Richard Horn

Richard Horn

Dr. Ishii and Ms. Deare

Math Field Day

April 18 2018

Math Field Day Reflection

I woke up and went to school on a Saturday (yay math field day), it was overall not that bad just felt like another

school day. Once I got there I moved around some tables and brought some water that I hoped to use for

the weights on the engineering project. After a quick discussion with David we realized that using water

bottles as weights wasn't a viable solution and instead decided that we would just test the boats in

smaller crates of water which would enable us to use the weights we had previously planned on using

while also eliminating the hassle of fishing the weights out of the pool. After we figured this out I went

to the MMLH for introductions, and helped to usher the children into their respective rooms. After the

kids were settled I realized that since I wasn't signed up to proctor a room I didn't have anything to do

for the next couple hours so I just bounced around. Eventually the engineering project came around and

that went off without any problems, all the kids surprisingly were very good at recording how many materials

they were using. In hindsight to make the process easier I would have changed how we counted the score

from materials. After the engineering project was finished, I stuck around for a little bit to clean up and the day

was done. RIP Math Field Day 2018.

&&&

So walking in today it was just like any other day. I woke up today at 6 and then got ready and drove to school.
I walked down the staircase it was a little colder than I would have liked, and then
I went into the H building. I got to the meeting room before the teachers did so it was locked
and I had to wait outside. I used this time to go get some water, at around 8:00 AM I came back
and sat down and the day began. We opened up with Dr. Ishii writing a to-do list on the whiteboard,
and as a group we got to work discussing the last minute details of the event. We projected a schedule
and job chart and Isabella recorded notes on who would be doing what and what events would be
occuring during what times. After about an hour or so of this discussion we finished. It was a very
mundane day, nothing extraordinary happened. Nothing really stuck out to me it was a aggressively
normal day, I was indifferent to the work we did today. It wasn’t very exciting and I’ve never been
one to enjoy logistical details. If at any point I felt connected to the community this contrived
reflection on the connection has decimated the sentiment. I already knew how to talk going into the
day, so unfortunately utilizing my ability to speak with others didn’t really teach me any new skills.
Having a meeting about the details of the event wasn’t challenging, so nothing in that department.
I didn’t really learn anything about myself, but writing this reflection did reinforce my dislike of
busywork. I think there were moments were we weren’t as responsive to what was happening as
a group (people were looking at their computers / whatever else) so we could definitely fix that,
however, that is a very minute detail that is easily solved. I contributed my fair share, and I didn’t
make any mistakes. So I don’t see where I could improve, maybe on my attitude but thats really it.

----------
Today was incredibly boring to be frank, because of the nature of our project all of the real work has already been done only leaving us to invite schools to come to our event. It took very little time to call people, and that's precisely what I did. I thought the work was just like most other work I do, it was work I did it, but felt no real satisfaction from it. There is no real community to speak of, and if there is perhaps one of math students I have no real connection to it, I made some phone calls to invite people to our event today, that hardly qualifies me to be a member of this community if it does exist. If I was unable to pick up a cell phone and dial a number, and needed to develop new skills to do so, God I pray that I can graduate high school. Today was actually very challenging at times I wondered if I would have the mental fortitude to pick up my phone and push in the correct number into my phone before speaking (just sarcasm we had a really easy day). I demonstrated integrity in that I came to school today, courage in talking to strangers, and compassion in not sounding robotic and monotone as I spoke to those strangers. While I wish I gained some new insight on my character through my brief phone conversations with the admins of other schools, I have yet to figure out how that reflects on my character and personality. I think that our group is working optimally, our work has been so far completed on time, and there isn't much else you could be asking for.




-----------

2/14/18

Today was a very lackluster day for me. It felt like a normal school day, but slightly more lax. I think the most interesting, and "skill intensive"/"persevering through challenges" was when David and I had to figure out the optimal setup for pulling the boats across the pool. Overall I didn't think this day was very interesting, and the work was rather boring since we have reached the stage where it is the tedious testing and error proofing. I felt no more connected to Sage today, than any other day to be frank. Although, it was fun to drive around with Calvin to deliver letters, but I don't count that as real work. During that trip, it was interesting to think about how there are other schools so different than ours, like the Jewish High School just down the road. I think my character and personality haven't radically changed, or changed by any degree between 8:00 AM and 1:30 PM today, and I didn't really gain any new insight on my own character. Given how this was a rather mundane day, it didn't exactly present opportunities for me to demonstrate compassion, courage, or integrity. From my perspective, I think that the group is running near to how efficient we are ever going to get. Everyone in the group is capable of doing their work, and our project doesn't demand frequent communication between members. At best, maybe if everyone suddenly had a surge of motivation to just do more work, it would improve the productiveness of our day, but beyond that I don't have any ideas for how we could improve.

