College Administration Day!

Today in class we had two other presentations. One in the first session and another one in the second session of the class. In each presentation Mr.Gray, who we refer to as Dawson in class, assigns three student to cause trouble to the presentation. In this way he can see their teaching skills when it comes to students who cause problems. For the first presentation, which was about the quadratic formula, I was assigned to be one of those students. For my "mission", to disrupt the lesson, was to constantly ask when I would ever use the lesson in life. After the first problem I asked when I would use quadratic formulas in life and why was it relevant to me. To my surprise, the student-teacher responded in a mature and calm way. She explained what quadratic formula would be useful for and I was impressed by how quick she was to answer. Although I was assigned to be one of the trouble makers, I did learn a lot from her lesson and how she taught.

During break kids in Special Topics in Math know
how to have fun!!

For the lesson in the class, we went in more detail on how to encrypt and decrypt  messages. There was so much to do when it came to encrypting or decypting a message. I like this lesson because we had an activity that was fun and interactive. Each student made a message that was not too short or not  long and encrypted it. Then the message was sent to another person in the class and they had to decrypt it. On my message I put "I like turtles". I couldn't think of anything better. It was an activity that I hope we can do again. 

Later on the day we had College Admission Night. It was different than the usual information sessions about college admissions. Half of the college admission officers for Vanderbilt came in and helped us understand their thought process in an actual college admission decision. They divided the student into nine groups. Each student acted like a panel in an admission meeting. Everyone was sat down and told to choose from four applications. In this way, they had the students act like the college administrators. We had to decide on admitting one, wait-listing two, and declining one. It was interesting to see how the administrators look at different aspects in an application.  I learned that administrators really look at the whole application and how they analyzed certain things in the application. For instance one of the applicants in the mock application had average grades, but his standardized testing scored were substantially good. But the fact that his grades weren't as good, showed an inconsistently. Being on the other side of the application process, let me understand how to better my own. I was thankful for the opportunity and will be looking forward to learn more about applications.

The color papers are the different mock applications.