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#the half essay is a group project and we made a lot of progress already
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Week 11: Monday - Tutor Group Meeting!! Yaaay!
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Diving straight into week 11 because week 10 is a blurr. After last Wednesday I know I did some chores and stuff off my to-do list but it's all a blur now and then I worked over the weekend. So Monday usually hits like a truck.
What I do remember from last week is ordering Tracing Paper and Carbon Paper on Ebay to make the transfer from sketch to Lino plate easier. I also ordered and collected 5 A3 lino boards from lcc at some point last week. It was heavy carrying it all the way back.
Alright so Monday and week 11 have come!
At the beginning of this group meeting we talked through the brief of the major project already, just so we've heard it officially at least once before the winter break. I had already printed and read the brief at the beginning of the year so this was just a nice refresher + some extra notes from Maisie, our group tutor, who has seen multiple years work on the major projects. So she has good tips and insights for us.
After that we were left to work on our projects while 3 people at a time would talk to Maisie about the progress we made with our projects. I was really nervous because with a lot of doctor and dentist visits + covid booster sickness + recent crying at the crit + last weeks crazy Tuesday night....it's just so much. And it left me feeling like a total useless slacker who doesn't even deserve to be here.
So yeah. I was anxious.
Maisie called Mia, myself and another member of our group who I don't know by name up first. Honestly the best thing that could have happened because if I was left alone with my thoughts again I would have probably freaked out again. So, the guy in our little group went first and I remembered him because of the presentation all of us gave a whiiiiile back on our project ideas. He is working on a single player table top game for people with severe social anxiety. I can somewhat relate. He has designed 15 cards already and the illustrations looked super good and the characters were very endearing! I would love to purchase his finished game honestly. You can tell he has spent a lot of time and love in developing every detail of it and it blows my mind he made a whole game by himself for this project! Truly original and amazing.
I also knew about Mia's project. Packaging design that caters to the blind consumer. Again, very original and out of the box thinking. I don't remember her showing any samples of her work but she was talking about doing lino cut instead of screen printing. She is also Route B in CTS which means instead of a loooong dissertation like me, she is working on yet another physical project and a shorter essay.
Then it came to me showing my progress and I was really nervous so I can't even remember half the stuff I said but Maisie was really nice and agreed with my work plan of finishing over winter break and printing first thing in January. She said that for the Lino cut prints I have to figure out how to make the characters stand out and pop. That was good feedback and I'm thinking about it a lot. I told her about thermo powders, Ellen mentioned to me, those could be applied to the ink after printing and give the whole image a nice shimmer.
Maisie also encouraged me to check out the 3D workshop area to make a quick wooden board I could put my lino board on while cutting. A little corner in the top of the board would hold the board in place, making the whole process safer.
After the group session Mia and I showed the guy (I REALLY WITH I KNEW HIS NAME AAAH) where the digital print and print finishing area is. Then I showed Mia our common room because turns out she never went there before. I delivered all zines, posters and post cards for the winter art fair here and Mia and I went to the 3D workshop together. Since we both are doing lino cut each of us needed a wooden board like Maisie suggested.
The technician was really nice and had a very calm demeanor. He cut some scraps for us and let us glue the corners to the boards. It took 30 minutes for the glue to dry during which Mia and I took a little lunch break in the cafeteria. It was nice catching up with her again.
The boards turned out nicely so we thanked the man who helped us and headed back home just as it got dark.
All in all a day full of productive and surprising turns.
Oh and I have bought new planner for 2023 and it's all blue and pretty!!
Things are looking up.
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doshmanziari · 3 years
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Musical Offerings for the New Year || What is “Radical Music” in 2021?
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Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s) and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. Since I have some tentative plans for reorienting Brick By Brick this year, while not overriding its emphases, I wanted to share that music with anyone who’s interested.
I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). If you care to, and are on a computer, you can also view the accompanying chatlog and read people’s responses from when they were listening to the live broadcast.
The compulsion for this project was sparked by excited discussions over and usage of the term “digital fusion”, most helpfully propagated by Aivi Tran, designating a computer-based body of work that for years lacked the rooftop of a commonly agreed upon genre-name. While describing my music has never been a big concern, even if it’s usually felt impossible (what, for example, is this? or this? I dunno!), I’ve appreciated how the spread and application of this term has brought together people who may have felt isolated.²
As “digital fusion” gained designative traction, I witnessed the activity in the aforementioned chatroom explode over the course of a few days. Before, a day’s discussion might’ve been a few dozen messages; now, there were dozens of messages every half-minute. This had positive and negative ramifications, the negative being that conversations often proceeded at a pace of rapidity which precluded concentrated thought. Eventually, I bowed out because the rapidity exceeded my threshold for meaningful interaction; but I was glad that significant invigoration was going on.
I wanted to share this music also because it intersects with thoughts and talks I’ve been having stemming from the question, “What is ‘radical music’ in 2021?” This was stimulated by a 2014 talk given by the writer Mark Fisher, wherein he contends that, were we to play prominent “cutting edge” music from now to people twenty years ago, very nearly none of it would be aesthetically shocking, bizarre, or revelatory (think of playing house music to an audience in the early 1960s!). Fisher also observes a trend of returning to music which once was seen as the future -- as if, deprived of a shared prograde vision, imaginations turn hazily retrograde; ergo, genres such as synthwave or albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.
It isn’t my goal here to argue about the “end of history.” Fisher’s time-travel hypothetical, however, rings loud and true to me. Visible musical radicalism has, for at least a decade, been strictly extra-musical, in the sense of songs like “This is America” or “WAP”, where one’s response is primarily to the spectacle of the music video, the performer’s identistic markers, and/or the manner in which the lyrics intersect with (mostly US-centric) ideological hotspots. Musically, there is really nothing radical here. Any vociferous condemnations or defenses of a song like “WAP” deal in moralizing reactions to semantics or imagery: how progressive or regressive is the political aspect? how propelled or repelled are we by the word “pussy”?
It would be a mistake, and simply wrong, to assert that the only music one can enjoy escapes the parameters outlined above; and my inability to coherently categorize some of my own music hardly raises that portion to the status of radicality. But the question here pertains to what is being made, and I think that if we’re going to seriously consider the nature of truly radical music today, we do need to question if such a quality can prominently exist when our hyper-fast consumerist cycle seems to forbid not just sustained, lifelong relationships to artwork but also the local, unhurried nourishment of creative gestation. Now, in my opinion, there are good, even great, examples of radical music still being made in deep Internet-burrows, and for evidence of that I would offer some of the material contained in the linked playlists. Moreover, I’d say that this quality can exist in part because these little artistic communities are so buried.
Let me share a quote that another person shared with me recently:
For culture to shift, you need pockets of isolated humanity. Since all pockets of humanity (outside of the perpetually isolated indigenous people in remote wilderness) are connected in instantaneous fashion, independent ideas aren’t allowed to ferment on their own. When you cook a meal, you have to bring ingredients together that have had time to grow, ferment, or decompose separately. A cucumber starts out as a seed, then you mix it with the soil, water and sunlight. You can’t bring the seed, soil, water and sunlight to the kitchen from the get-go. When you throw those things in to the mixture without letting them mature, the flavor cannot stand out on its own. Same thing with art and fashion. A kid in Russia can come up with a new way to dance, gets filmed on a phone, it goes viral quickly but gets lost in the morass of all of the other multitudinous forms of dance. Sure it spread far and wide, but it gets forgotten in a week. In the past, his new art form would have been confined locally, nurtured, honed, then spread geographically, creating a distinct new cultural idiosyncrasy with a strong support base. By the time it was big enough to be presented globally, it was already a cultural phenomenon locally. This isn’t possible anymore. We’re consuming too many unripened fruits.
The main impression I have here is that radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace. This transcends a dependence upon image, the primacy of acoustic instrumentation, or the signaling of sincerity versus insincerity. It is a return to the valuation of outsider art, so rare nowadays. As someone who I was recently in dialogue with wrote, “Where can you find new genuine folk music? Pretty much just with your friends, imo. Even then, the global world is so influential and seeps into any crack it can find. I think vaporwave was radical and folk for a while. Grant Forbes made that music way before the world knew about it.”
Sometimes, a lot of fuss is made over what’s seen as “gatekeeping” within certain communities. It can be, depending on the context, justifiable to question and critique this behavior. At other times, the effort of maintaining a level of exclusivity, of retaining an idiosyncratic shapeliness to the communal organism, can be a legitimate attempt to protect the personal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects from the flattening effect of monoculture. Hypothetically, I welcome the Castlevania TV series and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate having introduced new and younger demographics to Castlevania. In actuality, stuff like “wholesome sad gay himbo Alucard”, image macros, and neurotic “stan” fanfiction being what’s now first associated with the series makes me want to put as much distance as possible between my interests and those latecoming impositions.
The group-terminology David Chapman uses in his essay “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” is kinda cringey, but some of the cultural/behavioral patterns he lays out are relevant to the topic. Give it a look. If we cross his belief that “[subcultures] are no longer the primary drivers of cultural development” with our contemporary consume-and-dispose customs, we’re left with the predicament of it’s even worth attempting to bring radical/outsider art beyond its rhizomatic habitat. This is troubling, because it would mean that artistic radicality no longer might not only refuse to but cannot encompass cultural upheaval. It would be like if dance music were invented and -- instead of progressively permeating nightlife, stimulating countercultural trends, and ultimately being adapted as the basis for pop music globally -- only were listened to via headphones by a few thousand people on their own, stimulated a group meeting once a year or two, and never affected music beyond a niche-within-a-niche. That’s a very sad picture to me.
¹ Chimeratio has also maintained an excellent blog on here dedicated to looking at videogame music written in irregular time signatures, far preceding higher-profile examinations like 8-bit Music Theory’s video on the same topic.
² For myself, creative isolation has had its uses, because it has led me down routes that are highly personalized. The isolation can be dispiriting too. Although a lot of my music is videogame-music-adjacent, almost none of it uses “authentic” technology, such as PSG synthesizers or FM synthesis; and the identification of those sounds is fairly important for recognition.
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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years
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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT CIRCLE
It's hard to think of startup ideas. If this is true it has interesting implications, because discipline can be cultivated. Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world, and this is easier for writers as well as readers. That means they want less money, but also that there are more and more valuable. When they go to VC firms. Anyone can see they're not the target market. If that's true, most startups that turn down acquisition offers is not necessarily that all such offers undervalue startups. That will change the atmosphere, and not before. The time required to raise money. Whoever the next Google is, they're probably going to have to be at the mercy of their own imagination. About 20% of the startups from preventable deaths.
