Hi all,

My name is Taya and I will be using this website as a place to upload some school assignments, reflect on what I have learned in the past week, and to work on my free inquiry project or a kind of ‘passion project’.

Throughout the first week of classes, I have been extremely overwhelmed but things finally feel like they are beginning to settle which lifts a huge weight off of my shoulders.

This week in EDCI 336 we have been asked to create our website, read through some standards and guidelines, begin deciding what we will be doing for our free inquiry project, and watch the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed”.

I struggled quite a bit with setting up the website and I am still trying to figure out how to maneuver it but I feel confident enough to make this post. My inquiry project has been on my mind a lot and I have been considering many things for my project, the idea that is sticking out to me the most is starting a university student food recipe blog. I struggle with this idea though because although I cook a lot and have many recipes up my sleeve I never cook with measurements. I am going to try to adapt my cooking so that I can figure out how much of each ingredient I put into my recipes. Hopefully, this plan goes smoothly and I am able to continue exploring food recipes for my blog.

I would also like to reflect on and discuss the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed” which we were required to watch this week. I did not look into the documentary at all before starting it and at first, it seemed like the documentary was going to be about how robots are taking over the world and taking people’s jobs. The documentary then moves on to the modern-day education system and explains how it was formed and how it has barely changed since it was created. Continuing on the documentary documents an alternative high school, High Tech High (HTH), in which students are not required to take tests and do not receive grades throughout the year. HTH absolutely amazed me as the teachers are able to teach whatever they like and they do not need to worry about including all the curriculum whatsoever. As a new student who has always been in the regular school system, I think I would find the first month of classes there very daunting. Teachers allow students to run seminars without intervening and they allow students to make big decisions about their assignments. The decision making part of the school really resonated with me as I watched the students struggle to make the decisions. I remember never being asked to make decisions about my learning until college and when I was asked I recall it being very challenging as decision making and knowing what you want is not really taught in our education system. We are more often just told what to do, which is also probably why so many young people struggle with deciding what they want to do with their future. This was also discussed in the documentary when they went to regular public schools and asked students if they would rather be taught so that they can ace the test or if they would rather be taught so that they can actually apply what they’re learning to the real world. All of the students responded by saying they would like to be taught so that they can ace the test. Most of their reasoning was so that they could go to college and keep as many doors open as possible. Their reasoning makes sense but it proves how our education system is flawed. HTH is a great step in the right direction but it will take many more years until this type of learning is applied to all classrooms throughout the nation. I do hope to see a future of hands on learning like in HTH because at the end of their school year you could truly see how proud each of the students were about their end of year assignments they had created.

That is all for this week! Thanks for reading!