Quarter 3 Personal Narrative

Iris Rollins-Greene
Exhibition Date: 3.3.19

This Quarter, I am still carrying on with my studies within the subjects of english, social
studies and art. For art, I am starting to work within the responding standard more since that is
one of the parts of the art proficiency I have not worked on as much and I have began my
second painting. I have written the first draft of my research-based paper on the history of tarot
cards, and am working with a list of english artifacts that are required to acquire all of my english
credits as well as carrying on creating my own version of the major arcana. In social studies I
am working on the proficiencies culture, civic literacy, history and economics, by learning about
influential women throughout history, the three waves of feminism and the wage gap.
Throughout this year of independent studying, I have came to many realizations around
working methods and planning for different projects I want to do. My ways of planning and
organization have changed a lot throughout this year, since when one method starts to not be
very effective I have to find a new one that works. There is not one right way to do things when
you are an independent learner. Everyone’s minds and ways of perceiving things are different,
and everyone evolves with time. I have learned to ask myself “is this working?” quite often,
because if that way of planning and executing does not work, I must change it to one that does.
You have a lot of power over your learning in pilot, and with this control you have to
advocate for yourself and learn to manage your time much more than if you were in regular
schooling. It is completely up to you whether or not you are going to do the work since you
choose the time to complete it and you design the work you do. I am constantly learning
different ways to be efficient with my time, as well as frequently coming upon issues that I have
to work around to keep moving through my studies. An example of this would be when I have a
lot of open time throughout the school day to do work. It is extremely easy to go and talk with
peers as well as go down holes of distraction when I just get out of a class or run into them in
the halls, and I am currently trying to find ways to stay focused. Breaks are necessary to be
productive, but my breaks can be too long sometimes. It gets to a point where I have to just sit
down and do whatever I have to do, because I am not always going to have a sense of when I
should end my breaks and there comes a time when I have to get to work. A system I have
used a decent amount this quarter is I will set a very short term goal for something that I need to
get done, for example read and annotate half of a piece of writing, and when I am done with that
I will take a break, and then get back to work and complete the next task. I learned that short

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term goals can be just as important as long term goals, because the little things you do add up
to complete the bigger picture of your work. Something else I have realized is that when I leave
too much wiggle room in my schedule I tend to procrastinate more.
Going with the theme of procrastination, This quarter in seminar, we have began to
make three week goals. Amy told us about this study that was done that showed that if you are
given a goal and a 6 week window for completion versus a 3 week window for completion, it is
possible to get that same 6 week goal completed in 3 weeks. We began to make three week
goals, and would use templates for each week to plan out what we were going to do throughout
each day. We were making short term goals to complete the long term ones.
All year, I have had a goal of writing a research based paper on the history of tarot cards
for my english study. This goals has taken me much longer than it had to, and I decided to make
that my number one priority for my first three week goal. I made an outline of the paper, drawing
out each paragraph and stating what their contents would be. Then, I distributed those
paragraphs between the days of my calendar template so it would not be overwhelming to
complete. I then began to write, some days I would not have enough time to complete what I
had written down in my calendar, but that just meant I had to complete it along with the other
planned tasks the following day. I was able to get the first draft of my paper complete at the end
of the three weeks, and I am now working on revisions and making it get up to 1,500 words.
For the second round of three week goals, I planned on finishing a wage gap
presentation I have been working on for my social studies topic, as well as completing my tarot
card for the empress and writing down descriptions of cards and their meaning in a google
document I created. This is the week I got mono, but I managed to get my presentation for the
wage gap done, complete the tarot card and do almost all of the card descriptions and
meanings, with an exception of a few areas of some cards. Because I was sick and obviously
was not planning around that happening, I had to do more work within the last week of my goal
completion, but I was able to get most of it done, and was able to show a small group of people
what I completed the following Monday.

In my english study, I have continued with my study in tarot cards. I’ve spent a lot of time
this quarter doing research for my paper and completing the first draft. During my research, I
had found contradictions in the information on tarot’s roots, so my paper is including both pieces
of information I found, and I address in the beginning of the paper that that there are multiple
claims all equally valid around the same time periods that have to do with the evolution of this
deck of cards. I am doing this because I want to include all of the possibilities, since I can not

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decide which one is correct. I am continuing to revise this paper after some feedback from my
english advisor, Chris, and am in the process of getting the paper up to 1500 words, to do this I
will either go more in depth in some areas of the paper if possible and also try to find more
information on some parts of the history of these cards that I do not have much research on.
For making my tarot cards, I have completed the 4th card, the empress, and am
beginning to create the 5th, the emperor. Since my focus in english throughout this quarter was
to produce more writing I was only to be able to get this much of my cards done. I connect these
cards with writing by making a chart that goes along with the tarot deck consisting of the upright
and reversed meanings, and then a description of the physical card I have made that connects
the meanings of the cards to the card itself. I have made a small physical book to go along with
these cards, but I have just been focused on doing everything on an online document because I
like how organized it is, and once I have everything written in the document I can then copy it
into the book. Also, because I am doing it in the document my advisors can view what I have
done easily.