Investors collude. If you look at the instruments. I didn't make a lot of time on the software. One could do a lot better for a lot of investors will reject you in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I said in the second version, why didn't I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? It's equivalent to asking how to make a difference. A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. Angels can take greater risks because they don't have to look for things that seem completely unrelated, like social networking apps. It's supposed to mean that a deal is going to be. Distinguishing between wise and smart is a modern habit. Dropbox: an SAT prep startup.
Philip Greenspun said in Founders at Work that Ars Digita's VCs did this to them. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb. But neither should you let them run the company. Another drawback of large investments is the time they take. There do not seem to be superficial reasons. In the time of Confucius and Socrates, wisdom, virtue, and happiness were necessarily related. If you run out of money, you have to figure out what you'd need to reproduce Silicon Valley. I would guess that practically every Stanford or Berkeley undergrad who knows how to program has at least considered the idea of starting a startup means the average good bet is a riskier one, but most can upload a file. What surprised me was their reaction when I called to talk about buying you. If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's not the deciding factor. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. To evaluate whether your startup is worth investing in.
I decided the critical ingredients were rich people and nerds—investors and founders. It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users. Google's founders were willing to fund teams of MBAs who planned to outsource their product development—which to my mind is actually a lot riskier than investing in a pair of 18 year old hackers, no matter how finished you thought it was important for a founder to be an expert in business. A termsheet is not legally binding, but it is a definite step. There seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be the first to switch to it. And yet when they started the company. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural. That may not be possible to do that completely. One of the two founders was still in grad school, but we're focusing on growing the company. But coming up with startup ideas is to work on a recipe site. This is one of the people who are committed enough to prefer that, and c only hire people who are committed enough to prefer that, and c only hire people who are really good at acting formidable often solve this problem by giving investors the impression that while no investors have committed yet, several are about to.
But I've proposed to several VC firms that they set aside some money and designate one partner to make more, smaller bets, and they bounced back. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. Reading Fred's post made me go back and figure out if they were returning to work after a months-long illness. You could replace high schools too, but there are signs it might be as much as a half. You generally shouldn't pass up a definite funding offer to move. Start a company? But there are limits to how well you answer their questions. A good deal of willfulness must be inborn, because it's common to see families where one sibling has much more of it than another.
Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have a qualification appended: at games that change slowly. I don't know exactly what the future will look like, but I'm British by birth. No amount of discipline can replace genuine curiosity. Now I would guess that practically every Stanford or Berkeley undergrad who knows how to program has at least considered the idea of switching seems thinkable to me. You have to be generated by software, so we wrote some. The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years, then switches polarity? This leads to the phenomenon known in the Valley as the hot deal, where you can assume that if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, a working prototype; if you win an Olympic gold medal, you can be wise without being very smart. Judging startups is hard even for the most successful of that group by an order of magnitude larger than the number who want it, not how to convert that wealth into money. To count as research, the less likely it is to be something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would be an amazing hack. You're all smart and working on promising ideas. Something that curtly contradicts one's beliefs can be hard to sell. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.
As I was leaving I offered it to him, as I've done countless times before in the same spirit. In a sense there's just one point, you don't really understand them. They insist on it. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Corporate Development, aka corp dev, ask yourselves, Do we want to keep in close touch as you develop it further. And not just because we make small investments; many have gone on to raise further rounds. VCs: How would you like a job where you never got to make anything, but instead ask do we suck? They say Yeah, maybe I could see myself—making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.
Considering how basic a red circle is, it seemed surprising to me when we started YC. The last one might be the most progressive. You can't use euphemisms like didn't go anywhere for something that's your only occupation. One Canadian startup we funded could appear in a Newsweek article describing them as the next generation of billionaires, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head. After they merged with X. So here's the recipe for impressing investors when you're not already good at seeming formidable the first time in history they're no longer getting the best people. I mean truly evaluate whether your startup is worth investing in, rather than whether it's going to take, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. The only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups.
Thanks to Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, the founders of Zenter, and Justin Kan for smelling so good.
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livingbutamireally · 3 years
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AY2020/2021 Y2S1 Module Reviews
This semester proved to be a pain as expected. Said pain coming mostly from BT2101 and CS2030. Everything was conducted online with the exception of the weekly lab sessions for CS2030 so I only had to go to school for 1 day. F2F CS2030 recitations were optional so I gave up and just watched the recorded zoom session instead of going to school just for a class half way through the semester. I usually miss the live zoom sessions because mine was at 1pm and I am almost always still having lunch at that time and not ready at all. Also i missed about half of my BT2102 tutorials because I simply forgot I had tutorials at that time (2-4pm). They still awarded me nicely for participation much to my surprise (7/10).
BT2101 Decision Making Methods and Tools
BT2102 Data Management and Visualisation
CS2030 Programming Methodology II
GEQ1000 Asking Questions
IS1103 Ethics in Computing
CS2030: Programming Methodology II in Java
Prof: Dr Henry Chia, A.P. Terrence Sim
Weightage:
Weekly labs (5%)
Individual project (15%)
Practical assessment #1 in week 7 (15%)
Practical assessment #2 in week 12 (20%)
Class participation (5%) : includes lab participation, piazza discussions and peer learning activities
Final exam (40%)
CS2030 proved to be intensive not only in the aspect of planning code design but also the actual implementation itself.. (thinking about how to solve the problem and/or get the expected outputs)..  Really struggled my way through the start although that really was only the tip of the iceberg because I had no prior experience in Java and the introductory Winter Workshops were reserved exclusively for freshmen or I missed the deadlines can’t remember.. The first few lectures got us familiar with Java Programming before diving deep into Functional Programming which is a lot harder to grasp vs Object-Oriented Programming which was introduced to us in CS1010S already. The hardest part comes with Streams but honestly after learning streams so many processes can be coded so much more efficiently as compared to OOP, really simplifies some of the tasks when using FP rather than OOP. Interesting to note that this streams part ties in well with BT2102′s coding part where we learnt aggregation pipelines in MongoDB and MySQL i believe the concepts felt similar??
Weekly Labs
Pretty manageable imo , compared to the project ofc (rolls eyes)
This semester they changed things up a bit and shifted all the weekly labs deadlines to finals so we had more control in terms of time management and our progress in the labs. Naturally we are expected to do them every week but say we are busy in a certain week for other modules we can always come back on another. I was always behind by like a month compared to my friends who were more on task.
Individual Project
Project part 1 was still okay for the Discrete Event Simulator (DES) basically designing a system for customers to queue and be served and recording the relevant work done at the appropriate times using OOP.
The hardest part was project part 2 where you had to rewrite the whole chunk in part 1 FP style and also they added a lot of more complex simulations and cases which I really just gave up entirely after completing level 2.
It was so hard it was traumatic. Level 3 had something to do with importing a random number generator and the test cases only get more confusing and long i just really had no brain cells left for the work worth only 7% before deducting late submissions penalty (bc brain slow LOL) and the code design criteria and checkstyles. I was so mad that it takes up so much time and effort just to be worth a petty 7% that I gave up entirely didnt even finish reading the questions (which was also pretty darn long). Sorry i am dumb. Please be proud of me I am trying my best.
I have zero idea who in the department decided to rig the difficulty of this project by so much up compared to previous semesters. They really expected too much out of us i am so sorry to disappoint.
Practical Assessments 
Basically similar to weekly lab exercises but you have to do it within the time frame during a lab session. You get to take home and re-edit the code to get the full marks and are moderated according to the changes you made compared to the one submitted during the PA itself. That also means if you do not submit the correct full marks version of the code in a week, you do not get moderated and will be awarded with the marks scored in lab which is obviously 0 for me I had over 70 compilation errors and you might be thinking how. But trust me i am too, confused how. Most people will score around 0-2m in lab but taking it home and refining the whole code with minimal changes and will be graded according to the amount of changes made to get the final code. Tests you how close you can get to the correct outputs within the time frame whether you already had it in your head.
Final Exam
Comes in MCQs, a few case questions consisting of subparts if i remembered correctly some of which required you to write out a possible code (2-3 lines) converting oop to streams, synchronous to asynchronous etc. There are plenty resources (pyps) floating around in the gc so you can use them well for revision.
Theoretical content was tested i dont really know how to put in words but you may be able to code well even though you may have some of the concepts wrong
We only did pure coding work in labs, projects and practical assessments so this really reinforces your understanding of the material
Considering I didnt finish project part 2 this is quite a decent grade already really thankful i dont have to go through this ordeal again. See you never.
BT2101: Decision Making Methods and Tools
Professor: Rudy Sentiono, A.P. Huang Zhiyong
Weightage:
Group project (20%)
Written assignments - 3x 5% (15%)
Tutorial participation (5%)
Midterm - open book (20%)
Finals - open book (40%)
This is the second module that I have been struggling with since the start of the semester. Tutor changed after the first session, the former tutor was much better and clearer in her explanations. This is quite a math-intensive course and requires some knowledge of linear algrebra and thus the pre-requisities. Maths has never been my strong suit (well except in primary school) so I struggled hard with this module. Nearing the end we learnt about deep learning neural networks which was pretty interesting and really broadened my perspectives on the future of machine learning. The pace was okay, but the lecturer seems to just repeat the words on the lecture slides in his lectures. The lectures were seemingly simplified from the reference texts he used but is nevertheless still daunting to look at to revise. Project was a 4-5 people groupwork where we had to conduct all the stages of data analytics from data exploration, cleaning of data to data mining, conclusions etc. There were an additional 3 assignments that we had to do together with our groupmates by the stipulated deadlines. This module requires a lot of work and preparation. Am glad to be able to pass.
BT2102: Data Management and Visualisation
Weightage:
Assignment 1 (Group):  25 marks
Assignment 2 (Individual): 35 marks
Assignment 3 (Group):  30 marks
Class Participation: 10 marks (Participation in Tutorials and Group Assignment Discussions)
IS1103: Ethics in Computing
Weightage:
FPAQ (50%)
Missions (50%)
Expected Grade: B+
Final Grade: A-
For this module, all 13 missions are to be done by the last date of submission for finals which was a 300 question quiz held on LumiNUS. Missions are assigned weekly where we go to the WordPress website the professor has built, a server that he regularly does maintenance on and in it he uses a tracker to track our progress through clicking links and submitting short answer questions sometimes. Most of them were done by clicking of links and we were told to disable our Adblockers if any to prevent interruptions or his system not capturing our data. We were encouraged to do it weekly although the deadline was the end of the semester. One of the missions included us doing some Linux practice penetration questions on Kali, it was a bit tough but other than that the other missions were pretty simple and straightforward. After every mission done we were to do a practice PAQ which is not graded and upon submission would give us the model answers to study in preparation for FPAQ the final week submission. PAQ consists of 5 themes * 7 questions = 35 questions, whereas FPAQ has 300 over questions to be done over the span of a week, the reading week. Carpal tunnel.
