The Krispy Kreme Challenge

I remember hearing from Lacy this week that she was encouraging us to share out of class experiences on our blog, so here I go. This past weekend at North Carolina State University there was the Krispy Kreme Challenge. The idea is that you run from the bell tower on campus to the krispy kreme store 2.5 miles away, eat twelve donuts and then run back to the tower. There were right around eight thousand people that participated in the ninth annual challenge. I do run regularly, but I have never tried to eat twelve donuts at one sitting the most I have ever eaten was six at one time. I did not know how to eat them besides just dip them in water to get the glaze off. While I was waiting at the start line people are talking about different stuff, and I end up in talking to a group of guys about random things. Finally we came upon the subject of how to eat them and the veteran said you have to eat them four at a time or there is no way that you will be able to put down that many donuts in one sitting. Once I flew through the first 2.5 miles and got to eat the donuts. I actually found the veteran and observed how he was eating them and I tried emulating him. Once I hit eight I was not feeling too well I was feeling nauseous  to put it simply. I was eating half of my last eight when I urgently needed to use this restroom, so I used this opportunity to dispose of my last part of donuts. I started running back and the first mile was not too bad but the second one I started to feel pretty bad, luckily I ended up in running with some guy similar in age. We helped to push each other to the very end and this really helped me to not stop and also pushed me to be better than I could be by myself. Once I crossed the finish line it was a huge relief and apparently everyone else thought so too. People were hurrying to bushes if they could make it while some were just puking up the donuts in the middle of the street. I assure you that I did not come to this point, but I was flirting with it. I believe that this can be related back to what we have been talking about english and learning. I think this is so because I was able to hear and observe what others were doing when they were eating the donuts and figure out which way would work for me the best. Next year I'm sure that I will do it in a completely different manner than I did this time. I should probably practice eating that many donuts before next time.

Genres of Participation

As I was looking back through my day book to see what I should blog about I found a piece that interested me. A couple weeks ago we were told to go pick a section of a much larger piece by Gee, I choose Genres of Participation because it had an intriguing title. He classified participation into different categories the two main ones were friendship-driven and interest driven. Interest driven helps to describe group's like the geeks, musicians, and the jocks. While friendship driven is more what youth do with their friends. Which one do think is more prevalent in today's youth? If you guessed friendship driven then you were right because a lot of the activities that youth do are with each other and because of each other. Would you want to go to some party without your friends? Wouldn't you be more likely to try something with a friend? I wonder as we as youth transition into a more independent lifestyle and professional do we become more interest driven or friendship driven. I argue that for the career oriented person it is defiantly more interest driven, as you start to join clubs with the same interest and making connections within that given interest. I am not saying that friendship driven is still not heavily prevalent , but that it is more balanced out by interest driven than before in one's youth.

Music and Effect on My Mood

So the other day in english for writing into the day I wrote about music, and the kind of effect it has on my mood and what it does to me. I started going off on how it is like a daybook and it brings back old memories. For instance if I hear a certain song I remember a number of events that are related to that particular song. First Song when you listen to this song what memories come back, did it trigger any at all? For this next one it is a little bit of a throwback, but lets see if it helps bring back any memories second song. I think that music can have a profound impact on how we feel or even what we are thinking about. If we listen to sad depressing music you are not very likely to be in the best mood ever, but on the other hand if you listen to upbeat music it is very hard to stay sad or angry for long. What impact do you think music has on you?

String Games

First class of this semester and we start out by playing with string. Seems to have no relevance to English right? Wrong! It has everything to do with English and how we learn as students. At first you struggle to even know what to do with the string, just like the first week of classes. Once you learn or taught what to do with the string you begin to play around with it and create different things with the string that look really cool. This is when you are figuring out how to learn for a particular class and you experiment with different things to find what is most useful for the particular subject. The final step is figuring out how to do a really cool figure and being able to repeat it over and over again. Which is similar to when you find out to be successful in class and can do it over and over again for classes. Another thing that the string games is challenge you to think in different ways and also try new things with no consequence. This is what I got out of the string game what do you think it's purpose was?

