Personal Reflection

While reading Systems Thinking, The Systems View of Life and Learning as a Way of Leading, I felt as if I was experiencing many contradictory things at once. I felt as if i was in the past and the future, i was growing and shrinking, peering into a microscope and peering through a telescope all at the same time. I was taken on a journey through the micro and macro while weaving simultaneously through my own internal and external mental models of the world. This immersive reading experience sparked a strong desire in me to seek new perspectives and try to understand what others internal and external mental models look like, what they mean and what they feel like. The concepts and theories presented in the readings have helped me to solidify some of my own thought processes and ways of thinking about the world so I can put them into action and apply new practices into my community work and in turn create change. I do know one thing for sure, I want my contributions to be positive and go towards the common good. The readings reminded about how interconnected everything and everyone is and how fragile life can be. The readings have reinforced my desire to do good, be creative, think of others more than myself, but to not lose touch with self.

I am Samantha pressdee and I will self assess myself for this quarter. I will discuss my attendance, my grade,work ethic and my overall attitude in this class.

Emotional distress, at that moment, far exceeded the past physical pain which I had endured, where, as my body fought for survival, my mind yearned for death. Bound by judgemental onlooking eyes, I stood in the grounds of my school, where they consequently studied me for a sign of vulnerability; begging for me to collapse into my self-fabricated darkness. Like a spineless criminal, I slumped, trembling irrepressibly in the middle of the secluded balcony, where I implored myself to “stop” as I yet again had a crippling anxiety attack which incarcerated my whole body. It was punishing enough to wake up in the mornings, though faced with the immobilizing guilt that my therapist had contacted my parents concerning my suicidal ideation, evaporated my self-esteem. Tears filled my eyes like an overflowing river and cascaded down my face, though freezing in the silence. Proceeding to coerce myself repetitively to “stop it”, as I repulsed that mental illness was the corruptive reality of my life, I cowered as the flashbacks uncontrollably replayed in my mind. I recollected the words that any mother would dread to divulge to their child; that “sometimes I think that it would be better that you were gone, because then, you wouldn’t have to feel this pain”, contradicting this by expressing to me that “I know it’s selfish, but you can’t leave me”.

“Contributes to team goals in and out of meetings” –I rate my performance in this area with a “1”. Although I complete all the assigned tasks on time, I still need to work on advancing the team’s progress by “articulating merits of alternative ideas or proposals.” When working with team, I often feel pressured to deliver my suggestions and ideas because I am afraid that mine is impractical and not substantial compared to others’. In addition, in most cases, my ideas overlap with another team member’s, which further discourages me from sharing mine. From now to the end of this semester, I strive to contribute more of my ideas to the group. I will overcome my fear of expressing my thoughts and new suggestions by actively participating in weekly group discussions. I usually speak once or twice during discussions, but I will aim for a higher frequency and quality in my input. For example, not only I will offer my solutions to the group, but also I will ask questions about and express my thoughts on others’ solutions. Regarding meeting the assignments’ deadlines and producing quality work, I perform very well in that area. However, I must improve in assisting other team members to complete their assignments with “similar level of excellence.” I will use GroupMe to communicate with my team members regarding their progress on the assignments. I may check up on them once in the middle of the week and once near the deadline to make sure that every team member stays on track.

My supervisor/ team leader gave me top rating of 10 except a 7 on academic knowledge. I agree with his ratings except I would lower the rating of academic knowledge to a 5. I started with fundraising for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and recently I started on Save the Children. When I received the rating of a 7, I had been on the start of my third week. I only had the basic knowledge of TNC and wasn’t fully confident to do on my own to overcome objections. After listening and practicing saying my pitching about the charity, I got more comfortable and was able to influence others because I had the education to back up with what people asked.

This week at the Jasper County Health Department, I had a variety of tasks. Due to session cancellations, the first couple hours I was at the clinic, I helped with filing patient files as well as working at the front desk to check in clients and schedule future appointments. I learned a large amount of interesting information just by looking at patients files. A lot of information goes into each file and I was surprised and lucky to have the chance to view these files and learn from them. Patients varied from DUI’s to mental illness. As I spent the first few hours of the day up front working with the women up there, I learned a lot about the billing systems. I had not planned to learn so much about how they charge and when they can charge and when they cannot. I learned the difference between insurance, Medicaid and self-pay. One of the secretaries informed me that they have a crisis counselor always on call. If a client calls in and is talking suicidal the on call counselor will get them help. From talking with her, I learned that in these kinds of cases, clients cannot be charged any fee. I was never aware of this for these situations.

Throughout my rigorous academic career, I have written numerous pieces of literature from research papers, poems, academic essays, and even tweets. In my rhetorical analysis, I will be analyzing a college essay in which I submitted to Bowling Green, Xavier, Toledo, and Ohio University. The reason I selected this piece to analyze is because this essay played a crucial role in determining where I would go to college, and it also describes me as a person, and my love for the city of Cleveland.