GEQ1000: Asking Questions
Weightage: 
Tutorial attendance/participation (36%)
Forum participation - forum 1 and 2 (14%)
MCQ quiz (36%)
Final paper (14%)
This is a general education module everyone in NUS is required to take. I dont think I learned much so I am really only there to go through the motion. There are a few pillars that the department touches on mainly Physics, Engineering, Design, etc to show how the different disciplinary courses are interconnected and how/why is questioning important. Really low maintenance course, we do a 6 or 10 MCQ quiz every week prior to the lecture for that pillar. Tutorial was online via zoom and really low workload in general. Final week was on design and we had to make a wallet for our partner and explain why or how we chose the designs, and also submitting a word essay on our reflections of things we learned.
Update. I only pray to hover above or maintain at this current CAP lemao PLEASE YOU NEED TO
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cosmosogler · 7 years
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today i got almost everything done!
my mother woke me up at about 5:45, and then again at 6:20. i was super angry. then my brother and sister were in both the upstairs bathrooms so i had to go all the way downstairs and across the house just to go to the bathroom before i went back to sleep.
i dreamed that i was getting annoyed with a conspiracy theorist. “video games are downloading scientific theories into your brain!!!” it was the science that scared them apparently. and the computers. the person wasn’t even present, i was just hearing their voice as i played dream mario, which is only slightly like nintendo mario. i told the voice that video games are just another way to tell a story. i pulled a children’s book out of somewhere, i think it was “goodnight moon” actually. except the cover was wrong. but i was telling the voice that there wasn’t nothin wrong with telling a cute or simple story.
sometimes the story is “i got really good at jumping over hills and across floating spinners and on turtles.”
i only put on the snooze for five minutes because i really, REALLY didn’t want to get up with less than like seven and a half hours of sleep. i got up anyway and showered. i didn’t get to spend long in the shower though... i really need to shave but i haven’t had much time at all the last five, seven days. i shower every other day since it’s a little better for your hair and skin...
anyway as i was heading out to go to therapy dad decided to start asking me to do some chores. i sort of started one, i let eve outside, but i seriously didn’t have time to wait for her to take a sunbath and let her back in. then someone (not naming names, because i’m not 100% sure) decided to park their car in a way that made it impossible for me to pull out of the garage. so i had to go back inside, get that car’s key, move it to the other side of the driveway, go back inside to drop off that key, and then i could get in “my” car and get going. then people on the freeway kept cutting me off without using their turn signals and also were generally going below the speed limit so i would have to stand on the brakes. this happened more than once. then i almost hit someone trying to get over to the exit because as i passed them apparently they sped up while passing through my blind spot so they were farther up than i thought they would be when i started changing lanes. cool!!!!!!!!
in individual therapy i brought up a bunch of emotional problems i had started to explore a little bit in group therapy. i ended up talking for the whole 45 minutes straight basically. like, my therapist asked a few questions, and reassured me a few times, but it was like a huge information dump so hopefully in the coming weeks i can start addressing each problem individually. i also got my semester refund paperwork sorted out with her. i’ll be able to pick it up next week. i mostly focused on how none of my problems feel “big enough” unless they are unsolvable since i really didn’t get to talk about it in group yesterday. i said one thing that i kind of liked though. i said “i feel like if i didn’t have so many problems, i wouldn’t have so many problems.” 
what i meant to say was “if i didn’t have so many mental and personality problems, i wouldn’t have so many life problems,” but the vagueness was silly enough that my therapist made a face and laughed. i said i didn’t know what to focus on first and she said “you’re already working on everything.” i had listed the multiple projects i am trying to keep up with therapy wise... i dunno. i feel like if i can get over that big “problems have to be impossible” hurdle things will start feeling a little more manageable and i’ll be able to make progress more quickly.
guess i gotta spend more time thinking about that. i’ll keep you posted as things come up.
after that i picked up my paperwork from my physician’s office since i was on that side of town and got the number for the radiology lab that wants to do the last test. when i got home i shoved some leftovers in the microwave and called the lab and scheduled my “hida scan,” which is a gall bladder test i guess where they put a bunch of glowing stuff through your digestive system and see if it goes through normally. the scheduler said it normally takes two hours unless they find something, in which case it will take longer. luckily my next therapy appointment is 4 hours after my procedure... i hope that will give enough time. i will have to let her know. i definitely wouldn’t be able to do it on a group therapy day and the lady seemed pretty keen on doing it as soon as possible. and i can’t do it in the afternoon in case it goes long and dad isn’t able to get to work.
so 8 am next tuesday it is.
so i had my ravioli and went upstairs and then after a short break i watched the iron giant with oz. the movie is even better than i remembered. then we talked about physics stuff while i worked on gathering study materials with my classmates. i had a great time, and i hope oz did too. it felt nice to do an activity with someone that took up all our attention, so i didn’t have to, like, feel self conscious about not baring my soul or something.
i think when asher gets back i will talk to him about maybe spending an afternoon at the pottery lounge thing by the amc. it’s not cheap, but last time i checked i didn’t think it was too expensive at least. and i still have the ceramic dog i painted like 15 years ago so the stuff lasts. basically you pick out a little ceramic statue and you get to paint it using a selection from like 200 different shades. and i think you can stay as long as it takes to paint it. the smaller stuff wasn’t too bad cost-wise.
got sidetracked. after i hung up with oz and got all my emails and google docs in order i went and got groceries for mom. she was making quesadillas for dinner. i unfortunately had to pay for them with my own money, and it felt weird buying meat after all these years. but i guess i buy dog treats often enough that it’s not really, like, a compromise of my morals or something. i noticed that the dogs really went wild over the chicken strips i bought last time, so i tried to expand to “turducken.” (spoiler: they loved those too.)
so i dropped off the vegetables and stuff with mom, checked on the cactus mouse, and watched a couple of the videos i had loaded up while talking to oz. i try not to spend too much time reading or watching videos while talking to people because i get super focused on what i’m looking at and don’t hear what they say any more haha.
then i went downstairs and had my veggie quesadilla. it was... ok. i was still a little hungry afterward, but i also felt kind of ill so i didn’t want to eat any more. eating with mom was the WORST. she breathes loud and chews with her mouth open so it’s just a constant avalanche of awful squishy mouth noises. it made me so angry and annoyed that i think that’s what made me sick more than the food. i kind of abruptly stood up and put my plate away and took the dogs outside after trying out the new treats. i tried to play fetch with wiley but he was having none of it today. which is very odd... maybe it was just too hot for him to want to run around. 
i have been experiencing kind of horrible pain between my shoulder blades. i’m pretty sure it’s not my bra pinching anything because it’s way above the strap... probably a pinched nerve. i tried stretching my arms and shoulders and that seemed to help a lot, so i’m thinking i slept in a bad position.
then i went back upstairs and whined to myself about my therapy homework. i did more “self care” research and added a few more posts to my queue. and i talked with some discord guys a little bit. then i caught up on my self esteem journal and picked out one of my “short term goals” from my hospital-issued treatment plan. i used that as a base to expand on for my goal worksheet. i finished all that around 11 so then i got started on the owl picture for 40 minutes or so. now i am 35 minutes into my journal entry, which puts me at a comfortable time to finish up and try to sleep. i got another 10 minutes before i hit my target “get ready for bed” time.
my group mates and therapist expressed interest when i let slip that i like to draw on monday. the therapist asked what i draw. i wasn’t sure how to answer... “furries” isn’t really something i wanted to get into. and i haven’t drawn my own characters except for a reference for one of the art trades in a long time. i suppose i should post the uncolored version of that since i scanned it in and haven’t worked on it with the tablet yet.
so i just said “characters and people.” i like landscapes, but i have trouble spending enough time on them to really get into the details. i’m hoping the coloring pages will help loosen up my patience so i might start feeling like spending a million hours on one picture again. it’s been a couple years since i did anything complicated.
i’m thinking about maybe taking my sketch book... but i don’t want to spend a lot of time on explaining what the picture is of when i have more urgent things to work on.
tomorrow i have more things to do! i NEED to work on the welcome packet for ufl. i need to scan in a bunch of stuff, like my immunization records and my doctors’ notes for my refund file. i need to send an email to the preliminary test coordinator to figure out how to proceed with my studying... i need to know how much to panic about this. then after group therapy i need to drop off my sister’s old prescriptions at the police station. that won’t take too long. if i got energy i’d like to organize my desk and maybe also tidy up my room a little bit. write some things down to put in the jar. then i will work on my self esteem journal, continue reading through the self care resources i’ve got open in a million tabs, and work on the coloring page a little bit. that sounds good. and at some point i need to write my 1- to 2-paragraph essay for the refund. and also i gotta email my apartment complex about stuff like the bed size and some cupboard dimensions and whether there’s a microwave and stuff like that. some of those things i’m pretty sure i can just look up somewhere.
i think i can manage those things. the student orientation videos might have to wait until thursday but i can compile the paperwork and read the faqs and stuff. none of these tasks take long by themselves. so as long as i remember to take little breaks and stay motivated i think i can get it done and not have to worry about it so much any more.
ok, it is 12:30, which is only 5 minutes after my target time! i’m gonna do the daily pokemon stuff for 2-3 minutes and then get ready for bed. gotta practice giving myself credit for reaching/working on goals and stuff, even when i don’t want to.
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in this essay, we shall have a look at an example of an essay on George Washington’s Papers theme
in this essay, we shall have a look at an example of an essay on George Washington’s Papers theme
George Washington both produced and received a big quantity of letters, papers, records, and records during their life time. Washington ended up being conscious of his unique destination into the growth of the usa so that as a famed and beloved leader that is military statesman, and ended up being cognizant that their documents could be of great interest to future visitors. The papers that survive today can be found due to the care that Washington took during their life time, inspite of the often careless and destructive management that they encountered after their death.
During Washington’s lifetime Washington ended up being careful using the care and organization of their documents. At various points in their life, Washington created page publications (bound volumes with copies of their outgoing and incoming letters), utilized a letterpress (a tool that made direct copies of writing by lifting a number of the ink through the web page), and also edited their copies of a few of their very very early letters, smoothing grammar and term choice. In addition, throughout their life he hired secretaries, aides-de-camp, clerks, and copyists to help.
