​Anjali Phadke's P​ortfolio

Here ­at the Dayton Regional STEM School, we are faced with challenges every day. These challenges can range anywhere from a simple math problem to a problem with studying or learning new things. These challenges, although stressful, are how we grow as an individual. The more challenges we face, the more preparation we have for future, probably a little more bleak, problems/conflicts. Now, no one likes problems. Personally, I enjoy a good challenge once in a while! Because the nature of the school is different from other high schools, I am constantly challenged in my classes. Don’t get me wrong, being challenged is not a bad experience. That way, I know that I am learning instead of just staying constantly bored in my classes. Now, most challenges we face daily are small, most of which we overcome in a matter of a class period. But, what about the bigger challenges like the ones that we have to rack our brains trying to fix? Well, there is one specific challenge that I have faced year. This challenge has to do specifically with writing. The two classes that I had the most troubles with writing were Biology and Language Arts. Without further ado, here are my challenges!

The first class in which I had a problem with writing is Language Arts. For general knowledge, here is what the project (I am Poem) was about! Well, the purpose of this assignment was to express ourselves through creative writing. We created “I am Poems” with at least 15 sentences all on one page. These 15 sentences had to include 3 out of the 4 types of figurative language that our teacher said we could use (paradox, simile, metaphor, hyperbole). The sentences had to be meaningful in the sense that there were not too short and not too long. They had to make sense and sit with a person in a deep way. The title also had to be meaningful and not cliché. In all of the sentences we had, clichés had to be really limited. There were around 5 drafts that we had so that the poem could be the best it could be.

Now where did the challenge come in? Well, when we first started this project, I was a little scared about how to express myself in the poem. I am not a writer at all and I didn’t really know what to do! Specifically with writing, I always had trouble opening up to an audience or readers because I felt as if they would judge me. This is a very important challenge that I am glad I faced at the beginning of the year because it showed me how crucial it is to be yourself, no matter if it is in person or through writing. How was I supposed to overcome a challenge like that? Well, I looked up a lot of examples online. Also, in class we cut up words out of magazines and we pasted them together on a sheet of paper to create sentences you wouldn’t normally think of. Although this really give me any sentences, it helped because I was able to find new words. Words were the one thing that I didn’t know how to use (in the sense that I couldn’t find words that really expressed what I wanted them to). I really understood how to be more personal with an audience after seeing first hand examples of poems! Usually with a big problem such as this one, I always need an objective view or first-hand example so that I can fully understand how to solve it. In this case, just looking at other examples showed me that I could be myself without worrying about what other people would think! The artifact for this challenge really comes from the back of the 15 sentence sheet that shows the example of the pasting words together from a magazine. It also comes from the difference between the first draft and last draft of the final letter. With the first draft of the letter, the sentences I created weren’t very cohesive. They were more so a jumble of sentences where I was just trying to write down what my brain thought made sense. With the last draft, I focused more on cohesiveness and the question “which of these sentences describe who I am?” For example, in the 1st draft, we just wrote 20 sentences with no particular order but in the last draft, I tried to create stanzas by placing sentences that would pair well together. One example of a stanza is “I am teal in a sea of gray, an individual, a colored pencil in a world of graphite. I am sunsets in the darkness, freezing temperatures in the tropics, a green tree in a world of snow.” The first draft compared to the last draft shows that I could open up to the audience more by changing and changing sentences multiple times, placing sentences that pair well together, and really making sure that the sentences I used were meaningful.

So, now that I had challenges with Language Arts, what about Biology? The first endeavor I would like to talk about is the Experimental Design Pill Bug Lab. This was the first project we had in Biology and it was the first chance we really had to create a lab report. As a refresher of the project, we had previously learned about the experimental design process before starting this project. The Experimental Design Process is a list of 7 steps that are the ground work for any experiment. The steps are: Identifying the problem, researching, formulating a hypothesis, designing the process to be used to test the hypothesis, carrying out the experimental procedure, analyzing the data and observations, and drawing conclusions. So, groups of around 4-5 conducted an experiment on pill bugs! Our experiment or question for the experiment was “Do Oniscidea prefer perfume or lemon juice?” Now, after all the testing and observations of the pill bugs, we were to write lab reports about this experience. For our lab report, we were graded on the effectiveness and completeness of the individual aspects such as the introduction, the methods, the data, the analysis, and the conclusion. So, the parts of this project were the lab report and the actual project.

Now, the actual evidence for this is the lab report. Because this was one of the first projects of the year, this lab report was the first piece of writing that could’ve had an effect on me. Before this first lab report, I didn’t have much experience with them. Last year during science fair, I had another person with me to help write, but this year I was all alone. Specifically with writing in Science, I have to learn what to write about and what to leave out. So, the analysis and observations show the evidence of the challenge and how I grew from that challenge. “According to the data, the majority of the Oniscidea migrated towards the perfume. As the data shows, after 1:30, 7 bugs were in the petri dish for with the perfume and 3 bugs were in the petri dish containing the lemon juice. It could be that the lemon juice was a lot stronger than the perfume so the bugs wanted to move to a place with more air. I would’ve thought that the chemicals in the perfume would steer the bugs away, but I conjecture that the perfume was a lot less strong than the lemon juice. We had a list of lab questions we needed to answer throughout the lab.” How does this prove my claim? Well, because I have never created a lab and a lab report all by myself, I never really knew what information was pertinent. I solved this obstacle by looking at my question, which was “Do Oniscidea prefer perfume or lemon juice?” and writing down all the information that was important to that. Also, a lab report is different from other pieces of writing. There was math, lists, analytical skills, and interpretive skills involved in the writing. I had to use all of these skills to write about the lab and it was not easy to face this challenge head on! But, after really focusing on the question and looking at my past lab report, I overcame my obstacle with writing in biology.

Well, there are the ways I faced the challenges and overcame them. I would love to say that I won’t have any more challenges in my life, but that’s not true. I know that I will welcome challenge whenever it comes about! I am glad that I have had challenges with writing because I had a chance to grow in that skill. Writing will help me immensely in the future, so thank you challenges!