The central focus of my lesson was comprehension. I wanted the student to draw on their inferences to better understand the story. My lessons have built on one another because I have focused on different areas and made them more challenging. I first started the lessons with decoding, once the student mastered that I moved onto blending and finally comprehending. Each lesson up to this point has focused on what the student has learned from each tutoring session and building upon those areas to better understand the text by strengthening her fluency. I know that the student does not enjoy reading, therefore I make lesson plans that I believe she will enjoy by using subjects, text, and fun worksheets to engage her learning. I support my student’s literacy learning by creating engaging lessons and finding strengths in her reading that they may not notice. I try my best to compliment and support her progress by praising her when needed. My main focus in the beginning was to create trust. I believe once she trusted me that I want her to succeed, but to also trust me in the sense that she should do her best work, I began to notice that she tried her best once the moment of trust was built. I also try to create rapport with my student by getting to know her better and relating to her for a personal level. How I know if the student has mastered a topic in the lesson plan is based on the summative and formative assessments. The goal of my lessons is to improve my student’s fluency in

There are many expectations at my workplace, some are rather time consuming and slow-paced however, thus far I can say the duties in which I have performed are very enjoyable and insightful. One of my major duties is centered around me shadowing the various staff in the building. In one instance, I shadowed my supervisor, Peter Rego, during one of his physical assessments of a patient who was suffering from persistent shoulder and back pain and from that session alone I gained profound insight in regards to treating pain. Furthermore, in the better interest on my learning and to better grasp the concepts of Physiotherapy, another one of my duties includes reading and studying rehabilitation books. Some of these books include the “How to Treat Your:” series by Dr.McKenzie. These books are rather insightful and I find them to be helpful in terms of furthering my interest and understanding of the work of Physiotherapists. Moreover, reviewing and analyzing the documents of patients at the clinic is another one of the duties I was assigned with at my placement. This is an integral part of a Physiotherapist's job; despite the fact that it may be tedious, it is pivotal that Physiotherapists create, organize , examine specific documents in order to effectively develop rehabilitation plans for their patients.

The first few weeks of this class when we were going through all the essays we were going to write, I’ll be honest, I was a little scared to see where this semester was going to take us. But, now we are here and I feel very confident about all the work that has been done so far. Picking a topic for papers is always one of the hardest things for me to do, I tend to be a pretty good writer, but I get really indecisive when deciding what topic to write about. Eventually I decided to write about something I am passionate about and something I feel I have a a decent amount of knowledge on, politics. I chose the topic of raising minimum wage to learn more about it and because it is something which is very heavily debated in our society right now. I am a fiscal conservative which is why I chose the argument to keep minimum wage the same/lower it is because it coincides with my political beliefs. In my opinion raising the minimum wage leads to inflation, job loss, and raises the cost of literally every consumer good. Many people nowadays only get their news from one side of the spectrum which is why my goal was to show people who may only look at one side of the spectrum the other side of things. For this reason it was interesting researching all the groups of stakeholders, and ultimately it led me to writing an even stronger paper. Ultimately I am not looking for any specific reaction out of anybody I just want to educate people on some facts which I feel are important to making an

Heading into the first semester of college, many students do not know what passion of theirs they want to pursue for the rest of their lives, let alone the steps to achieve a realistic way to follow it and ideally make a living doing so. However, when I began my first year at Minot State University, I knew I wanted to continue my journey in English, although, I did not know whether I wanted to lean towards education or, in a perfect world, become the editor of a newspaper. Coincidentally, my Honors’ Community class’ final project required choosing something to learn about, and simply, learning about it. Since I had already known about English education, being that I had been taught by them for more than a decade of my life, I chose to learn about the ins and outs of “Becoming an Editor.” Doing so, I not only learned more about being the editor of a newspaper, but I also related more to the Honors’ experience at MSU, reinforced my passions, and clarified my future.

Throughout my high school career, I have been able to greatly develop my writing. Prior to my senior year, I was already quite confident about completing research papers, which have been required in a number of my CHS classes. I also had a lot of experience writing expository essays. After all, the process of writing a thesis and then breaking up an essay into distinct sections has been preached ever since elementary school. Going into my senior year of high school, I still had a lot to learn in narrative and timed writing. My greatest improvement this year was in the the timed writing category. Before recently, I had always struggled to come up with enough ideas to write a logical essay in a short amount of time. This year, perhaps because of the sheer volume of timed essays that we wrote, I was able to develop a sense of calm and confidence at the start of each assessment. Under these conditions, I could think more clearly and logically. I am still struggling to master the narrative, even if that isn’t reflected in my grade. For me, it is always a very difficult task to start a narrative, and if I am not careful, the story quickly becomes repetitive and dull. Again, more practice should help fix this.

This week I participated in a individual class exercise for my communications class. The exercise was to find personality and identity traits about myself. First I will identify specific traits that were similar in three appraisals. Second I will discuss differences in appraisals. Finally, I will describe what accounts for differences and similarities, and what it illustrates about how well we know ourselves.

I first came face to face with finance in a school project where I designed a Christmas product and sold it in the school stalls. I managed the budgeting and designed part of the product. Then I became even more engrossed into finance as I attended the investment Banker challenge where my group came second on the return on investment category by 0.01. I was the trader so I had to bid on commodities and shares, reacting quickly to real-time information, demonstrating my analytical and decision-making skills.

Introduction: Transitioning from high school to university is a big adjustment for many students. To help with this change, the book “Becoming a Master Student” provides students with concepts that can help them become more successful in their university career. This reflection will outline some of the articles that BMS has that enhances the student experiences not only academically, but also personally.