Cool facts from classes:
-Microbio: Bacterial spores can last for like 10-20 thousand years. Talk about a long hibernation. In lab, we did gram staining of bacteria to determine whether they were positive or negative. I learned I'm not very good with making slide mounts haha. And crap. I forgot to check my plates today. Whoops.
-Linguistics: The "p" sounds you make in the words "pit"and "spit" are actually different. Actually, if you record yourself saying the word "spit" and delete the part where you're saying the "s" part of the word, you'll hear yourself saying "bit". Cool, huh?
-Polish: We're learning about the genitive case which in Polish is "dopełniacz". In Polish, it's used when you're negating a direct object and also with possessives. We covered negation early in the week and have moved on the possessives the last few days (though I missed today). With possessive, you don't have to worry about word order like you do in English. ex: If you wanted to say my "dad's sister" you could say either "taty siostra" or siostra taty". The endings tell you what case the words are in, so the order isn't important. However, in English, if you were to say "sister dad's", that wouldn't mean anything.
-Architecture: We've been learning about the twelve different elements of form by looking at different buildings and seeing how they elicit these elements. A cool thing our professor does is show us paintings and parallel those same elements to the buildings. I really enjoyed the stories about the Manet paintings we saw, "Olympia" and "Luncheon on the Grass". These paintings took old classic paintings and redid them from a different angle. One that exposed the upper class families and led to lots of controversy and uproar. It's one thing to appreciate a work of art for its beauty, but to learn the history behind it makes is so much more meaningful.
-UTeach: I got to meet my 7th graders today! It was a bit intimidating for about 10 minutes or so, but they're all pretty cool kids! It's such a different environment that when I was in 7th grade. They were all working on assignments in pairs, and half of the kids had headphones on while working. Each group had a laptop and this kind of clicker thing that the teacher used to validate their progress on the assignment.
I got to meet just about all of them as I was going around, seeing what they were up to, and introducing myself. I was quite out of my comfort zone, but as time passed, I got more comfortable with them and vice versa.
They're all pretty cool kids. Robert was listening to The Beatles when I first came by and had lots of dubstep playing afterwards. Chloe wants to be a lawyer when she's older, and Jane wants to be a nurse. They're both trying to get into the Ann Richards Charter school that's only for girls. It's weird because after you apply, there's a lottery that they use to select people. Also, apparently an all boys charter school is in the works, or the Ann Richards school might be sued since it's not a private school. Kai was born in Georgia ( he wore a UGA shirt today), but loves UT and has been to football games here. We also learned from Rikki (my teach partner) that Kai means "ocean" in Japanese and "chicken" in Thai. Levi had a Miami Heat D. Wade shirt on, but it was ok since he was born in Miami. He likes to listen to Drake and Lil Wayne. Also, this one kid, Vladyslav, still had a pretty high voice. It was cute. And there were these two kids of in the corner, Jesse and Ronald who didn't get much done the whole time. I went over every now and then to check their progress.
But yeah, they were cool kids. Some of them were talking about playing Beatles songs backwards to hear hidden messages. I also learned that catfish whiskers have small barbs that can sting. Also, the school had a poster in the hallway where kids sided either on Team Peeta or Team Gale. I thoroughly enjoyed that. I'm excited about this. =)
I also learned some things about myself this week!
-Running isn't really that hard. Making yourself run is. Running buddies ftw.
-I have cool friends. When I was freaking out about losing my backpack, I got so much help from people as far as borrowing books, notes, (even a camera), etc went. Even the sympathy was nice haha.
-I think I've made the decision to not even think about dating and stuff like that for this semester and probably through the summer as well. That's just not really something I need to worry about this semester. I can pour my energy and time into other areas of my life that are in more need right now. I'm gonna focus on my faith, friendships, and school this semester. So yeah, no dating till after July 31st. Let's go with that. Not that I've ever been much of a "dater", but you know. Also, my youth minister met his wife during a time he did a similar thing. Maybe I'll be as lucky? *crosses fingers*
-Back to the running thing. I've lost 10 lbs in just about two weeks. It's pretty awesome. I'm keeping track of what I eat on http://www.loseit.com/ , and it's been pretty helpful. And I learned that I can run two miles. I just never knew how to pace myself to be able to do so before.
Hopefully that should be enough for you to read for the week. =p
