Daniel Morehouse
The Webfolio
The Essays
Agenda of Life
There are people who will multitask, and those who choose not to. Some people choose to do one thing at a time. Everyone though has their own way of managing time themselves for every day of the week. Some may figure multitasking out easier than others, at any time anyone can change to multitasking within the blink of an eye. No matter how busy life is, there can always be a way to chase a dream and be successful at the same time. All it takes is small steps and day-by-day tactics to get it right.
According to research done by Sparks, teenagers between the ages of 13 to 18 use six different types of media simultaneously outside of school. People who try to pay continuous partial attention to everything have difficulty concentrating deeply on anything. There is no way that the brain can be in two places at once. In my opinion that is just impossible. It actually takes much longer to multitask than it would take to do two individual tasks one after the other. When people make a choice it affects multitasking by having a brief “bottleneck” in the prefrontal cortex that delays the second task. The multitaskers that perform on memory and attention do worse than those who do one thing at a time. When people answer text messages during a test it can affect the test and the brain a lot because the student has to switch attention to the phone and then read the text message and then understand and respond to that message. Same goes with reading a book or chapter, but this time all they have to do is concentrate when reading, though it will be difficult. I believe that a lot of people are not multitaskers, because if people learned the ability of academic and social success, they may be able to do better in life and have a decent future (Sparks).
I’ve had times in my life where I had to multitask and it did not work out as I expected. One time in high school I was taking the SAT’s and I also needed to stay in contact with my parents because my mom was having surgery for her breast cancer. I was distracted, and I also was stressed out, and when I finished the SAT’s I had a feeling that I didn’t do well on it. A couple of months later, the scores were in and as I expected my assumption was correct about the SAT’s. I knew I could do better if I wasn’t dealing with family issues at the time and I didn’t have to keep checking my phone during the SAT’s. I also had another incident just this past semester; I was distracted from my classes and the notes that needed to be taken. We had a pop quiz and I didn’t get a single answer correct. I have learned that I need to turn off my phone from now on when I’m in my classes. In the end, as long as I’m taking it one step or task at a time, I can surpass anything. If I try to multitask then more likely I am going to fail just like I did with my SAT’s.
On his Planet Success weblog, Steve Mueller wrote about the time management matrix created by Stephen Covey, which contains four quadrants showing important and urgent activities. The reason that there are four quadrants is to determine the priority of a task and allow people to prioritize tasks in relation to their importance and urgency, helping people to decide whether they need to address a task immediately or if they can postpone it. The way to apply the time matrix is with the objective of using the time management matrix to question whether a certain activity brings people closer to their goals or not. The time management matrix must have a weekly assessment to evaluate how well the time was spent. At the end of each work day, people will list all tasks and responsibilities and the amount of time spent. People must make sure to summarize the amount of time spent with a given task. The first quadrant is about important and urgent things such as health and family. The second quadrant is about not urgent but important things like car maintenance and vacation. Now the third quadrant is about urgent but not important things such as spaying a pet and having flood insurance in a flood zone. The fourth quadrant is about not urgent and not important things like the weather and dinner plans. This gives the reader a great summary of what to do and what not to do at the end of the day (Mueller).
My life schedule isn’t as busy as others nor is it as bad; actually it’s quite easy and it works in my favor. I start off my week by waking up around 11a.m. to 12p.m. then getting some food to eat, doing some chores around the house and then watching NASCAR, if it’s on. After all that, it’s about time to eat dinner with my mom and then I play a few phone games before I take a shower and get ready for bed. For the days that I have class, which are Monday through Thursday, I wake up around 10a.m. and get myself ready to leave by 10:30a.m. I get to school and see my friends, where I hang out for a while before I head to my class. After I go to my class and it’s all over I go hang out a little more with the group before I head home where I repeat everything over again for the next day. As for Friday and Saturday, I call them my “wild card” days because I don’t know what may be planned. I just try to sleep until the afternoon comes, and have some relax time other than doing homework for my classes. One thing that I think is important to me, but isn’t as urgent as for others is to get a job to make money. My mother helps me out by giving me money if I need it. She wants me to succeed in life and not live on the streets, and all I can say is that I’m so lucky to have a mother like her. From what I have researched off the StudyGs website; my first goal is to complete TNCC by the year 2019. My second goal is to get a career job, but also continue with my education. My third goal is to create a successful family. To end it all up my time schedule is a lot easier than others are but one thing I know is that anything can be added or taken off of a schedule everyone just has to take it one day at a time.
