Time Strategies for School

 For this blog post I have included a picture of a clock, because I will be discussing time management skills. Time management is an extremely important skill that one needs to have in order to work effectively and manage stress especially as a student. In this post I want to focus on the one thing I do in order to ensure I have time when working on school assignments. What I have found is that the most effective way I manage my time is by starting an assignment as soon as I get it.

 For example, when I started working on this class I made sure to read the expected completion time for the orientation week assignments. This way I was able to gauge how difficult each assignment would be, thus allowing me to effectively plan out how long it will take me to complete said assignments and plan out when I will be able to complete the assignments for my other classes. Additionally, this tactic ensures that I am able to stick to the rest of my schedule, because I will not be blindsided by the unperceived difficulty of an assignment. However, following this tactic does not mean that I do not sometimes have to work up until the deadlines for some projects. But for the most part, I have a piece of mind that I will be able to get my schoolwork done by being able to stick to my schedule, thus causing me to have decreased stress and more time to do things other than schoolwork. 

Monkey clock

The Future of Technology

For today's blog post I have included a picture of a teenager playing solitaire on his new Microsoft computer, because this blog post is about technology. It is a fact that technology has gotten more and more powerful as humanity has progressed. In the past it would take days or weeks on horseback for a single letter to reach its destination. But today we can do what once took weeks in a matter of seconds. And one begins to question if it should be this easy and also how far should technology go. How long until we are living in a dystopia in which humanity is too lazy to even take a few seconds to send a message? And what will happen to humanity when the final person managing the servers gives up a life of work for one of leisure?

On a different note, I am familiar with most of the technology that is available for this class. And although I have never used blogger or written blog post in the past I found it pretty easy to get the hang of. I found that the blogger interface is easy to get the hang of and writing a blog is similar to using many other applications I have used in the past. For example, blogging is similar to writing in a Microsoft word document and posting is as easy as a click of a button.

A boy using his computer

Assignments I'm Looking Forward to

Hello everyone, for today's blog post I have included a picture of a man telling stories to children in hopes that I will both get to hear others' stories as well as tell my own throughout this semester. Storytelling to me is extremely important and interactive because of the different roles it gives the audience and storyteller. The storyteller on one hand seeks to engage the audience with their own stories or interpretations of stories. The audience, on the other hand, seeks to interact with the storyteller through active listening and perhaps by eventually creating their own stories. This phenomenon highlights the beauty of storytelling. That is, the roles of the storyteller and audience are interchangeable.

This leads me to the assignments I am most excited about. The assignment I am most excited for is the storytelling one. This is because I will be able to write engaging stories while still learning about Indian Epics. And since we have basically free reign for how we want to adapt each story I am sure that each story will be fresh making sure this assignment will never get old. I am also excited about commenting on other people's blogs, because I will get to read about other people's viewpoints of the stories we have read for that week.

Storytelling bring inspiration

The Main Obstacle to the Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck's growth mindset, the idea of celebrating students who try and fail rather than those who stay in their comfort zone, is something I have heard of yet never really seen in practice. And it is not really all that surprising due to the way that schools design their curriculum and, more importantly, their evaluation metrics. In the majority of public schools students are given letter grades as ways to determine how they did in class, and, while I do not have much of a problem with letter grades as a way to determine how well a student learned the topics of the class, I have a problem with how these grades are calculated. That is, primary through the use of high-stakes tests.

I personally believe that the way testing is done in the majority of educational environments is a main obstacle to the growth mindset. This is because during a test you are under an enormous amount of pressure to be able to regurgitate what you have learned in the class in a short amount of time. This could be an explanation for why students who do not have a growth mindset shut down when faced with a challenge. Because they have been taught that if they do not know the answer right away then they have failed. 

I believe that working on projects may be a better alternative to testing in many cases. This is because often projects are not just about learning vocabulary that one will forget moments after turning in a test, but instead it really makes the students use what they have learned in a not so high-stakes environment. 

A high-stakes test

Introduction: Caleb Lagge

Hi I am Caleb Lagge and I am a junior studying computer engineering and mathematics. I chose to study these topics, because I like coding and math, specifically statistics. And I hope to one day work as a quant. While I enjoy my major for the most part, the primary problem is that it is very time consuming, so I do not often have a lot of free time. But the bright side is that I do enjoy working hard since the payoff is often very rewarding.

To tell a little more about myself, I am a pretty big gym rat, so my free time is often spent working out with my friends at the Huff. If you read my favorite place post you will find that this is also my favorite place. My other free time is normally spent watching sports with my roommates. My favorite teams being the Minnesota Vikings, Minnesota Twins, OKC Thunder, and the Calgary Flames. Unfortunately, none of these teams have won championships in my lifetime, but I still have a somewhat foolish hope that next year will be their year.

My favorite movie would have to be Gladiator which is kind of ironic because I normally would prefer to watch a comedy or something much more lighthearted. However, what I like about Gladiator is that it has a good story with a nice mix of action, and while it is not a comedy there are some funny moments, at least in an ironic sense.

I am looking forward to taking this class, because it is not like any class I have taken. Instead of an engineering class where there are set rules and procedures one must take, this class gives its students the opportunity to be creative and go about the assignments in their own ways. To me this is fun as the blog posts I make are truly my own. 

A Gladiator

Storybook Favorites

The first storybook I was inspired by was the one about Bigfoot titled "Discovering the Lost". This is because I like the way that Bigfoot was portrayed. Not as some monster but, instead, as something that was friendly yet cautious. Essentially, he wanted to have fun with the person he met in the woods and he was willing to take a risk to accomplish this. The story also gives insight to the unknown. Often times when an idea is unknown there is a fear and uncertainty surrounding it. In this story Bigfoot is afraid of humans and that fear is the primary reason he does not want anyone to know about him. At the same time, it can be said that if Bigfoot was discovered people would fear him as well leading to Bigfoot's demise.

Discovering the Lost

The next storybook I was inspired by was titled "Alice's Journey". I liked this one because it was a somewhat comedic take on Alice in Wonderland. I particularly liked how the author focused on Alice's point of view as she traveled throughout Wonderland, and I thought it was funny how instead being confused about the place she was and the creatures that inhabited it, she instead was often just simply annoyed about those she met. Additionally, I like how the author has a large focus on how Alice would react if she had access to social media and technology while traveling through Wonderland.

Alice's Journey

The final storybook I was inspired by was titled "Apsara Stories". I liked these stories, because of their comedic take on serious Indian Epics. What I especially like is how the author takes what seems like serious events and gives it a different perspective by telling it in an overly dramatic way. And in doing so, there is somewhat of a detachment between the events that transpired and how they actually happened.

Apsara Stories

Legendary Bigfoot hunter Bobo

The Gym is My Favorite Place

 The gym is my favorite place to go.

DOOM Guy Workout

My First Post

Test blog