1. Explain how you grew as a writer in this project.

Be specific, go back through your

essay to find evidence. If possible, compare specific examples from an earlier draft
with your final draft, and discuss how your essay changed, and why those changes
made it a stronger piece of writing.

From the first draft to my final draft of my Adolescence essay “ The Brilliance
Beneath” I went through much trial and error, correction and revision, and all-around
growth to create one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever created. During one of the many
rounds of critique a class TA gave me feedback about the word Darkness, I had used it
around 30 or more times throughout the essay and after reading through the essay I
completely agreed that I needed to liven up my vocabulary. At first, I found myself
struggling to find synonyms for darkness, my brain was looking at the problem very
linearly. After thinking about my lacking vocabulary and doing a few google synonym
searches I was able to come up with some quite interesting synonyms, one of my favorites
being tenebrosity. This example seems to be limited only to this essay, however, it
represents my new abilities and awareness while editing and rereading my work in general.
Previously, I may have written a paper, scanned it once, then ran it through Grammarly then
just called it good. But just after I went through and carefully read my essay to make the
vocab more interesting I started noticing other mistakes, bland wording, and some things in
general that I wanted to change to make my writing more interesting and better all around.
While writing my adolescent essay I also grew significantly in my storytelling, using show
don't tell and hunting for forbidden verbs. Writing interesting, vivid stories isn't easy,
especially while I'm taking journalism, a class that encourages you to write as little as
possible. My rough draft stories looked something like, “My family was shocked and angry.”,
boring. And I knew this, but what I had trouble with was how to fix this problem. After we
worked on “Show don't tell” in class I finally had a solution to my boring verbs. So I began
hunting for all the forbidden verbs in my work, until the work resembled, “ My Parents
gasped and stared at me, speechless, while my sweet mannered brother glared at me as if I
had just burnt our house down.” After I had a solution to the boring words, and after I
realized how much spicier my stories could sound I applied the show don't tell concept to
any story I wrote, giving all of them the pizzaz they deserve. I could now be happy with the
effect my writing had.
 2. What are your largest take-aways from this project and how have they transformed
the way you see the world or yourself? This could be from any part of the project:
the content, the essay and mask, the design thinking process, exhibition prep, or the
exhibition itself.

My three largest takeaways after completing the adolescent project are how truly open
parents and other adults are to hearing our side, the ways that creativity and individualism
can shine through everyday things, especially during this project. The first of these stood
out to me predominantly at the exhibition. Being a project manager I was in and out of quite
a few of the rooms and in the middle of everything during the exhibition, I remember
looking into the skits room, filled with many students' families. The families watched
excitedly as the skit commenced and at the end, all of them were fully engaged with the Q
and A. They all genuinely wanted to hear a teenager's insight into adolescence, and learn
how they could better support their adolescent. I saw this enthusiasm again when parents
entered the cross-generational conversation room, where they both openly participated in
the conversation and listened to the students' perspectives, and had an open dialog. Also,
at the exhibition and before it, I could see the creative efforts put into the mask work and
the group exhibition projects. Each mask was unique, even if some represented similar
messages, like stereotypes, every person incorporated their take on adolescents. Although
parents may not always be open to everything adolescents do, or they may have trouble
understanding adolescents, the exhibition was a great way for parents to understand the
chemistry of the adolescent brain and to start opening a healthy dialogue, and you could
see parents gratefully using the exhibition as an opportunity for such things. I even heard
one parent saying that it was like free therapy. Walking around the mask room the morning
after the exhibition I could appreciate the solid facts of what Seigle had said in brainstorms
about adolescents and creativity. Now, they weren't meaningless words, I could see the care,
creativity, and out-of-the-box ideas that made up the museum of masks. This creativity was
also incorporated with academics while my peers worked on their exhibition projects, a
great mix of interesting interactive activities with real information. The projects and the
exhibition were a chance for the students to prove Seigle right, that adolescents are full of
creativity and that they can be defined by so much more than negative stereotypes.

3. How do you feel you have grown as a project worker and student throughout the
course of this semester? Be specific and provide evidence!
 Reflecting on this year I can see that I have grown a bit, but not an extreme amount.
One way that I grew as a project worker was time management and learning how to
structure my time when we have individual work time, not only in humanities but partially
in physics and a bit in math too. This growth and learning process was the most evident
during our most recent humanities project. I had lots of independent work time to write my
essay and finish my mask, I also was very independent as a project manager, in that case, I
had to be the leader of many groups, helping them manage their time. At first, I was sort of
messing around, not fully using my time wisely. Then as the due dates came into view I
started to take the time I had to work with seriously. I decided to split my time between
working on my mask and working on my essay, which seemed to be working well. Though
as we came even closer to the end date I had to work on my essay as homework to get
everything done, my mask came along much more easily. Overall learning how to split my
time in my class benefited me as we moved into exhibition prep and I didn't need to work
on my mask or essay, which came in handy as I had to help exhibition project groups
manage their time and plan projects while I had to also organize the whole exhibition. But
now I was able to split my time between working with individual groups and planning the
exhibition. Being able to manage my time is an essential part of a project-based high school,
a skill that I didn't have perfected at the beginning of the year, but I'm grateful that I've
grown in that sense as a project worker. It may have taken a little bit before I found a
rhythm that worked for this type of project, but once I found that rhythm my project work
was more straightforward to handle.

4. Describe what you did as a group member and how it contributed to the success of
our exhibition. Include what you would change or do differently if you were to do
this project again.

As a project manager for this exhibition, I feel as though I did a great deal, however, it’s
harder to see exactly what I did, my contributions lie in each of the groups I helped prepare for
the exhibition. While walking through the exhibition it may not have been apparent exactly what I
did or was doing but in fact, most of my work had been finished by exhibition or was behind the
scenes. I spent most of my time helping to organize and keep on track half of the exhibition
groups in my class. I helped them develop project ideas, get materials, and meet their daily
milestones. I was in charge of Brain development, and Essays, while also being co in charge of
Cross generations conversation and Hospitality, some of the groups were fairly easy to help,
while others needed a bit more guidance and help, like Cross generations conversation and
Essays. I mostly helped them by working out kinks in their plans and generating ideas, however,
fast forward five hours before the exhibition saw me frantically rallying the essay group to collect
quotes, format the quotes, print the quotes, cut them to size, then place them with the correct
mask. I was a bit frantic that morning, as was the whole group. But by the exhibition, everything
was in place. My other job as an exhibition manager was to help Lori organize the flow and
schedule of the exhibition, both before and during the exhibition. At the exhibition, my final job
was to funnel guests into the right rooms and partially to help keep the students where they
were supposed to be. If I were to do this exhibition again I would push some of the groups a
little bit more, I would have helped the Essay group sooner so that we would have had less
stress overall, and I would have made it more clear during the exhibition were the cross
generations conversation room was because a lot of people missed that extremely important
room. But other than that I feel that as a project manager the exhibition could hardly have been
better, It was quite enjoyable to watch the whole thing roll out, displaying the creativity and
wonderful collective of our 10th-grade class.