As soon as 1775 throughout the American Revolution, Washington held the security of their papers at Mount Vernon 2nd simply to the security of their spouse, Martha Washington. George Washington instructed their cousin Lund Washington to present “for her in Alexandria, or other host to safety he was creating grew, Washington was concerned for their care, once sending them to Congress in Philadelphia for safekeeping for her and my Papers.” 1 As the Revolutionary War progressed and the volume of papers. In 1781 he asked Congress and had been allowed to employ an united group of clerks to transcribe and arrange their letters. Upon their come back to Mount Vernon following the pugilative war, he hoped “to overhaul & adjust all my documents.” 2
As President, Washington and his staff produced papers that are many. Whenever their term that is second was, Washington had their secretaries take away the papers their successor would want and had them pack the others to deliver to Mount Vernon. During their your your retirement, Washington penned which he had dedicated their infrequent free time “to your arrangement, and overhaul of my voluminous Public Papers—Civil & Military—that, they might get into protected deposits.” 3
Washington additionally planned to erect a building at Mount Vernon specially to keep their documents. The building had not been built by the time of their death. Also in the final day’s his life, Washington focused on their documents. Their buddy and longtime secretary Tobias Lear recorded that, hours before their death, Washington told him, “we find i’m going, my breath cannot continue long. . . can you arrange & record all my belated armed forces letters & papers—arrange my records & settle my books.” 4
A U.S. Supreme Court justice after Washington’s Death In his will, Washington bequeathed all his civil and military papers, as well as his ” private Papers as are worth preserving,” to his nephew Bushrod Washington. 5 within the months after George Washington’s death, Tobias Lear arranged the papers into the previous president’s workplace. It could happen at that time that Martha Washington removed and burned her communication with her spouse. Immediately pay for essay after Bushrod Washington permitted Chief Justice John Marshall to simply just take a number of the documents to Richmond while Marshall composed a biography associated with president that is first. Marshall, nonetheless, would not constantly just just take care that is sufficient of documents. As Justice Washington later noted, “the papers provided for the main Justice . . . are extremely extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise hurt by moist.” 6
As well as Marshall’s bad stewardship, Bushrod Washington permitted a few people—including the Marquis de Lafayette and James Madison—to remove their correspondence because of the belated president. Justice Washington additionally passed down autographs along with other favors through the documents as souvenirs to prefer seekers. He permitted William Sprague, their nephews’ tutor, to eliminate a lot more than 1,500 letters regarding the stipulation he keep copies inside their destination.
In 1827, Bushrod Washington gave editor Jared Sparks permission to publish some of Washington’s papers january.
During their work, Sparks relocated a number of the documents to Boston and he visited repositories both in the usa and Europe to find letters and papers perhaps perhaps perhaps not represented in Washington’s very very own documents. Unfortuitously he had been additionally free with offering favors of Washington’s handwriting.
Whenever Bushrod Washington passed away in 1829, he left George Washington’s documents to their nephew George Corbin Washington, a Maryland congressman. George Corbin Washington quickly relocated the documents that stayed at Mount Vernon to their workplace in Georgetown. Government officers had usually consulted Washington’s documents, plus in 1833 George Corbin Washington consented to offer the documents into the State Department, excepting people he regarded as being personal. In 1849 he offered the personal papers since well. The Washington documents stayed during the State dept. until 1904, if they were turned up to the Library of Congress. Copies of Washington documents off their repositories plus some originals have already been included with the collection throughout the full years since the collection took possession. In 1964 the Library of Congress circulated a reproduction associated with documents on microfilm, plus in 1998 it posted electronic pictures for the documents obtained from the microfilm on its internet site.
Posting the Papers Jared Sparks’ The Writings of George Washington had been posted in eleven volumes between 1833 and 1837.
Sparks edited Washington’s terms heavily, changing spelling, sentence structure, phrasing, and also at times whole sentences. From 1889 to 1893, historian Worthington Chauncey Ford published a fourteen-volume group of the Writings of George Washington. Later on, John C. Fitzpatrick ready thirty-nine volumes of this Writings of George Washington Through the Original Manuscript Sources (1931–1944) being a right component associated with united states of america George Washington Bicentennial Commission.
But, no comprehensive or completely annotated form of Washington’s documents had been attempted through to the development associated with the Papers of George Washington task in 1968. Sponsored because of the University of Virginia while the Mount Vernon women Association and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities therefore the nationwide Historical Publications and Records Commission, the editors and staff procured a lot more than 135,000 copies of Washington papers from repositories global. Within their search they included not just letters compiled by George Washington, but additionally letters to him, papers, diaries, and economic documents. Approximately half of these papers come from the Library of Congress’ Washington Papers collection.
at the beginning of the task the employees split the task into a couple of diaries and five series that is chronological of: Colonial, Revolutionary War, Confederation, Presidential, and pension, that have been posted simultaneously (63 volumes up to now). The 2 series that is largest, Revolutionary War and Presidential, will always be in manufacturing, by having a projected twenty-four more volumes to get. The George Washington Papers Digital Edition, developed by the Papers staff and University of Virginia’s electronic imprint, Rotunda, was released in 2006.
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bisoroblog · 5 years
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How Mastery-Based Learning Can Help Students of Every Background Succeed
NEW YORK — At New York City’s Urban Assembly Maker Academy high school in lower Manhattan, two things immediately stand out. First, its teachers are rarely standing at the front of the classroom dispensing facts and figures for students to dutifully transcribe. Instead, they’re constantly on the move, going from table to table facilitating group discussions and providing feedback as students work. Second, the students reflect the racial diversity of the city. Within one of the nation’s most segregated school systems, Maker Academy has attracted a mix of black, Latino, white and Asian students in which no single group makes up less than 10 percent or more than 46 percent of the population.
“This is the most diverse school that I’ve ever been a part of in my 15 years in education,” says school principal Luke Bauer. “We have kids from the projects and kids who take Ubers.”
The school’s leaders made diversity a priority before it even opened five years ago, Bauer says, when they chose not to use grades or test scores as admissions criteria. They also embraced a nontraditional educational model. Like a growing number of schools around the country, Maker Academy uses a mastery-based learning model, in which static letter grades on one-off tests and assignments are jettisoned in favor of detailed feedback that students use to revise their work as they progress toward mastery of clearly defined skills. Instead of receiving a C grade on an essay, for example, a student’s evaluation may include a 1 out of 4 in reasoning, a 2 out of 4 in evidence and a 3 out of 4 in communication, with an opportunity to submit additional drafts throughout the semester.
The results are promising. The school saw 90 percent of its inaugural class graduate in 2018  while surpassing the citywide average in measures of college readiness. It ranks high on the education department’s annual school quality surveys, and it’s becoming increasingly attractive to families, with five times more applicants than seats available, according to the most recent city data.
With 1.1 million students in 1,800 schools, New York City’s school system is the largest in the country. By the city’s own count, roughly 70 percent of its schools are segregated by race and income. The result is essentially a two-tiered system of public education — academically thriving schools for students from white and affluent families, and underperforming schools that almost exclusively serve black and Latino students from low-income families.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, have made racial and socioeconomic equity a priority. A panel commissioned by the mayor recently released a report calling for schools to mirror the demographics of their surrounding neighborhoods and to implement principles of culturally responsive education as a way to combat the city’s persistent achievement gap. At Maker Academy and about three dozen other mastery-based schools in the city, culturally responsive teaching practices are already taking root. These schools are also among the most diverse in the city.
Maker Academy teacher Gerry Irrizary works with students in his Design Principles class. (Amadou Diallo for The Hechinger Report)
Yet support for these schools within the education department has been lukewarm. A small division that has served as a conduit for sharing information and best practices among the mastery-based schools is now down to a two-person staff, as department resources have shifted to more publicized efforts like a $23 million-dollar anti-bias training program for teachers. This may be a missed opportunity. While mastery-based learning isn’t explicitly linked to racial or economic equity, education experts say that any school willing to make the leap from traditional grades to a complex rubric of individualized student assessments most likely already has supports in place to tackle the difficult, messy work they say is necessary to ensure that children of every background can succeed.
“From the minute we opened we had a very diverse population and we needed to navigate that,” says Danielle Salzberg, principal of Frank McCourt High School, on the Upper West Side, which opened in 2010. “Kids come with different educational backgrounds … different socioeconomic backgrounds. We opened our doors fully aware that we were going to be meeting different kids’ needs in different kinds of ways.”
To meet those needs, Salzberg and her team turned to a mastery-based model.
“It’s the best way to provide feedback to students that allows them to understand themselves and be empowered as learners,” Salzberg says. “We focus a lot on student engagement. What are we doing to challenge their thinking and not just have them be compliant?”
The school is thriving. With 20 percent of its 400-plus students diagnosed with a learning disability and about half of its kids coming from families in economic need, McCourt nonetheless outperforms citywide averages on state-mandated Regents exams, graduation rates and postsecondary enrollment. Students describe the school as offering a much different experience than what they were used to.
“This school wasn’t my first choice, so I didn’t have big expectations,” says college-bound senior Kendra Castro. What Kendra found once she arrived was a deeper level of student-teacher interaction than at her previous schools. A typical class may begin with the instructor in “teacher mode,” going over the day’s agenda for a few minutes, but the rest of the time is spent engaging directly with students as they work, providing feedback and support.
“When kids struggle, teachers go to them,” she says. “Math especially can be hard for people. Here I’ve seen people struggle with it, but never for the whole semester.”
Support extends beyond teacher interventions. With a schoolwide emphasis on working in groups, students’ most-used academic resources are often their peers.
“In middle school we always did work as an individual,” says Rosalia Minyeti, an 11th-grader from the Bronx who found the adjustment challenging. “I didn’t like working in groups at first. But then, in classes where the work was more ambitious, I found that being in a group made it easier to understand things.”
Working in groups provides a benefit to students who have already mastered the material as well. “Teaching something to someone actually helps me learn it better,” says Kendra.
But implementing a mastery-based approach is difficult work, even in schools like McCourt and Maker Academy that have adopted it from the day they opened.
“Mastery-based learning is a complete paradigm shift for most teachers,” says Salzberg. “It means thinking about grading as a way to provide feedback, and not a random act that we do because the quarter is ending.”
student at Maker Academy tries his hand at sneaker design. (Amadou Diallo for The Hechinger Report)
City schools that have adopted mastery-based practices — from large, highly competitive schools like Staten Island Technical High School to small, narrowly focused programs like the Young Women’s Leadership School of the Bronx — have gotten some support from a small unit, the Mastery Collaborative, tucked away in the education department’s Office of Leadership. It was launched in 2015 out of a recognition that schools adopting mastery-based principles were often doing so in isolation.
“We started the program as a community of practitioners,” says program director and co-founder Joy Nolan. “Our model was, let’s share resources, let’s have these conversations about [mastery-based] practice.”
