A connection I made between Study Abroad, to our classes was in Spanish. In Spanish something that I feel like will be helpful and useful when Studying Abroad, is knowing some of the basic Spanish, which we learned this past semester. I believe that Humanities helped in the process of generating questions for interviews. Another connection is when we read the book, Brave New World. Brave New World was focused on one specific society that was set to their community. There wasn’t a whole lot of freedom. There were specific standards that were meant to be met as them, the characters. There was a Cast System and in each part of that system, different people were categorized and conditioned to be like the rest of their cast. Something majority of the characters had in common was that they were conditioned to love being in their placed cast. There were two characters that didn’t grow up in the society. One of the characters was a son to the second character that didn’t grow up in the society. He was considered a savage because he was someone that the community considered different. Something that we don’t want to do is go into a community and, “Hey! We are from America and we are going to give you something that we aren’t even sure you need.” We want to feel empathy through people in the community. We want to give them something they want and need.
In Math I had quite a few successes, but a lot of challenges. Some Habits of a Mathematician that I used were, being systematic and conjecture and test. I had a somewhat complicated game in the process of setting up and making it work as a whole. I had to take a lot of steps in the order that I set up my game. In my version of mancala, I had to create, individual “pots” to place the marbles in. I started off with the plan of 48 individual marbles. I went through a long process of testing out different placements for the pots and marbles. I actually ended up creating a key for the differences between the x and y variables for the marbles. It took a while to figure out those differences, but conjecturing and testing really helped me. In the process of creating the pots, I wanted to set up the rest of my “board”. I took lots of steps to get to the point I’m at currently.
During the presentations during Exhibition, I was able to learn a lot. My first shift was in Passports. I was never a part of the group, but I was able to quickly learn what I can talk about to our audience. I learned that there are two different kinds of Passports. There’s the card, that allows you to go to Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. Then the booklet, mostly allows you to go anywhere else. There are countries in the Middle East that don’t allow you to come to their country, if you have an Israeli stamp. My presentation for the Documentary went pretty well in my opinion. I actually learned from the audience during Exhibition. In our exhibition, we had 2 showtimes in each shift. Although we didn’t have anyone come in during that last shift, we still talked to the few people that came about our exhibition. I learned that an exhibition has to flow nicely, during that first showtime. An audience member actually came to us and gave us the idea of filling in awkward space during questions by bringing up some questions the audience might have before we start the panel.