I spent the past two weeks reading over my old blog posts and trying to select the most notable ideas from which I could develop a thesis for my paper. I had trouble discerning any major ideas at first, because I found that there were no absolute statements that I could make about Madame D’Aulnoy’s writing. Continue reading
A decision in writing that I have struggled with was how I wished to give my characters a voice. I originally began writing my story in third person, narrating from the perspective of an onlooker. But after completing some writing in this style, I reread it and it felt sterile in some way. Continue reading
As I am finding out, college applications and I are not exactly friends. Seeing as they are taking up a good portion of my time at the moment, it seems that my independent work has been pushed to the back burner slightly. I had been so consumed with making everything surrounding my applications perfect that I did not even notice the lack of work I was receiving from my mentor. Continue reading
Much of my time up to this point has been spent practicing and figuring out what I am actually performing. As the date quickly approaches, I have been forced to face some of the trickier practical details. Many people comment on how scary it must be to fill a whole hour with performing all on my own. While I am nervous for the performance, I find it much scarier to plan every detail out on my own that to actually sing, dance, or play the piano. Continue reading
Finally, after all the planning and coordinating it took to have our Spoken Word assembly, it happened. The date and time was set, Habeeb and I arrived early to fix up the stage and get each performer ready. In total, we had 10 performances. Seven of those performances were made up of students from our Spoken Word Club. The other three were invited guests.
Last week, the Westtown School Math Team attended the Harvard MIT Math Tournament. During the tournament a seminar is offered called linguisticless linguistics. This linguisticsless linguistics seminar talks about how people can sometimes understand a language they have never seen before with a few hints. The concept and logic behind this could be used in the computer science world.
Def Jam Poetry at Westtown on November 15th was a success. After the performance I was inundated with a substantial amount of praise and congratulations. After a week of rehearsing, people dropping in and out I was surprised by the good feedback we got from the audience. From the buzz I’m getting about the assembly the last performance by Keith Robertson seemed to resonate with the audience the most. The first part of his performance started off with a spoken word piece, which lead him into rap for the last part of his performance. Continue reading
During this past week, I visited Westtown Lower School for a day. I truly felt the great energy from the children in Lower School and I first want to thank the teachers and students for being so welcoming. The kids were really innocent and they were extremely approachable in comparison to teenagers like me. I am now going to provide my observations on Lower School on Thursday, November 14, 2013. Continue reading
Recently, I have just been working on finishing my project, so rather than spend time here telling you how it has been going, I am going to post a recent excerpt. I will say, however, that I am finding progress easier, and am anticipating wrapping up the history section by sometime this Friday or Saturday. I have also been trying to get the point of view of important magazines, so recently I have spent a lot of time reading articles on Syria in The Economist. Continue reading
This week is a turning point of my Math Independent Research. After I came back from the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament that was held at Boston last weekend, I have spent more time sitting down and thinking about what Westtown needs in order to achieve higher on the path of mathematics competitions. I have thought more about my role in this case, what I can and should do in order to contribute to the future Westtown Math Teams and math lovers. After considering thoroughly and talking with T. Margaret, I decided to extended my clean energy paper and focus more on math competition preparation experiences and problem solving. Therefore, I would like to do a presentation about my suggestions and vision on math competitions at Westtown.
Independent Seminar Blog 