With both time management and multitasking, the life of any person can and or will move more smoothly and even become stronger with every year that passes. The more education that a person has the possibility of more multitasking can be there. Try to create realistic goals and strive to attain them. So in the end, choose what the heart wants and work with it because anything can happen at any moment.
Works Cited
Mueller, Steve. "Stephen Covey's Time Management Matrix Explained." Planet of Success. 09 Oct. 2015. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. <http://www.planetofsuccess.com/blog/2015/stephen-coveys-time-management-matrix-explained/>.
Buser, Thomas, and Noemi Peter. "Multitasking: Productivity Effects and Gender Differences." "Multitasking: Productivity Effects and Gender Difference." 2011. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. <http://econ.core.hu/file/download/korosi/2011/peter.pdf>.
Sparks, Sarah D. "Studies on Multitasking Highlight Value of Self-Control." Education Week. 15 May 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. <http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/16/31multitasking_ep.h31.html>.
The Brain: Wiser than we think
The brain may seem small to us, but it’s bigger than people think and it grows a lot when all we have to do is think of something or even anything. The more we work our mind and brain the more it will grow and the better our life will be. We learn in school, at home, and even where ever we go, it’s good to learn and get our brain going because later on we will be thankful for it. Our brain is the largest muscle in our body use it or loses it.
There are six stages to the famous NHLP that Dr. Smilkstein did her research on. The first stage is motivation, where we watch, observe, have a need or an interest in learning a particular skill or concept, and be curious. The second stage is beginning practice, where we’re learning from mistakes, asking questions, consulting others, and taking lessons. The third stage is advanced practice, where we’re gaining some control, becoming encouraged, experimenting, and getting positive feedback. The fourth stage is skillfulness, where we’re feeling good about oneself, achieving more success, and increasing in self-confidence. The fifth stage is refinement, where we’re learning new methods, continuing to develop skills, becoming creative and gaining independence. Now the last stage is mastery, where all we are doing is taking on greater challenges and getting better. The NHLP is a great summary of the brain from Smilkstein, Rita. We’re Born to Learn: Using the Brain’s Natural Learning Process to Create Today’s Curriculum, 2nd Ed. Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Corwin,2011.
I’ve had experiences with these six stages before, like when I started learning how to play football when I was two years old. My dad gave me motivation to catch the ball and throw it as well as I can. Later on when I was five I fully began to practice the game of football. When I was ten years old, I was ready to advance my practiced skills by joining the little league football team” The Hampton Cavaliers”, yet sadly due to my injuries at the time I was unable to play. I was now 15 years of age when I put my skillfulness to the test by trying out for the high school team, but another setback happened when during the first day of tryouts I had a very bad pain in my hips which later on came out to be a tumor, so sadly my chances of playing high school football were done. After all that and I was pretty darn healthy I went to refine my skills because I felt out of shape and I wanted to see if I still had it, which I still did. Now that I’m mastering my skills of football I hope one day in the future I can teach my son how to play football just like I was taught.
In the brain there are cells called neurons, which in the human brain is about 100 billion brain cells. Every neuron has at least one axon with many tails called terminals. The terminals send electrochemical messages to other neurons across very tiny spaces that are called synapses. When people learn it creates the synaptic connections, which in result is knowledge and skills that are constructed in our brains. A neuron has five main pieces to it, which together they make what people see as a tree. Neurons have dendrites, a cell body, of course the axon, myelin sheath, and the axon terminal bulbs. Everything in the world has to have a nucleus and neurons are just the same, one nucleus in every neuron. The tree aka neuron has a stem that includes the Schwann cell and the Node of Ranvier. The neuron is what keeps our brains going and they grow very fast which makes a lot of brain cells, but it’s all worth it if we can be able to think and learn all types of things like Smilkstein, Rita. We’re Born to Learn: Using the Brain’s Natural Learning Process to Create Today’s Curriculum. 1st ed. Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Corwin. 2003.
