the people there won’t be all from top SAT tutor, La Jolla type neighborhoods. It seems like an environment I would thrive in. However, if I were to get into Stanford, I would probably go there instead. I don’t like Palo Alto, my life would probably be much more study intensive, but the actual education would be much better. I really like that Stanford is a pioneer in teaching techniques like the 8 ways of thinking that they use instead of having general education classes. They find ways to make things interdisciplinary and then give each class some labels for which way they push a student to learn. By the time you graduate, you have to have taken one of each of these 8 ways. This means I would have more autonomy over what classes I take! I love having autonomy. It just worries me that I’d get too stressed out or be surrounded by people I can’t relate to. They do not have a very large Latino population, nor is the school inexpensive. I’d have to take lots of weekend trips back down to Santa Cruz!
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We watched a ted talk that connected the concepts of neuroplasticity and growth mindset. In my head, I had made connections between the two from the start, but the data on the subject was very interesting. The ted talk focused on using the word “yet” in classrooms. So instead of students failing, teachers would just say that they haven’t mastered a subject yet. This connects to neuroplasticity because instead of people giving up because they failed, they are rewarded for effort, strategy, and progress, all things that help to increase myelination of neural connections. By encouraging practice, teachers push the brain to perform the functions that actually promote learning.
This reminded me a lot of math class. In the HTHCV math program, they have always said, “Failure is just a first attempt in learning.” In freshman year, they actually eliminated grades because they believed that they were counterproductive. For students who are naturally, “intelligent”, and get straight As, they aren’t pushed to challenge themselves because they are already getting good grades. For students who struggle more with content, they aren’t pushed to get any better because they are discouraged by the Cs, Ds, or Fs on their report cards. I really liked the thinking behind this. Even though grades were eventually brought back they have always kept up the positive reinforcement and made sure that we focus on improving ourselves. This is why math is one of my favorite classes, because even when the content gets difficult, I know I will always have the support to build on those neural connections in my brain. After a long day of workshopping our social justice topics and launching the project, we got the chance to meet a panel of activists from all different fields. They introduced themselves and immediately I fell in love with Ms. Patricia. She represented, for the most part, exactly the kind of person I hope to grow up to be. She was intelligent, powerful, eloquent, and kick ass. She shared about her youth in South East San Diego and how she was exposed to many things that people in higher income neighborhoods never experience. This got her politically motivated and pushed her to become the executive director of the Sherman Heights community center. At the center, she devotes time to her community by teaching art and Chicano studies. As someone who is very passionate about the Ethnic Studies movement, it makes me so happy to hear that empowering leaders are sharing their knowledge with their community and helping people to uncover the strength of their roots. However, there was more to what made me love her. When the teachers asked what the activists do to take care of themselves, Ms. Patricia said that she plans days where all she does is sit on the couch from morning until night. She told us about how in order to continue the work without burning out, we need to heal ourselves. Otherwise, our problems will eventually catch up to us and we will end up unable to continue serving others. I consider myself an activist and I know that I have a very hard time with taking care of myself. Hearing this from her was very important to me because it showed me that even kick ass people take time to do the things that make them happy.
We were looking at a diagram of a brain. We all had to go up and label different parts and follow up with an explanation of what these different areas did. I had begun to build a deeper understanding of the lobes from our readings, both textbook and journals, but it was frustrating. It seemed like all anyone had to say about brain development was that teenagers make stupid decisions. Our most recent article, however, was a bit more hopeful. It was just a long list of different parts of the brain that explained all of the different functions. When we discussed it, however, we talked a lot about how brain development can change with trauma.
Things in the brain develop differently depending on the environment that a person is put in. If their social or basic needs are not met, or even if there are no adults around who push the development of frontal lobe skills (i.e. planning, goal setting, decision making, reflecting, etc.) then an adult can grow up and still have many qualities that the articles used to describe teens. This reminded me a lot of my brother. My brother grew up without a father in a home with a mom who had run away at the age of 12, struggling through the rest of her life on her own. He was often left alone, had a school that didn’t care about him, hung around people with similar stories of neglect, and ended up never really growing out of his teenage years. His mom experienced trauma, her frontal lobe skills never fully developed, so her son ended up experiencing the same thing. And my brother was white, so for many people this experience is doubled with the realities of racism. This showed me the necessity for teachers who challenge and accommodate students who have experienced trauma. Cycles of abuse and poverty will never change if there is no one there to break the cycle. This is why the idea that you can work for a better life is so wrong, because it does not account for the lifelong changes that can happen when growing up in poverty. I fell in love with the artwork hung on the museum’s walls not because it was particularly beautiful, but because it was powerful. The Museum of Contemporary Art’s current exhibition, “Memories of Underdevelopment” highlights the imperialism and westernization that burned throughout America Latina in the 1960s. I saw all sorts of different mediums used to display the hunger for freedom, true freedom, of artists, political activists, and average humans. But if I would have entered this room a year ago, I would have been bored. Many of the art pieces were letters or newspapers. Some were posters. There was an interesting piece that included a live anaconda. This is all I would have seen. In biology, I have developed an important skill: observation. In this case, it translated to visual literacy.
Visual literacy is when a person has the ability to gather visual evidence from an image and then translate it into a deeper meaning. For example, the art with the anaconda had little to do with reptiles. Below the snake was a map of South America, mainly focused around Chile. It was filled in with crayon, all warm colors, many of them reddish tones. Not knowing the full historical context, I was still able to make a few assumptions. There was some sort of predator that, like the anaconda, seemed to constrict Chile. With the previously described colors, I thought that because of this predator, Chile was pushed to become more communist. This was partially correct. It turned out that the predator was a copper mining company actually named Anaconda. The reddish tones were probably representative of the copper, but from what I know about Chile in the 60s, I think that the leftists usually came from those same mines. I wouldn’t have been anywhere close to understanding this, however, if it weren’t for our extensive work on observations in class. Thanks to biology, I was able to find evidence of what I was seeing, ask questions about it to understand deeper meanings, and draw conclusions based on those curiosities. Our class always finishes our “Meditation Monday” by reading a section of the book, “The Four Agreements”. We meditate to clear out all of our mind gunk and then read to fill the newly open spaces with ways to improve our lives. This week’s section just happened to be about how we often take things personally and/or victimize ourselves, a habit I had actually told my teachers in my POL that I wanted to change. The moral of the chapter was: Stop. This, funnily enough, actually “made me” feel offended. It felt like the author was attacking me and saying that I was the one doing everything wrong. I knew that his words had truth to them, but the whole thing felt impossible. I got to thinking about the concept and realized that one of the things that frustrated me the most was that I didn’t know why I was so sensitive in the first place.
As I went through our next activity, an article called, “The Pains and Pleasures of Social Life”, I found the answer I was looking for. Our brains actually interpret social pain the same way that they interpret physical pain. This developed because we need the help of others in order to maintain our basic means of survival, so our brain tries to keep us together. It gives us little reminders and hints to try and understand one another to make sure we keep our society from falling apart. It was important for me to figure this out because now that I am aware of the sense behind my sensitivity, I don’t have to blame myself for it. This was probably one of the things that made it so hard to give up. I now understand that I am not the victim, the things that people say and do have nothing to do with me, and neither does the high importance that my growing mind seems to put on it. So I can feel social pain, understand that it, and let it go. Next week, I hope to explore these concepts deeper so that I can begin to take on the task of being impeccable with these words and taking action. |
What is this?Hi everyone! This is my junior year blog. Here you will find weekly reflections up until the completion of my junior internship. I hope you enjoy this inside look on my learning! Archives
June 2018
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