In my History study, I have started to research the first wave of feminism with the
suffragette movement. I read and annotated a collection of pieces of writing about the
conferences at Seneca falls, which were the first mostly women groups to get together and talk
about women’s rights changing to be equal with men. This was around the time when slavery
was still active in America, and a group of women at an anti slavery conference were being
discriminated against by the men, and they decided to form their own conference to gain more
respect from men and extend their own rights to be equal with men. Women were “owned” by
their fathers before they got married, and then their husband would have ownership over them.
They could not get a good education, and were not expected to accomplish many things
throughout their lives. Most definitely not as much as a white man. I plan on gathering more
information on this movement to write a short paper about the three waves of feminism, starting
with the suffragettes, and I am adding Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, (two
women who were very active in the suffragette movement) to my influential women slideshow.
I have finished my wage gap presentation, and am going to present it as well as having
a conversation with the people attending right before my exhibition. I have found out some ways
that make the wage gap the way it is, and also have found median wages of both men and
women of the same ethnicities and races for 2016 and 2017. I am going to ask questions to
make people think about why the wage gap is so present still in this time and ways we can
change that.

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 In my art studies, I have progressed a lot on my painting which is the second one out of
my three part series. When I was sick I could paint so I got a lot of hours of work in during that
time, and I am trying to work on shading the figures more After having an art critic with the other
pilot art students I was given some good advice on how to work on shading, like choosing a
direction I want the light to be coming from and also looking at anatomy books to work on
making things more realistic.
I have finished my poem that goes with my paintings, and have recorded a video with
Kristina of us reading it since it is a two person poem. I will be showing this video at my
exhibition. It is very personal to me because of how much I relate to it. I was not expecting this
poem to be coming from such a personal place but it ended up relating to me a lot. I think it is
because I have a very strong emotional connection to the art I have made this year and a lot of
my creativity comes from emotions I have and want to express.
Something I have to work on more for art is responding, and I have a book that was
written by the guerilla girls that talks about the history of western art, and am going to read that
and write reflections about it moving forward. I also am going to start doing weekly art
reflections that I was doing in the beginning of the year but then drifted away from when I
started to work on creating art more. I think it’s important to analyze other people’s art because
interpreting other’s creations and taking in other’s art is just as valuable as being able to be
creative on your own.

My emotional and physical health has had an effect on the way that I have worked this
quarter, not that it hasn’t in the past, but this quarter was much more intense since I had
mononucleosis, and was very sick for about two weeks. Within this time I was unable to do
much work, and I could not push myself to be more active since my sickness would only come
back more severe. I also had some issues in my personal life that made it hard to get into a
good place for working but I have started to work on advocating more to help get myself back in
a healthy space so my working self, emotional self and physical self are happy and thriving.

Bibliography
English-

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-Connolly, Eileen. Tarot: A New Handbook for the Apprentice. Vol. 1, Career
Press, 2008.
-Decker, Ronald, and Michael Dummett. A History of the Occult Tarot. Duckworth
Overlook, 2002.
-Hughes, Matt. Ethereal Visions Illuminated Tarot Deck. U S Games Systems, pp.
1-128.
-Sosteric, Mike. "A Sociology of Tarot." The Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol.
39, 2014, pp. 358-92.
-The 21 Faces of God. Produced by Robert Bonomo, 2018.

History -
Research on the wage gap-
-Dorman, Jennifer. Are Women Paid Fairly? Farmington Hills, Greenhaven Press,
2013.
-Hegewisch, Ariane, et al. "The Gender Wage Gap: 2017 Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity." Institute for
Women's Policy Research, 7 Mar. 2018, iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-2017-race-ethnicity/. Accessed 10
Jan. 2019.
-"The Equal Pay Act of 1963." U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/epa.cfm. Accessed 10 Jan. 2019.
-Fact Sheet- Pay Secrecy. Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Aug. 2014,
www.dol.gov/wb/media/pay_secrecy.pdf. Accessed 24 Mar. 2019.
-"Whitened Résumés: Race and Self-Presentation in the Labor Market." Interview
by Sonia Kang et al. Administrative Science Quarterly, 22 Jan. 2016,
www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%20R2%20Accepted.pdf.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2019.
Research on the suffragette movement-
- Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. Not for Ourselves Alone. Alfred A. Knopf,
1990.
-The Seneca Falls Convention: The Women’s Rights Movement Is Born

Art-
The Guerilla Girls. The Guerilla Girl's Bedside Companion to the History of
Western Art. Penguin Books, 1998.

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