Reflections and Images

Recently, I attended my first teaching assistant seminar for ATDP Berkeley. ATDP Berkeley is a summer camp where middle school to high school students attend classes for credit or to make their summer productive. The weekly seminars are designed to train teaching assistants so they can be good role models for the students. In other words, the seminars target on life skills that include peer to peer relationships. The topic for the first seminar was on motivation. We watched a 5 minute clip from Cambridge University about motivation. What made it a very insightful video was when the person said, "It is wrong for adults to ask 'How can I motivate students?' Instead, the question should be 'How do I set the conditions that can help motivate my students?'" Looking back, this totally made sense. In the end, motivation is internal and cannot be forced upon. No matter how much you tell someone to stop doing something because it is bad, nothing will happen until the...

Summer has been less stressful, but I still have assignments and tasks that I am expected to do. Some reasons why I feel an imbalance is that I stopped some habits that I did over the school year. Because I have too many goals, I fail to prioritize and feel like I am being pulled in many directions. This post won't be long compared to the other blogs. A habit I should revive is using the calendar. During April and May, I used the monthly calendar every day by writing out how many hours I was going to spend on each task. I did this for each week on Sunday so I had a clear idea of where my time would be allocated on each day of the week. Now, I do daily plans but it is very helpful to have a weekly plan so I won't have the tendency to procrastinate on my assignments. Writing down a weekly or monthly plan helps relieve a lot of stress because your plan is written on paper. Also, it is very satisfying to make tick marks when you completed the number of hours for a specific task.

A bad habit that I have a hard time quitting is thinking in the past instead of the present. These types of thoughts usually come in the form of regretting past decisions. Most of these decisions are academic ones, such as not doing well on an exam. Even if such event happened a month or two ago, my mind can't stop but ask myself questions that only worsen my mood by making me more anxious and self-critical. For instance, I did not do well on the free response section on the AP physics exam in May. It is already June and people who have taken the test with me are probably enjoying their summer while this bad test experience drifts in my mind. A common analogy that meditation practitioners like to compare clouds as thoughts. They drift and are in your presence, but they are temporary and then vanish. Unfortunately, I cling on to them and let the cloud follow me where ever I go. Thinking about hypothetical situations about how I could have changed the past in that particular moment i...

Side note: I tend to write based on my stream of consciousness, so that may explain why I sound very redundant and disorganized. The first week of summer has already passed and that means around 10% of my summer has ended. There is no doubt that I have less stress than the normal school day and can spend more time on other activities such as piano. However, how I envisioned my summer days was not what I expected it to be. I guess it has to do with the fact that I set expectations that are more suited for the school year and not for summer break. These goals are more on a rigid, tight schedule that requires regular commitment. Although I made consistent progress on some areas, there were some goals that I didn't achieve on a daily basis. A possible reason this is happening is because I naturally have the tendency to relax during the summer by sleeping an extra hour or two. I think what is lacking from my summer is spending more time in solitude or exploring places nearby. In the...

Mindfulness has always been an issue for me. I have experimented with apps such as Headspace and Calm, but I failed to remind myself on a daily basis to meditate in the morning. Whenever I go running or biking, random thoughts would pop up that have nothing to do with the present moment. Instead of appreciating the blue sky and nice weather, I am absorbed in my thoughts. Although some thoughts are quite neutral, they can cause some anxiety. For instance, I would sometimes think about standardized tests.  It is as if I am physically in one world, but I choose to enter another world. But that is not the worst thing about not being mindful. Not being in the present moment has really affected my ability to focus when playing the piano. Piano is a type of flow activity for me that requires creative thinking, imagination, and trying to immerse yourself in an imaginary world that you try to create in your head. With a scattered mind, that type of experience is hard to find. When I start m...

The 2018-2019 school year has been overall quite good. I have changed a lot compared to last year because I now participate in more types of activities outside of school. Before, I was restricted to few activities. Some of these lessons can be found in my older posts, but I find it nice to summarize my entire school year. All of the pieces of advice I list here sound very obvious and cliche, but I just wanted to connect these experiences to my own normal life experiences. 1. Failure in the beginning is normal Before, I would take failure very personally and think that there was something wrong with me as a person because my project wasn't working well. I avoided these hands on projects because I didn't want to end up building something that didn't work. After doing Science Olympiad, my attitude changed a lot. Despite the obstacles I faced in Science Olympiad I learned that they were good signs that I was being challenged. After being involved in such activities for 4 mo...