"All of us are feeling scattered and distracted as we try to keep up with an accelerating world. But nearly all of us have an answer in our hands, in simply choosing to do nothing and go nowhere for a while." Pico Iyer's article on CNN talks about the benefits of doing nothing. Literally nothing. It focuses on the benefits of taking short breaks, even just for 10 seconds, every set of time. The time that you do "nothing" is so short, that, put together, it could make up only 1% of the time you spend at work (or home or class). During our Socratic seminars, many of us thought of doing nothing as simply switching to a different task or maybe even watching an episode of our favorite series. We thought it meant not accomplishing anything. But this is now that Iyer meant by doing nothing. He meant absolute nothing; letting your mind wander to its deepest depths. You might think this has many downsides, mainly "but I'm losing time, how is this a good thing?". Well, first of all, you lose only a very small percentage of time and this loss could lead to better work. Also, when time is crunched, we tend to get things done quicker. I'm pretty sure you, sometime in your life, have procrastinated and left something to the very last minute but were still able to get things done, surprisingly. I know I have. Why is this? "We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive." When we take breaks, we are letting our mind clear out for a couple of seconds in order to be able to attack our work with full force. Also, with crunched time, we learn to prioritize our tasks better and organize our time better, using it to its best potential. "... the best way of completing a task, often, is to look away from it; it's the pause in a piece of music that gives the piece its beauty and its shape." In reality, when we're doing nothing, we're actually doing more than we could ever imagine.
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We've spent the last week pondering about Blendz. Pondering on its social responsibility; pondering on its purpose. We came to the conclusion that for the past months we have been blending and making smoothies "just 'cus" and not because we were excited to donate to our fund. "But why is this" you may ask yourself, "you know where the money is going to so why aren't you motivated?" Well yes, we do know where the money is going but we are not seeing any change in the community, we can't put faces to the people we are helping. Also, the money isn't going anywhere where it blends our community, an important aspect of Blendz. So we've pondered and we've come back to one of the ideas we always seem to end up at: have an event dedicated to the workers, where they have time to enjoy with their family and with the Roosevelt community. that, but after two hours of workshops, we would have sports such as a soccer match or a volleyball game in which everyone would participate in. This would allow us time to interact with everyone, accomplishing the "blending" of the Roosevelt community that Blendz wants to accomplish. But again, we were assuming they wanted this so we went around talking with workers at school, finding out if they would enjoy an event like this, what workshops they could offer and what workshops they would like to take. To be honest, I have gotten a lot more excited about having an event like this rather than a fund, but we have to get things moving. I think that we've gotten so caught up in thinking about the workers and what they want, that we're trying to cater to their every need, when in all honesty, they would appreciate the fact that we took the time to organize something specially for them. We have to remember that this is just a prototype and nothing is set in stone. If something doesn't work out, it can be changed. Let's stop pondering and get moving! Go BlendZ!
WHAT?! Teachers? Obsolete? Wednesday started off with a debate on the weird motion that teachers are obsolete. Students as the opposition, teachers as the proposition. It hadn't even started and it was already keeping me on the edge of my seat. The proposition proposed that technology was going to take over education and the world would solely rely on it for the education of humans. When the opposition inqured about third world countries that don't have access to technology and internet, they offered mentors and home-schooling as a solution. However, the opposition wasn't satisfied. First of all, there are a thousand and one distractions that can occur when it comes to the use of technology. How do we know that they're learning and maximizing their time? Also, how can we be certain that the content that children are learning is even true. Or if they're even learning content for that matter. Another point that the opposition pointed out is motivation. Children, teenagers, humans in general need motivation when it comes to doing things. How would a computer motivate humans more than another human. They're not able to push them to higher levels. In the end, it's just a machine. Yes, I agree that technology is useful on so many levels but we can't rely solely on it, especially not for something as vital as education. The proposition also proposed that mentors or supervisors would suffice, especially someone who has known the child since their infancy. They didn't agree that a person who has experienced world cultures would be a good mentor. Well, why would a mentor suffice but not a teacher? How is a child supposed to get a global education when they are being shown ideals by only one person who hasn't experienced the world? I shouldn't be refuting everything that the proposition said because they did have a good point: experiential learning is the way to go. Actually, both houses believed that experience was necessary regardless of their belief on teachers being obsolete or not. To no surprise, the Innovation Academy came up various times during both side's arguments. However, there has to be correct balance between content and experience. Teachers are not obsolete and it's something that we've realized as an academy this semester. On Tuesday, we had a Blendz meeting and realized we haven't learned as much content as we would like to have by this point in the semester. We came to the conclusion that this is because, apart from reading The Lean Startup, we haven't really learned content; we've just gone out and tackled things the way we thought we were supposed to tackle them. In reality, we could have been doing things much more efficiently if we read about things more specific to our business and not just startups in general. Also, we are starting a business without much knowledge in business and businesses. It doesn't sound logical. At all. Not only that but we wanted to have the opportunity to improve our vocab and English by reading (SSR) and having constant Socratic seminars; we wanted to improve our media skills by having the chance to play around with Photoshop; we wanted to become more effective and efficient with our endeavor. This is where Mr. Topf steps in. Recently, he has been more a mentor or supervisor rather than a teacher and we realized that this was not the best idea we have had. the last half of the week. Regardless of not yet having had content "lessons", we have had two successful Socratic seminars and SSR and are already finding ourselves to be more efficient during Blendz time. This takes me back to my main point: we had a supervisor and relied on technology way more than we needed to. Accordingly, we took matters into our own hands, asked Corey to give us lessons and are now ecstatic to try a new structure in the IA.
This week we tried something new, we had simultaneous sales in two different places on campus on Wednesday: in high school during break and lunch and in middle school during lunch. We had never had simultaneous sales in two different places and it was overwhelming, exhaustive and we definitely were not as efficient as we needed to have been. First of all, we had to set up and taken down our stand many times. We spent all morning setting up for the high school break sale and for the middle school lunch sale. Once the break sale was over, we spent most of mid-morning cleaning up the high school stand, taking everything back up to the class, making smoothies for deliveries and setting up again for the lunch sales. This was definitely not the best use of our time. The first sale hadn't even begun and we were already feeling overwhelmed and exhausted from running around all over school. Not only were we setting up the stands with the supplies we had, but we were also looking for equipment that we should have thought of at least the day before. By the end of the day, I, along with most, if not all, of my classmates, were exhausted and felt we couldn't even pick up a finger or get our brains to reflect about the day. At the end of the day, I felt like we had worked double the amount of time and put in double the amount of effort to sell the same amount of smoothies we have sold other times; times which didn't require even a fraction of the effort we put into setting up and taking down the stand. Drew came up with a good solution: when we have sales, each person should be in charge of getting one or two things and should be in charge of setting up those things each time we have a sale. In the long run, we wouldn't have to rely on others to see how we could be helpful because honestly, when we ask around, it makes everything and everyone a lot more overwhelmed. Also, we would become experts in what we would do which would make us a lot more efficient in the long run. Now that I think back on Wednesday, I realize that as soon as the 8:00 am bell rang, we were all running all over the place doing things that we thought were the best use of our time, when in reality, this was not the case. Some people had too many things on their plate when others didn't have much at all. This goes back to the conversation of taking initiative that we had a couple of weeks ago and how we should all start taking more initiative because it is the best way to step up your game and persevere in whatever you're doing; but in all honestly, it was hard to see what had to be done when everyone was all over the place and roles were not defined.
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Author"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." Archives
June 2015
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