Week 5

This week was a pretty okay week. We were mostly focused on our presentation that was due on Thursday, but we were able to do some selling of bands during a few lunches. We are still having trouble selling to freshmen, but we have gotten a few to tell their friends about them. Our senior bands are completely sold out, and we have been thinking about buying junior bands since a few people have expressed interest in buying them already.

It turns out that the 360 evaluations that we all wrote about each other are actually going to be visible (without names of course). This freaks me out a little because I know that we all gave one member of the group not so great marks, and I'm worried about how she will feel. It's not like she didn't deserve what we gave her (in fact she might have deserved less), it's just that it's not something anyone likes to hear about themselves especially if you're friends with some of the people in the group that said those things about you.

The presentation went reasonably well, although we do have to make many changes to the slides themselves. One person's sections had to be completely reworked since it focused so heavily on the negatives of our company, but other than that, we don't have too much to rework.

I wish we could have gotten more done this week, but I'm not sure there was anything else we could have done.

Thanks for reading,
Zank

Chapter 5

This chapter starts with about a page and a half of text that I couldn't agree with more. It explains that the most conservative system in our world today is our education system, especially at the high school and college levels. The way high school and college are taught are to pass on the knowledge of the previous generation in order to make sure someone knows everything that was known by that  generation and all of the ones that came before it. The issue with this is that it leads to memorization of facts that will help students pass meaningless tests, but no one actually knows the reasoning behind the the facts. The information that students have to learn increases every year, just like the amount of information in known to the world, but instead of altering teaching styles, most educators continue to march through the material, just hoping to get through it all before exams. Kids graduate from college having "learned the facts, but [not understanding] the ideas behind them." Increasingly in the twenty-first century, what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know. We have to be able to create new knowledge and new ways of solving problems, but our education system has not caught up with us.

The chapter goes on in a bit of a predictable way, two case studies: one with a teacher and a class of "at risk youth," and another with a teacher and a class of highly motivated science students. Each teacher has a new style of teaching that is very out of the box, and both classes do much better than they would have if they had been taught with the "normal" teaching style seen in schools today. This book was published in 2012. Honestly, I don't really remember what was going on in the world in 2012 because I was more interested in how exciting it was to be a freshman in high school. I think that the ideas in this book may have been innovative at the time it was published, but that now it's kind of like common knowledge (or at least in schools like Brookline High School). It seems like so many people have written books about these innovative ideas about the future, and how we need to change the way we teach and raise children, that it is no longer a novelty idea. That said, all of the ideas touched upon in the book are good ones.

Thanks for reading,
Zank

Week 4

This week we finally started selling our bracelets! On Tuesday I helped put up flyers, which we decided to primarily put inside bathroom stalls. We decided that the times when we actually read the flyers that others put up around school was when they put them up on the insides of the stalls. On Wednesday during second lunch, I sold the bracelets outside of the cafeteria with Polina, Becky, and later Madi. It was actually much more fun than I thought it would be. We ended up getting really into calling all of the people out that would pass by our table, and trying to convince them to buy a bracelet. We sold way more than I expected we would, but we didn't sell very many to freshmen. This actually surprised me greatly, but I think the way to solve the issue is to recruit a couple of freshmen to spread the word to their friends. I think this would work well because we were able to sell a lot to our friends, but none of us have freshmen friends, so we didn't have any pull with them. I didn't sellduring lunch on Thursday because I was the only one with first lunch, and I didn't want to sell alone. Unfortunately, the women who prepare sushi come on Friday, so we weren't able to sell on Friday either. I did some individual sales, and got some promises of future sales. We've made around $100 so far (I think). It was a great start, and I'm actually excited to sell again in the upcoming week.

On the storefront front, we had a deadline yesterday that we may be a little behind on. The only parts that need to be fixed are the ones that needed to be done the whole time. Unfortunately these two parts fall under my jurisdiction because they are the ones that Sophia was supposed to do, but did wrong or not at all. The unfortunate thing is that these parts require speaking to a salon owner, which isn't the easiest thing to do. I have emailed the salon owner of the salon that I have been going to for many years, but she hasn't yet responded. I also left messages on machines of a few different plumbing, heating, and electric companies, but haven't gotten many, if any, responses. This is frustrating because we are so close to finishing (and the deadline has now passes), but I can't do my part to help us finish. I made an appointment with the salon owner for this upcoming Wednesday, so if she doesn't respond to my email before then, I will speak to her then. I will continue trying to get in contact with the utility companies, but none of them are open on weekends, so I will have to wait until Monday. It seems that as soon as one project starts doing well, the other begins to suffer. Anyway, hopefully I will be able to get everything done before it's too late.

Thanks for reading,
Zank

Chapter 4

Chapter four had a nice change of pace. Instead of focusing on examples of people who are doing very well in the business world, this chapter focused on social innovators. The example was of a girl (Laura White) who grew up in Atlanta, quit swimming (even though she was a national champion by the age of 12), and started a program to teach under privileged kids how to swim when she was just in high school. When she was 16, she worked for a large non profit that started up many volunteer projects in the area, and she was soon in charge of many volunteers. She continued her work while at Tulane University in New Orleans, and she has made a great difference in many people's lives. Her parents raised her similarly to the other examples that were given in earlier chapters: not too much structured time, allowing their children to choose what to participate in and what not to participate in, encouraging passion, as well as encouraging quitting when the passion is no longer there. Laura did very well in school, but as she put it, it was just to prove that she could and that she was dedicated. She was a person that challenged other people's ideas, and spoke out very often.

An insight that the author made, was that this behavior isn't always encouraged by authority figures. These personality traits are what lead to Laura becoming who she is today, and if those traits had not been encouraged by her parents, she probably would have become a different person. I found this chapter more interesting because I feel that I can relate to it more than I could relate to the examples in the previous chapters. The other examples felt like I was comparing myself to geniuses who did really well in school without even trying. This example felt more like something I would do. I do reasonably well in school, but most of the mandatory classes are quite dull to me. I like finding other, more interesting classes to take, as well as finding out of school activities to do that involve working with people from all backgrounds. I even did a similar program to Laura's, but instead of teaching inner city kids how to swim, I thought them how to snowboard. This chapter was able to recapture my interest in the book as a whole, and I will continue with this book to see where it goes.

Thanks for reading,
Zank