• 
  

---------------------

Hi, my name is Richard Horn I am a junior at Sage Hill School and I am a part of the Math Field Day Team this year. When we were first offered a list of all the Service Learning Groups, Math Field Day stood out as the most interesting project. Math Field Day seemed interesting to me because of the potential for me to help encourage interest in STEM in middle school students.

-----------


When the day first started, since I had not been paying enough attention to where my group was supposed to meet I was unsure of where I was supposed to go. Fortunately I was standing in front of the right door. Once we got inside it was pretty much what I expected, Dr. Ishii and Ms. Dear opened up the day by formally running us through how they day has gone in years prior and the format of the event. I sat there and happily listened to how the day went in the past, and as I heard the obvious glaring mistakes previous groups made I wondered how hard it would be to make this year’s Math Field Day more successful than the previous ones. The day itself was nothing incredible, it felt like a normal school day except of doing my classwork I was working on Math Field Day things. I went into a classroom in the h building turned on my laptop, sat down, and got to work. All in all it was a normal day. If I was being honest the most interesting thing to me was seeing how Ms. Dear talked. I’ve never had a class with Ms. Dear before, but I’ve had a class with everyone else in the room (Dr. Ishii and all the other students). The work itself was decently fun, I got to work with my some of my friends on a engineering challenge for little kids and that was fun to do. I didn’t face any real challenges today, everything was within the scope of my ability, nor did this day challenge any of my values, or present to me a opportunity to demonstrate my compassion, courage, or integrity anymore than a standard day of school does. This day hasn’t shifted my perspective or life, or allowed me to gain anymore insight about myself. While I don’t think I my character has changed as a result of today I do think I can incorporate how my day included some of the other six C’s. Collaboration, in any group work based setting you must work with others. Communication, in order to do any group work you must effectively convey your ideas to other people. Cross Cultural competency, I don’t think I displayed this today because I did not interact with any outside cultures. Critical thinking and creativity designing challenges for middle school students requires both of these traits.

--------------------

Today was successful, I completed all my goals for the day, and overall everyone else made significant progress. Most of my day was spent fixing our blog, and making it more friendly for visitors. Before our entire blog was just a single page that listed all of our posts, but now every team member has their own page. There were also a lot of little bugs that would sometimes prevent articles from being displayed properly. Working on the blog was a very solitary activity, which restricted the amount of interaction I needed to have with my team members, but after I completed the blog I switched back to working on the Engineering challenge with David. We decided to settle on the challenge being making a boat. I had a lot of fun working with David on this challenge, and it offered me opportunities to use my creativity. I made little use of the other C’s, but it took a lot of creativity to design the challenge.


---------------

Richard Horn

Dr. Ishii

Service Learning

10 January 2018

Service Learning

Today was a very tranquil and relaxing day, the other days characterized by the loudness and almost chaotic nature of people shouting about their tests, and working on their challenges it was nice to have some contrast and have a very laid back day. The first thing we did was check in and see how all the groups were doing, after that we Ms. Dear and Dr. Ishii checked in with all of us to see how sending “save the dates” to schools were going. It turns out that most of us haven’t actually sent anything to our schools, and that we urgently needed to send out the details to schools we were interested in attending.

After that we had a nice, long, and quiet work block where most people went off on their own nestled behind a computer doing work. Given how all the tests were completed that meant that people didn’t need to do much collaboration which led to a very quiet day. Out of all the C’s the one I used most was creativity in perfecting the engineering project. Today was the day we had planned to do a trial run of the engineering project, but after our project faced some scrutiny from Dr. Ishii it turned out that we had a lot of issues with the planning of the project (rules, loopholes, and efficiency). The actual execution of the trial run was very fun, but it took up a much longer time than what was acceptable. We took nearly an hour to run three boats across the pool, something we wouldn’t have the luxury of being able to do on the actual day of.