Today it serves as a conduit for 37 member schools to exchange expertise regularly. And Nolan says that inquiries about the program from potential members have increased every year. Schools in the collaborative are united not only by an embrace of mastery-based learning but also by the desire to serve a diverse student population. An analysis of Department of Education data by The Hechinger Report found that 29 of the 37 schools either meet the city’s current standard of a racially representative school or reflect (within five percentage points) their borough’s demographic makeup for at least two ethnic groups.
Nolan emphasizes that the schools in the collaborative came to mastery-based learning on their own. Her program does not mandate curricula or evaluate practices. It is, however, seen by the schools as a valuable resource.
“What the Mastery Collaborative has done for a lot of schools is to get educators out of their own buildings,” says Maker Academy principal Bauer. “Visiting other schools is the best professional development that exists. There’s no slide deck that is going to lead to seeing new things and being able to apply them to your school.”
In a system where segregation is the norm, one of the biggest challenges for schools that seek to embrace diversity is creating an environment in which students from all backgrounds can excel. In 2016 the Mastery Collaborative began hosting anti-bias workshops for teachers and staff, spurred by member schools’ ongoing interest in culturally responsive education practices. Credited in large part to the work of educator Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally responsive education is, first and foremost, a recognition that the academic disparities seen along racial and socioeconomic lines come from systemic practices that minimize anything other than the dominant culture.
Zaretta Hammond, the author of the book “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain,” describes a vicious cycle in which low-income students of color begin their education in under-resourced schools with less-experienced teachers, then fall behind academically so that even if they get opportunities to attend a high-performing school later, they arrive grade levels behind their more affluent peers. Culturally responsive teaching seeks to address the inequity, not by dumbing down the curriculum, Hammond says, but by igniting students’ intellectual curiosity through rigorous content reflecting real-world issues.
Teachers must understand, Ladson-Billings argues, that academic outcomes say more about the education system than the child. “If a kid isn’t reading,” she says, “it can’t be the kid that’s the problem, it has to be the method.”
Creating a culturally responsive school environment isn’t achieved by putting up posters of African-American heroes or celebrating Cinco de Mayo, say proponents. It requires teachers and administrators to examine the biases and assumptions they carry, how those affect their relationships with students and, in turn, the students’ ability to master a challenging curriculum.
“It’s really hard and deep work for the adults in the building,” says Natasha Capers, coordinator for the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, a parent-led nonprofit advocating the adoption of a culturally responsive curriculum in city schools.
“How do we make sure our schools are warm and welcoming environments for students across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender presentation?” she asks. “It’s in thinking about how we deliver content, why we’re talking about the subjects we’re talking about, how we connect instruction to students’ everyday lives.”
Mastery-based schools, with their emphasis on feedback and revision, seem to be particularly well-suited to this challenge.
“Traditionally, when you’re talking about serving large numbers of children of color in particular, they don’t get feedback,” says Hammond. “What they get is ‘You got it wrong.’ Mastery-based learning works by creating feedback that is timely and corrective.”
Maker Academy’s assistant principal, Liz Dowdell, puts an emphasis on academic rigor. “If we’re really putting an appropriate challenge in front of kids, they are going to fail at first,” she says. “Our job is to … support them to revise and make it better.”
McCourt principal Salzberg stresses that this approach is relevant for all kids, whether their challenges are tied to racial or gender identity, economic status or parental expectations of high achievement: “Part of what we’re doing in CRE is finding the ways in which the kids are engaging or not engaging in the curriculum, and every kid is presenting us with some information about what’s getting in their way. We want to break through that to make sure every kid feels like they’re being met where they need to be met.”
Culturally responsive education is still a largely unstudied model. “You’ll see a lot of instances of cultural responsiveness in a particular classroom but not systemwide,” says Leah Peoples, a researcher at New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools who is studying it. “With the Mastery Collaborative we’re talking about places that are implementing this across entire schools.”
Inside the city’s education department, however, reaction to these schools’ achievements is notably muted. Despite the city’s announced mandatory anti-bias training for all teachers and school administrators, the deputy chief of staff to the chancellor, David Hay, doesn’t view mastery-based learning as the only or even the preferred method for implementing culturally responsive practices. “You can have CRE in any kind of school, no matter what their guiding philosophy is, if people are willing to do the work,” he says.
He doesn’t see great potential for significant numbers of schools across the city emulating the work of schools in the Mastery Collaborative. “[Mastery] is something these schools have chosen to participate in,” he says, noting that such a dramatic move from traditional grading and evaluation may not be a good fit in other school communities.
Once a five-person operation, the Mastery Collaborative program was down to one full-time employee until a few weeks ago when a second was added, and the number of member schools declined from 43 to 37 in the past year. Asked about future program resources, Hay said, “We’re very happy with where the program is right now … [it] has got some great things going for it but there are other models that do, as well.”
Schools in the Mastery Collaborative have long been doing the heavy lifting required to achieve what the mayor and chancellor’s initiatives seek to promote: equity in both admissions and academic achievement. Without additional support, the question is whether an approach with a promising record of success can spread to schools with like-minded leadership, or whether the opportunity to attend diverse, high-performing schools will remain limited to a handful of the city’s children.
This story about culturally responsive education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
How Mastery-Based Learning Can Help Students of Every Background Succeed published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/
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perfectzablog · 5 years
Text
How Mastery-Based Learning Can Help Students of Every Background Succeed
NEW YORK — At New York City’s Urban Assembly Maker Academy high school in lower Manhattan, two things immediately stand out. First, its teachers are rarely standing at the front of the classroom dispensing facts and figures for students to dutifully transcribe. Instead, they’re constantly on the move, going from table to table facilitating group discussions and providing feedback as students work. Second, the students reflect the racial diversity of the city. Within one of the nation’s most segregated school systems, Maker Academy has attracted a mix of black, Latino, white and Asian students in which no single group makes up less than 10 percent or more than 46 percent of the population.
“This is the most diverse school that I’ve ever been a part of in my 15 years in education,” says school principal Luke Bauer. “We have kids from the projects and kids who take Ubers.”
The school’s leaders made diversity a priority before it even opened five years ago, Bauer says, when they chose not to use grades or test scores as admissions criteria. They also embraced a nontraditional educational model. Like a growing number of schools around the country, Maker Academy uses a mastery-based learning model, in which static letter grades on one-off tests and assignments are jettisoned in favor of detailed feedback that students use to revise their work as they progress toward mastery of clearly defined skills. Instead of receiving a C grade on an essay, for example, a student’s evaluation may include a 1 out of 4 in reasoning, a 2 out of 4 in evidence and a 3 out of 4 in communication, with an opportunity to submit additional drafts throughout the semester.
The results are promising. The school saw 90 percent of its inaugural class graduate in 2018  while surpassing the citywide average in measures of college readiness. It ranks high on the education department’s annual school quality surveys, and it’s becoming increasingly attractive to families, with five times more applicants than seats available, according to the most recent city data.
With 1.1 million students in 1,800 schools, New York City’s school system is the largest in the country. By the city’s own count, roughly 70 percent of its schools are segregated by race and income. The result is essentially a two-tiered system of public education — academically thriving schools for students from white and affluent families, and underperforming schools that almost exclusively serve black and Latino students from low-income families.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, have made racial and socioeconomic equity a priority. A panel commissioned by the mayor recently released a report calling for schools to mirror the demographics of their surrounding neighborhoods and to implement principles of culturally responsive education as a way to combat the city’s persistent achievement gap. At Maker Academy and about three dozen other mastery-based schools in the city, culturally responsive teaching practices are already taking root. These schools are also among the most diverse in the city.
Maker Academy teacher Gerry Irrizary works with students in his Design Principles class. (Amadou Diallo for The Hechinger Report)
Yet support for these schools within the education department has been lukewarm. A small division that has served as a conduit for sharing information and best practices among the mastery-based schools is now down to a two-person staff, as department resources have shifted to more publicized efforts like a $23 million-dollar anti-bias training program for teachers. This may be a missed opportunity. While mastery-based learning isn’t explicitly linked to racial or economic equity, education experts say that any school willing to make the leap from traditional grades to a complex rubric of individualized student assessments most likely already has supports in place to tackle the difficult, messy work they say is necessary to ensure that children of every background can succeed.
“From the minute we opened we had a very diverse population and we needed to navigate that,” says Danielle Salzberg, principal of Frank McCourt High School, on the Upper West Side, which opened in 2010. “Kids come with different educational backgrounds … different socioeconomic backgrounds. We opened our doors fully aware that we were going to be meeting different kids’ needs in different kinds of ways.”
To meet those needs, Salzberg and her team turned to a mastery-based model.
“It’s the best way to provide feedback to students that allows them to understand themselves and be empowered as learners,” Salzberg says. “We focus a lot on student engagement. What are we doing to challenge their thinking and not just have them be compliant?”
The school is thriving. With 20 percent of its 400-plus students diagnosed with a learning disability and about half of its kids coming from families in economic need, McCourt nonetheless outperforms citywide averages on state-mandated Regents exams, graduation rates and postsecondary enrollment. Students describe the school as offering a much different experience than what they were used to.
“This school wasn’t my first choice, so I didn’t have big expectations,” says college-bound senior Kendra Castro. What Kendra found once she arrived was a deeper level of student-teacher interaction than at her previous schools. A typical class may begin with the instructor in “teacher mode,” going over the day’s agenda for a few minutes, but the rest of the time is spent engaging directly with students as they work, providing feedback and support.
“When kids struggle, teachers go to them,” she says. “Math especially can be hard for people. Here I’ve seen people struggle with it, but never for the whole semester.”
Support extends beyond teacher interventions. With a schoolwide emphasis on working in groups, students’ most-used academic resources are often their peers.
“In middle school we always did work as an individual,” says Rosalia Minyeti, an 11th-grader from the Bronx who found the adjustment challenging. “I didn’t like working in groups at first. But then, in classes where the work was more ambitious, I found that being in a group made it easier to understand things.”
Working in groups provides a benefit to students who have already mastered the material as well. “Teaching something to someone actually helps me learn it better,” says Kendra.
But implementing a mastery-based approach is difficult work, even in schools like McCourt and Maker Academy that have adopted it from the day they opened.
“Mastery-based learning is a complete paradigm shift for most teachers,” says Salzberg. “It means thinking about grading as a way to provide feedback, and not a random act that we do because the quarter is ending.”
student at Maker Academy tries his hand at sneaker design. (Amadou Diallo for The Hechinger Report)
City schools that have adopted mastery-based practices — from large, highly competitive schools like Staten Island Technical High School to small, narrowly focused programs like the Young Women’s Leadership School of the Bronx — have gotten some support from a small unit, the Mastery Collaborative, tucked away in the education department’s Office of Leadership. It was launched in 2015 out of a recognition that schools adopting mastery-based principles were often doing so in isolation.