Final Reflection

One of the biggest moments of wobble that I have experienced this semester is my first blog post, but first a little bit of explanation of wobble. Wobble in the manner that I will be using is a moment of weakness or a moment that was difficult. My first blog post scared the living day lights out of me for no reason other than the fact that I was scared of the world seeing what I was saying. Actually I take that back I was not scared of what the world sees, I care more about what people from high school was say if they saw what I posting. I honestly don't know what I feared this because it is foolish. I should not be scared of expressing my ideas and what is going on through my head, should I? Why should I be scared of others, when they don't even remember what I say or do they? Who is has the right to put me down for expressing me? Why should I conform to social norms? Why can't I create my own style? Can I create my own style? What happens when I do break the norm? Would there be consequences for it? What would it take to break the norm? Would the people I was worried about even care if they did see it? Would they even remember my words on this page? Or ever remember this blog at all?

Literacy Narrative Reflective Blog

Documentation of Revision:

• 1st Draft
• 2nd Draft
• 3rd Draft/Final Draft
• Attempt at something that turned into nothing:(sorry for the size had to make it big enough to see) 
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It was hard at first for me to figure out what to write about because I had this image stuck in my head of a story that had to directly relate with writing and our lives. Needless to say I do not have many concrete interesting stories about writing that could even take up a paragraph. Once I figured out that it just had to literacy in general terms. I then thought of the trip I took to Australia summer before Sophomore year in High School. I knew it would make it easier for me because so much had happen on this trip that I could talk about. It was different and it was risky. I revised my first draft into a stream of consciousness story that was was quick and fast moving. I ended up in telling more of the story in the second draft also. I am not saying that my second draft was perfect because by all means it was no where near that. After that one day in class we watched a whiteboard video that was really cool, so I thought it would be cool to do something like that. I knew that there was no way for me to do the whiteboard so I just drew out all my pictures and was planning on making a video. After I made the video I would go back over it with a voice over and tell the story in a stream of consciousness way. I ended up in drawing it out, but I never ended up in making the video. Instead I went through my second draft and read it out loud, and the parts I did not like how they sounded I would change to whatever suited my mood at that time. It was good although probably my grammar in the paper was not the best, and also it was defiantly not 100% stream of consciousness. There were a few sentences  where it did not fit into the overall style. That is okay though because I needed to have those parts in there and without the story would just not make sense. Editing my work is not as much fun as revising though because editing is more of the boring stuff while revising is changing up the way you are telling the story or some other way that is cool interesting. This assignment was really cool. I liked how the story could pretty much be about whatever we wanted, and we as students were not constricted to a certain style or anything it was all us. We could do it however we wanted and whatever we wanted it to be about. 

Ethnography Reflective Post

It was not that difficult to figure out what to write and what to put in the photo montage. I sat down and just thought about how and why people write what they write on the whiteboards. I think it was easy for me because I always find myself thinking about why others do what they do. When I was writing out what to say I originally wrote what I was going to say, and then I went back through and read it. When I was reading it I would edit certain sections that did not sound just right. One thing I think our group struggled with was communicating with each other, but when it came down to it we got it done and I think we did a pretty good job. Next time I would exchange numbers because that is a more direct way to get in contact with someone rather than email or other methods. It was not hard to create a non essay because in previous blog posts I have experimented with presenting ideas in different forms. Which is good because when I first tried doing videos it was hard, and took a long time. When I was working on the ethnography project though it came together pretty quickly and was not hard at all. I think this was good project because it forced us to experiment with expressing ideas in a different way, and also it forced us to collaborate with others.

Here are links to our project:
My Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4C_G8e2K0s
Our Prezi: http://prezi.com/25tfhjv-yfg7/ethnography-project-public-writing/?kw=view-25tfhjv-yfg7&rc=ref-10587848
My editing notebook: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1lN72Wx9W97SWxHRHdjaWw5SkE/edit