“We started the program as a community of practitioners,” says program director and co-founder Joy Nolan. “Our model was, let’s share resources, let’s have these conversations about [mastery-based] practice.”
Today it serves as a conduit for 37 member schools to exchange expertise regularly. And Nolan says that inquiries about the program from potential members have increased every year. Schools in the collaborative are united not only by an embrace of mastery-based learning but also by the desire to serve a diverse student population. An analysis of Department of Education data by The Hechinger Report found that 29 of the 37 schools either meet the city’s current standard of a racially representative school or reflect (within five percentage points) their borough’s demographic makeup for at least two ethnic groups.
Nolan emphasizes that the schools in the collaborative came to mastery-based learning on their own. Her program does not mandate curricula or evaluate practices. It is, however, seen by the schools as a valuable resource.
“What the Mastery Collaborative has done for a lot of schools is to get educators out of their own buildings,” says Maker Academy principal Bauer. “Visiting other schools is the best professional development that exists. There’s no slide deck that is going to lead to seeing new things and being able to apply them to your school.”
In a system where segregation is the norm, one of the biggest challenges for schools that seek to embrace diversity is creating an environment in which students from all backgrounds can excel. In 2016 the Mastery Collaborative began hosting anti-bias workshops for teachers and staff, spurred by member schools’ ongoing interest in culturally responsive education practices. Credited in large part to the work of educator Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally responsive education is, first and foremost, a recognition that the academic disparities seen along racial and socioeconomic lines come from systemic practices that minimize anything other than the dominant culture.
Zaretta Hammond, the author of the book “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain,” describes a vicious cycle in which low-income students of color begin their education in under-resourced schools with less-experienced teachers, then fall behind academically so that even if they get opportunities to attend a high-performing school later, they arrive grade levels behind their more affluent peers. Culturally responsive teaching seeks to address the inequity, not by dumbing down the curriculum, Hammond says, but by igniting students’ intellectual curiosity through rigorous content reflecting real-world issues.
Teachers must understand, Ladson-Billings argues, that academic outcomes say more about the education system than the child. “If a kid isn’t reading,” she says, “it can’t be the kid that’s the problem, it has to be the method.”
Creating a culturally responsive school environment isn’t achieved by putting up posters of African-American heroes or celebrating Cinco de Mayo, say proponents. It requires teachers and administrators to examine the biases and assumptions they carry, how those affect their relationships with students and, in turn, the students’ ability to master a challenging curriculum.
“It’s really hard and deep work for the adults in the building,” says Natasha Capers, coordinator for the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, a parent-led nonprofit advocating the adoption of a culturally responsive curriculum in city schools.
“How do we make sure our schools are warm and welcoming environments for students across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender presentation?” she asks. “It’s in thinking about how we deliver content, why we’re talking about the subjects we’re talking about, how we connect instruction to students’ everyday lives.”
Mastery-based schools, with their emphasis on feedback and revision, seem to be particularly well-suited to this challenge.
“Traditionally, when you’re talking about serving large numbers of children of color in particular, they don’t get feedback,” says Hammond. “What they get is ‘You got it wrong.’ Mastery-based learning works by creating feedback that is timely and corrective.”
Maker Academy’s assistant principal, Liz Dowdell, puts an emphasis on academic rigor. “If we’re really putting an appropriate challenge in front of kids, they are going to fail at first,” she says. “Our job is to … support them to revise and make it better.”
McCourt principal Salzberg stresses that this approach is relevant for all kids, whether their challenges are tied to racial or gender identity, economic status or parental expectations of high achievement: “Part of what we’re doing in CRE is finding the ways in which the kids are engaging or not engaging in the curriculum, and every kid is presenting us with some information about what’s getting in their way. We want to break through that to make sure every kid feels like they’re being met where they need to be met.”
Culturally responsive education is still a largely unstudied model. “You’ll see a lot of instances of cultural responsiveness in a particular classroom but not systemwide,” says Leah Peoples, a researcher at New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools who is studying it. “With the Mastery Collaborative we’re talking about places that are implementing this across entire schools.”
Inside the city’s education department, however, reaction to these schools’ achievements is notably muted. Despite the city’s announced mandatory anti-bias training for all teachers and school administrators, the deputy chief of staff to the chancellor, David Hay, doesn’t view mastery-based learning as the only or even the preferred method for implementing culturally responsive practices. “You can have CRE in any kind of school, no matter what their guiding philosophy is, if people are willing to do the work,” he says.
He doesn’t see great potential for significant numbers of schools across the city emulating the work of schools in the Mastery Collaborative. “[Mastery] is something these schools have chosen to participate in,” he says, noting that such a dramatic move from traditional grading and evaluation may not be a good fit in other school communities.
Once a five-person operation, the Mastery Collaborative program was down to one full-time employee until a few weeks ago when a second was added, and the number of member schools declined from 43 to 37 in the past year. Asked about future program resources, Hay said, “We’re very happy with where the program is right now … [it] has got some great things going for it but there are other models that do, as well.”
Schools in the Mastery Collaborative have long been doing the heavy lifting required to achieve what the mayor and chancellor’s initiatives seek to promote: equity in both admissions and academic achievement. Without additional support, the question is whether an approach with a promising record of success can spread to schools with like-minded leadership, or whether the opportunity to attend diverse, high-performing schools will remain limited to a handful of the city’s children.
This story about culturally responsive education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
How Mastery-Based Learning Can Help Students of Every Background Succeed published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/
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milenianos · 6 years
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Springboard to conquer the world
(Essay written for a scholarship application)
One of my earliest memories of my life dates back from before entering kindergarten. Around the time when my parents were doing all the paperwork to enroll me in the neighborhood school, my late father once approached me and said to me, “there is no reason to be scared of mathematics. Most people are afraid of the new, and consequently become stunned and are unable to make any progress. That happens a lot with math. But if one does not understand it on the first attempt, one should not get dazed, one should rather persevere until one understands.”
Then he added, “Besides, math is very easy. It only consists of 10 symbols, (0,1,2,3, …, 8,9), from which all other numbers can be derived and all operations can be done. Mathematics is exact, concrete, objective, accurate, and very important. They permeate it all! From biology and politics to astronomy and computing.” His speech made me, from an early age, approach mathematics without fear and with great enthusiasm, although my relationship with them has not always been smooth.
When I arrived to the United States, at age 14, for the spring semester of my sophomore year of high school, I was placed in a class named “Informal Geometry ESOL” due to my lack of English and to the difference between the American and the Colombian educational system. That class was particularly easy, which, on the one hand, frustrated me because I like to be challenged, especially mathematically challenged; but on the other hand, I saw it as an opportunity to be a helping hand to my classmates.
But my discontent grew when for the following year I was required to take the exact same class, regardless the perfect A+ I got on the course. This was because I had started school in the middle of the academic year and I needed to complete the missing half credit. Fortunately, that did not happen. Navigating a foreign system and overcoming language barriers, in the end, I was able to sign up for Geometry Honors for my junior year.
To be able to take honor classes, with a broken English and a family that was constantly moving while settling in a new country, was a big step. But it was not enough for me. I wanted to take the most out of this wonderful and new educational system that was presented before my hands. While in Colombia everyone in high school is required to attend the same classes, in the United States students have the opportunity to choose their courses according to their capacity and talents. Students even have the opportunity to take university-level classes, something that had never crossed my mind before as a possibility for a high school student.
As my junior year progressed, my new goal was to take AP Calculus before graduating. For my senior year, I applied to Boca Raton Community High School’s STEM magnet program. Although I did not meet all the requirements to be eligible for the program, especially because I was already an incoming senior, Dr. McKee, Boca High’s then principal, took a bet on me and admitted me into his school.
With this turn of events, I took AP Calculus during my senior year, along with several other AP classes. In the beginning, I struggled with the class because I skipped a lot of the mandatory prerequisites. I had the additional distress of not feeling free to ask questions out of the fear of exposing the fact that I was not supposed to be taking that class. I studied really hard, both the class material and the things I did not know from the prerequisites I never took. In the end, it all worked out because not only did I accomplish my goal of taking an university-level math class before graduating, but I also passed my AP test.
Instead of pitying myself for the struggles, I feel glad that the challenge was there for me to conquer. Looking back about how mathematics felt forbidden for my status quo during my high school times, I feel proud now that I am on the verge of graduating and becoming a professional mathematician, but I also feel thankful for those that helped me to get where I am, people like Dr. McKee that looked beyond the requirements and saw potential in me, making a profound impact on my life by letting me attend his school.
I have had an amazing journey as a mathematics undergraduate student, attending over fifteen academic events and participating in other fifteen as a panelist, organizer, poster presenter, speaker, and even as a radio host. I have had the chance to study and do mathematics in three different continents, six countries, and four languages; the opportunity to meet students and professors with diverse stories to tell from all walks of life; and the experience to collaborate with scientists and journalists from around the world in both research and science outreach projects. And I am aware that all of this has been possible because the United States is my home and my springboard to fulfill dreams.
I became more mindful of this fact during the semester I spent abroad in the Math in Moscow program. We were ten American mathematicians studying in fairytale Moscow amidst the worldwide-followed, U.S. presidential election of 2016. Inside our dorms, we would constantly reflect on the differences between Russian and American cultures, and also on how our ideas about the right to free speech and rule of law defined us as a group and identified us as Americans.
In addition, among all other foreigners, we stood out for our sunny and positive nature, and for our carefree and generous personality. What is more, in such a remote place I noticed the similarities that I share with my fellow Americans. I realized that I owe my independent, self-confident, and hard-working personality, to my upbringing in the United States, a land where the air you breathe is full of empowerment.
My dad only attended first grade of school, and I am still amazed to this day by the wisdom in his words that inadvertently led me to be a mathematician. But the best legacy he left me with was the gift of bringing me to the United States, a country he loved and felt very proud to be part of. Looking forward, I believe that it is my responsibility to prepare myself and reach my full potential to contribute to the society that has given me so much. For that reason, I am going to keep jumping on my springboard to conquer the world.
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clubofinfo · 6 years
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Expert: (Image credit Banksy) The holiday period provides us with a unique opportunity to express the new awareness that must inform a less commercialised and more sharing-oriented world. Rather than spending all our time partaking in conspicuous consumption, why don’t we commemorate Christmas by organising massive gatherings for helping the poor and healing the environment? ***** At this time of year, our overconsuming lifestyles in the affluent Western world are impossible to ignore. Brightly-lit shops are bursting with festive foods and expensive indulgences, while seasonal songs play in the background of shopping malls to keep us spending the money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t matter. The frenetic commercialism of Christmas on the high streets continues to escalate to inconceivable proportions. Despite all the warnings from climate scientists that ordinary Western lifestyles are destroying the planet, still we buy enough Christmas trees in the UK alone that could reach New York and back, if placed in a straight line. Enough card packaging is thrown away in this country that could cover Big Ben almost 260,000 times. Not to mention the 4,500 tonnes of tin foil, the 2 million turkeys, the 74 million mince pies and 5 million mounds of charred raisins (from rejected Christmas puddings) that are thrown away come early January. Mountains of e-waste from discarded electronic items – much of it bought as unwanted gifts and soon discarded – is projected to reach 10 million tonnes by 2020. Pause for a moment and try to picture the extent of that annual waste by the British populace. For if you combine our surplus produce with every Christian nation in Western Europe, North America and other over-industrialised regions, you have an appalling idea of the unnecessary ecological destruction that we collectively contribute to each year. Christmas is, after all, only an exaggerated illustration of the gross materialism that defines our everyday lives in a consumerist society. What is more difficult for us to contemplate, however, is how our profligate consumption habits also directly exacerbate levels of inequality worldwide. We know that the so-called developed world – roughly 16% of the global population – consumes a hugely disproportionate share of the earth’s resources, and is responsible for at least half of all greenhouse gas emissions. But behind such statistics lies a depressing reality, in which our artificial standards of living in the global North are dependent on the dire working conditions and impoverishment of millions of people throughout the global South. In spite of the spurious claims of trickle-down economics by the adherents of corporate globalisation, the number of people living on less than $5-a-day has increased by more than 1.1 billion since the 1980s. The vast majority of people who live in developing countries survive on less than $10-a-day; none of their families can remotely afford the wasteful and conspicuous consumption that we consider normal. Our personal complicity in this unsustainable global order is highly complex, of course, because we are all caught in a socioeconomic and cultural system that depends on ever-expanding consumerism for its survival. Everywhere, we are besieged with messages that encourage us to buy more stuff, as profit-driven businesses increasingly seek to meet our needs – either real or constructed – through interaction in the marketplace. Our consumption patterns are often tied to our sense of identity, our desire for belonging, our need for comfort, our self-esteem. So we are all the victims of an excessively commercialised culture, not only in a collective way through environmental harm and global warming, but also through the proximate psychological and emotional harm that in some way afflicts everyone. We experience that harm through the time-poverty of affluence; through all the pressures of living in an individualistic and market-dominated society; through all that we have lost due to the competitive work/consume treadmill – our freedom for leisure, our mental space, our community cohesion, our psychological health. There is also an inarticulable form of spiritual harm that arises from simply being part of this exploitative world order, in which our over-consuming lifestyles in the West are connected to the vast suffering and immiseration of people in poorer countries who we do not know, or care to know. Clearly it is the whole system that needs to go through a radical transformation – but how can that transformation be brought about, when we ourselves are the constituent parts that maintain the system in its currently destructive form? Over many decades, the basic problem and solution has been well articulated in a theoretical sense by progressive thinkers. Numerable reports cite the physics of planetary boundaries, demonstrating how we already require one and a half planets to support today’s consumption levels. Simply put, it is impossible to reconcile the twin challenges of ending poverty and achieving environmental sustainability, unless we also confront the huge imbalances in consumption patterns across the world, and fundamentally re-imagine the economy as something different that escapes the growth compulsion. Hence the resurgent focus on post-growth economics in a world of limits, recognising the importance of reducing the use of natural resources in high-income countries, so that poorer nations can sustainably grow their economies and rapidly meet the basic needs of their populations. Nowhere is the case for sharing the world’s resources more obvious or urgent, than in the question of how to achieve equity-based sustainable development or ‘one planet lifestyles’ for all. Yet our societies remain so far from embarking on this great transition, that the interrelated trends of commercialisation, inequality and environmental destruction continue to intensify year on year. What better example of double-standards and duplicity than the spectacle of French President Emmanuel Macron convening the ‘One Planet Summit’ this month to demonstrate international solidarity in addressing climate change, while at the same time governments were attending the resurrected World Trade Organisation talks in their continued attempts to turn the world into a corporate playground with minimal protections for the poor. These larger questions of global injustice and ecological imbalance may seem far removed from our daily lives, but everyone who participates in a modern consumerist society is conjointly responsible for perpetuating destruction and divisions on an international scale. Again, our frenzied spending around Thanksgiving and Christmas time is a salient case in point, exemplifying how our relentless mass consumption is directly propping up an extreme market-oriented economic system, and further preventing us all from embracing the radical transformations that will be required in the transition to a post-growth world. What, then, should we do? There are lots of answers from campaigners about how we can de-commercialise Christmas, like the buy nothing movement that advocates we ignore altogether the conditioned compulsion to purchase luxury goods, thus demonstrating our awareness of over-consumption and how it affects global disparities and the earth. At the least, we can practise ethical giving and support the work of activist groups and charitable organisations. For example, Christian Aid has released a witty video this year that entreats UK citizens to be aware of festive food waste in the context of global hunger, and donate £10 from Christmas food shopping – enough for a family in South Sudan to eat for a week. Actions like these may constitute a small step towards celebrating Christmas with awareness of the critical world situation, and the need for Westernised populations to live more lightly on the earth, while prioritising the needs of the less-privileged. If extended beyond the holiday season, hopefully that awareness may be translated into a mass movement that rejects the consumerist lifestyle altogether, instead voluntarily downshifting their lifestyles and meeting more of their needs in ways that bypass the mainstream economy. As proponents of the gift economy, the commons and collaborative consumption variously attest, this is the long-term antidote to mass consumerism. It means becoming co-creators of alternative economic systems in which we reinvest in our communities, shift our values towards quality of life and wellbeing, and embrace a new ethic of sufficiency. It means resisting the competitive economic pressures towards materialism and privatised modes of living, thereby releasing our time and energies for cooperative activities that promote communal production, co-owning and civic engagement. It means, in short, an expanded understanding of what it means to be human on this earth, in which we relearn how to participate in civic life and share resources at every level of society. The holiday period during Christmas actually provides us with a unique opportunity to express the new awareness that must inform a less commercialised and more sharing-oriented world. Rather than spending all our time partaking in conspicuous consumption that has nothing to do with the message of Christ, why don’t we organise local meetings or massive gatherings for helping the poor and healing the environment, both in our own countries and further abroad? Such an appeal to our goodwill and conscience is made in a seminal essay by Mohammed Mesbahi, titled Christmas, the System and I. He exhorts us to imagine what could be done if all the money we needlessly spend on festivities and unwanted gifts was collectively pooled, then redistributed to all those who urgently need it. Indeed imagine what could be achieved if people not only donate to charities at this time of year, but also unite in countless numbers on the streets for sharing and justice on behalf of the poorest members of the human family. If Jesus were walking among us today, writes Mesbahi, surely that is what He would call on us to do. For what cause can be of greater priority in this era of growing inequalities and planetary crisis, than the need to save the millions of people who continue to die from poverty-related causes each year? Perhaps that would be the first expression of the true meaning of Christmas in the twenty first century, when millions of people come together in constant demonstrations that call upon our governments to implement the principle of sharing into world affairs. http://clubof.info/
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pelaanthony-blog · 7 years
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☾Extended Project: The Progress of the Project (February) ☾
1st February 2017
My first priority for today was making sure all my work for the Future Proof Assignment was done, ready for marketing next week. After this was done, I was able to focus on carrying on my designs for extra assets towards the game. Evidence Below. I have decided to create some in-game posters to help tie the story together and give some extra information to the player while exploring the game world. I found this task really fun as I love creating marketing material but specifically for games as I have a moral issue with some advertising schemes - I don’t like marketing that makes people feel less without the product. But, with this kind of marketing, it just adds MORE to the game and does take anything away from the player. Problem Solving. After doing my research and my own personal love for the style, I decided to settle on creating Art Deco style posters to help bring that tone into the game.
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Start of The Fish Bowl Poster
2nd February 2017
Today I carried on with my in-game assets so they wee ready to be used by the marketing team and put on our game website. Evidence Below.
The Fish Bowl Poster
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ShadowMan Poster
After deciding an Instagram page would be a great idea to use as advertisement for my art tem and attract the target audience, I made sure to allocate days for the people in art group A to upload so the page was always kept up-to-date.
Later on in the afternoon, Jon presented the whole class with a PowerPoint about the gameplay for Eliza, our game. I thought this would be a positive experience as everyone would get a better understanding of the formation of our game, however I became stressed as everyone kept demanding what they thought our art style should be to pair with this gameplay. After the lesson, I spoke with Lauren and we agreed that it should be us what the game ‘looks’ like to which Lizzy agreed with. Because of this, I created a PowerPoint myself to show the class on Tuesday about what the art style of our game world would be. This PowerPoint was not only to help the rest of the course understand the art style, but for art group A and B understand the style of architecture, clothing and design me and Lauren were looking for. Evidence Below. 
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Art Deco PowerPoint Showing Architecture
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Art Deco PowerPoint Showing Clothing
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Art Deco PowerPoint Showing Patterns and Designs
3rd February 2017
I carried on with my specialist essay today but I have really been struggling with it as I don’t truly have a great understanding of the task. I tried to create a mind map about the things I was going to write about in my essay, however that still wasn’t correct. I have set up a meeting with Lizzy to go through the essay and hopefully help me get a better understanding. Problem Solving.
7th February 2017
I have carried on creating more in-game posters as I enjoy doing them and I feel like they will help progress the game story. Through research, I have been able to recreate posters in a style that would have been seen in the 1920s. I’ve also been feeling very stressed and overwhelmed recently and creating these posters helps reduce my stress levels. Evidence Below. Problem Solving.
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Toy Box Poster
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Potions Poster
8th February 2017
Today I was able to go through my Specialist essay with Lizzy. She told me what I had written was good, however, I needed to work on my sentence structure to make more sense and write a higher level piece of work. She then helped me improve the outline of what I already had by letting me know what I needed to include to reach those higher grading criteria. This really helped me and by the end of the lesson, I had been able to complete most of the essay off.
9th February 2017
After finishing the essay off today, I was able to complete some artwork for inspiration to our game. As none of the artists had really gone in-depth with the whole steampunk style, I decided to do some research and try and come up with some sketches of how we could incorporate steampunk into our game. By the end of the lesson, I had drawn a mechanical arm. Evidence Below.
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Mechanical Arm
I took great inspiration off my favourite game series, Bioshock, to try and maybe include characters with metal limbs or faces to add a creepy, industrial sense to the game.
21st February 2017
I am planning to finish my pre-production over half-term as I want it to be completed and organised so I can start production. So far, the progress into making our gaming has been extremely slow so hopefully, by completing my pre-production early, I will be able to get a head start into creating art for the game. Problem Solving.
Art group B haven’t created a schedule yet so it’s causing a lot of stress for me and my group as we don’t know what they are doing. To combat this, I have let Lauren see our schedule and let her know what we are doing each week so she is able to work off of what we are doing. Problem Solving.
23rd February 2017
Today, I went to the college library to take out a few art books to see if I could use them for research. I fell in love straight away with a Disney book which explained all about the progression of Disney and its art. I decided to complete a case study on the book as the information I unsurfaced will not only help me with art style towards my posters, but also helped be on how I lead my art team and also how I interact with other teams.
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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years
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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PRESSURE
We say that the novel or the chair is designed according to the most advanced technologies, and I think I have finally solved the problem. I repeat is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it later becomes. It would be easy to fix. The reason not to put all your eggs in one basket is not the number that can get acquired by Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all? Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. These can get a company airborne for $15,000. Which is of course a way to work faster. It spread from Fortran into Algol and then to both their descendants.
They know, in the sense that the measure of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center. One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. You can't get it from the poor, not to be so cruel to one another.1 And creating wealth, as a startup, the other alternative was to get users, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix that. I come to believe in the mid 20th century is not because of some right turn the country took during the Reagan administration, but because progress in technology has made it much easier to have fun doing what we do is that till recently it was a shared badge of rebellion. What I'm going to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. One of my first drawing teachers told me: if you're bored when you're drawing something, the drawing will look boring.2 Buildings to be constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale in wood. I am more fulfilled in my work than pretty much any of my friends who did not start companies.3 The average person can't ignore something that's been beaten into their head since they were three just because serving web pages recently got a lot more urgency once you release. It's so important to launch fast that it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. They'll decide later if they fail.
Could you have both at once, or does there have to be poked with a stick to get them in a society in which most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers. PG, Thanks for the intro! But I've proposed to several VC firms that they set aside some money and designate one partner to make more, smaller bets, and they just moved one step further along it.4 By 1969, when Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, the limit seemed to be down to one. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they tried, start successful startups, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent. Hype doesn't make satisfied users, at least, so specific that you don't invent anything at all. But ambition is human nature.5 What's so unnatural about working for a big company. The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they weren't crazy.6
One reason is that the kind of possibility that the pointy-haired boss is not completely mistaken to worry about this. Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask.7 Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it also has to be some baseline prosperity before you get a silicon valley is China. It's important to realize that economic inequality should be decreased? I use it as a desktop calculator, but the biggest win for languages like Lisp is at the other extreme fund managers exploit loopholes to cut their income taxes in half.8 Now the default exit strategy is to try lots of different things.9 Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.10 When we make something in America, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. Startup School. When I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of pressure to use what are perceived as standard technologies.11 While few startups will experience a stampede of interest, almost all will at least initially experience the other side of this phenomenon, where the current group of startups present to pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami.
Why? Exactly. We do this with YC itself. You also have to be a job. A good example is the airline fare search program that ITA Software licenses to Orbitz. The big successes are so big they dwarf the rest.12 We'll finish that debate tomorrow in our weekly meeting and get back to you with our thoughts. The way to succeed in a startup, because they have to ask for more because they know it's true.13 Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups worth the trouble. Where had these questions come from? There's no manipulation in that.14
Notes
A related problem that I didn't need to know how many of the Web was closely tied to the yogurt place, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you want to learn to acknowledge it.
Not all big hits follow this pattern though.
Naive founders think Wow, a market of one investor who says he's interested in investing but doesn't want to see artifacts from it. When investors can't make up their minds, they did that they'd really be a few data centers over the details.
Particularly since many causes of the Italian word for success. Don't be evil, they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e.
The solution was a great one. As Anthony Badger wrote, If it failed.
That I was living in cities.
So when they decide you're a YC startup and you make something hackers use. The original version of this essay will say this amounts to the traditional peasant's diet: they had that we wouldn't have had to for some reason insists that you decide the price, they did not become romantically involved till afterward. And so this one is going to work on projects that improve the world wars to say for sure a social network for pet owners is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Google Wave. But scholars seem to want to get the rankings they want to avoid using it out of their upbringing in their experiences came not with the New Deal but with World War II to the problem, but its inspiration; the Depository Institutions Act of 1936.
One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to invest in it. If it failed. Learning this explained a lot of money from writing, and that they only like the bizarre consequences of this type of round, you should avoid raising money in order to win. If you extrapolate another 20 years.
Dealers try to be some things it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. Come From?
At this point. To consider behaving the opposite way as part of a cent per spam. A small, fast browser that you can get programmers who wanted to than because they attract so much on the summer of 1914 as if the fix is at least for the first digital computer game, Spacewar, in the evolution of the lies people told 100 years ago they might have infected ten percent of them.
It's not a programmer would never even think of a correct program.
The few people plot their own page. As Clinton himself discovered to his surprise when, in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud at least bet money on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the image generator written in C, the more corrupt the rulers. Rice and beans are a lot heavier. 5 million cap, but you're very docile compared to what you write has a word meaning how one feels when things are going well, so x% usage growth will also remind founders that an artist or writer has to be something of an investor derives mostly from the revenue-collecting half of the previous two years, but bickering at several hundred dollars an hour most people will pay people millions of people who are running on vapor, financially, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that would have a different attitude to the point of saying that because server-based software is so hard to say that YC's most successful founders is often responding politely to the yogurt place, we found they used it to colleagues.
Where Do College English 28 1966-67, pp. 1886/87. Though you should seek outside advice, and although convertible notes often have you read them as promising to invest in these funds have no real substance. There are fields now in which his chief resident, Gary, talks about programmers, but I know when this happened because it depends on the way starting a company he really liked, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, John Collison, and Robert Morris for the lulz.
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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years
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WHY TO GET STARTUP
There were a lot of developers feel this way: One emotion is I'm not really proud about what's in the App Store? Instead of desktop applications, you'd run Java applets delivered from a server. The world of investors is a waste of time. So keep typing! I'm aiming for good ideas.1 We didn't need this software ourselves.2 And because of supply and demand.3
A new concept of variables. You may even be false, in industrial democracies. Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey say you should only work on problems that exist. What's wrong with having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to be. What would you pay for right now? It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. What really convinced me of this was the sort of person, you have to be at least some of the most conspicuous trends in the last several decades, with the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about. You may need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup? Not eventually, right now.4 Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves, because that's what Steve Wozniak wanted for himself.
Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford. Top actors make a lot of money.5 And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's a good sign. Ramen profitable means no more than the definition implies. Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. And that gave us flexibility.6 It's usually a mistake to use Microsoft as a model, because their whole culture derives from that one lucky break. Indeed, these statistics about Cobol or Java being the most popular languages because they view languages as standards. At the mention of ugly source code, people will want. Are there some you can cultivate?
Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one winning permutation somewhere in it. But the more you learn, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely it is to be able to recognize real productivity when they see growth. They started almost as a contract programming operation, and the company is already a write-off. The reason it seems ridiculous to us to treat smells as property. Other domains change fast.7 Investors don't realize how much they want it to be one problem that's the most urgent for a startup is what makes it hard. Raising money is terribly distracting. Problems Why is it counterintuitive for founders?
If you look at the list of acquirers is a lot longer than that. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking. They only just decided what to use, so why wouldn't they? That's only off by a factor of 10 or so. There do not seem to be missing.8 When a startup launches, there have to be so far.9 Fights between founders are surprisingly common.10 College is an incomparable opportunity to do that with hardware, but because you want the kind of people who could have made it that far if angels hadn't invested first.11 If you get an offer at an acceptable price. They'll decide later if they want to start a company, but without this software they were programming in machine language. While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, you could succeed this way. More likely they'll want you to be a hacker yourself.
Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup—becoming the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age. Of course, Internet startups are still only a fraction of the size it turned out to be. You can still raise money, but because they felt it was really for them, but probably would have been delighted at first to be bought for $2 million, but only a handful of them. That's the whole point of technology. When the ball comes near them their instinct is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to change the problem you're solving. If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but it should be distributed equally, rather than recruiting them one at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually.12
Notes
In both cases you catch mail that's near spam, but no more than you think you'll need, you can talk about the new economy during the Bubble. Icio.
Every pilot knows about this from personal experience than anyone, writes: True, Gore won the popular vote. Bullshit in the early empire the price, they would probably be to say that hapless meant unlucky. For more on not screwing up than any preceding president, and that injustice is what you care about the Thanksgiving turkey. The succession of spectacular treason trials that punctuated Henry's erratic matrimonial progress made him an obvious candidate for grants of monastic property.
I'm not saying that's all prep schools, because his ideas were one of the aircraft is. The founders who are good presenters, but I'm not saying you should prevent your investors from helping you to acknowledge it. Wufoo was based in Tampa and they hope will be on fewer boards at once is to give their associates the title associate has gotten a bad reputation, a torture device so called because it has to give them sufficient activation energy required to switch to OSX. One reason I did the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century European art.
Credit card debt is little different from technology companies between them generate a lot of investors started offering investment automatically to every startup we funded, summer 2010. As Anthony Badger wrote, If it failed it failed it failed.
But although I started doing research for this purpose are still, has a spam probabilty of. I deliberately pander to readers, though it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. These range from make-believe, which merchants used to say.
It rarely arises, and the editor in Lisp, which is as straightforward as building a new search engine, but as impoverished outcasts, which made it possible to have funded Reddit, for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same town, unless the person who would have been; a vogue for conglomerates in the classical world meant training landowners' sons to speak well enough but the median tag is just visual spam.
This prospect will make it sound. I. A degenerate case of heirs, professors, politicians, and philosophy the imprecise half. In general, spams are more repetitive than regular email.
Whereas many of which he can be compared, per capita income in England in 1750 was higher than India's in 1960. The latter type is the lost revenue. Disclosure: Reddit was funded by Y Combinator certainly never asks what classes you took in college. Those groups never have worked; many statements may have been a time.
They want so much better to be extra skeptical about Viaweb too. I'm talking here about everyday tagging. When that happens. If a company.
Applets seemed to us that we didn't, in writing, and they would never come face to face meetings. Actually it's better to embrace the fact that the web have sucked—A Spam Classification Organization Program. Ed. The amusing thing is, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from large companies, summer jobs are the usual way of doing that even if they plan to make you expend on the web.
I wonder if they can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and the foolish. Google's site. At the time.
They may not understand you at all but for a 24 year old to get as deeply into subjects as I know randomly generated DNA would not be far from the 1940s or 50s instead of working. Which means if you're good you are listing in order to attract workers. When one reads about the details. Similarly, don't destroy the startup isn't getting market price, they may have realized this, but instead to explain it would be possible to make money, and spend hours arguing over irrelevant things.
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