The synaptic firing is very similar to a spark plug firing in your car’s engine. It has synaptic gaps that are also known as synapses which receive chemical-electrical messages just like a spark plug does. It conducts a lot of chemical or electric energy for every time it happens. It gets its fuel from our thinking skills just like a spark plug gets it from a battery. The synaptic firing usually happens best when people are stress because they begin to freak out which makes the synapses freak out as well. It has its endorphins and norepinephrine or better known as noradrenaline which gets it going fast for a very short amount of time just like a spark plug trying to start back up any car engine out there. The synaptic firing is the human version of the spark plug for a car or anything needed electricity and it helps make the brain work like its suppose to work for any human being.
People have emotions that can make it difficult to learn or even prevent learning from occurring. People can have a death in the family that will throw their whole thinking skills away and bring out a side they never wanted to see ever. It’s hard to get back on task when their emotions get in the way due to problems in their personal life. They can do everything that they can to go back to the way it was, but if they and their emotions aren’t in sync then they will never be the same again. All people can do is try and try again and never give up on getting their brain and their heart that holds the emotions back together in sync because if people give up on themselves, they may never forgive themselves ever.
I have also had my emotions break me from learning in college and it actually happened last year. My dad was diagnosed with his third cancer of his life and his second neck cancer and in the month of October of 2014 the cancer took his life. When that happened I wasn’t myself for a few weeks, I took a few days off of school wasn’t able to think straight nor was I able to learn anything cause all I was thinking about was my dad. It was a very tough time but I had family, friends, and teachers that were by my side and worked with me through that difficult time and in the end I was able to pass my classes and I was so excited and I have never looked back since. The best way to get back on track is to let the people around you help you and get you and your brain back on task so your future can be bright as ever.
To put everything together, use the brain in the right way and if you need to, always ask for help or even look up sites such as “The Study Guides” and “JMU’s Learning Toolbox” because in the end it’s your future that matters and the brain needs you as much as you need it.
Communication: The Key to Life
We all have different ways of communicating, yet some of those ways are used with the wrong words or even the wrong actions. People say how they feel, or feel how they say nothing’s wrong with that. Sadly a lot of people don’t realize until it’s too late that communication is the key to life whether in speech or in writing it’s still the same. We the people decide how we want to be and how we want to speak that is our right and our choice. In the words of my father, “The words and actions you choose to say and do, will define to others of what kind of person you are in general.”
There are some good arguments in the world of grammar. Like what the Wall Street Journal had said once, “when people think a semicolon is just a regular colon just with an identity crisis” that can be argued. Then you have another time that it said, “people that scatter their commas into a sentence” like it’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It can also be argued that languages are constantly changing every year to decades, but it still doesn’t make grammar unimportant to the people and their lives. People can also have an argument about why do people who have dyslexia or even are learning English as a second language have an advantage or disadvantage at getting a job in the U.S. With poor grammar may not mean that a person is sloppy, it could just mean that the person can’t think of any other word that would go well in the sentence. Now with getting the sentences straight before that person even says them doesn’t always prove that he or she can master tasks at work or even at life. It just means they knew what they wanted to say at that moment, not everybody nor anybody can do it all the time. So yea in my opinion, it is good to have a way with grammar, the only thing is people shouldn’t be judged for how they speak or how they write. As a matter of fact in my opinion, nobody should be judged at all.
Communication is key in any circumstance, especially when it comes to a person’s future. My future career is going to be dealing with criminal justice and communication is needed for being a lawyer or even a crime scene investigator. I could choose to be a lawyer which means I would need to know how to speak to a client and get the full story. I would have to try and make a deal with the defense so that my client and the defense can be happy at the same time. Then we have the judge and the jury that I would have to convince to that my client is not guilty of many if any of the charges against them. Communication is very important in all situations whether it is normal talk to intercontinental talk; people need to know what to say and how to say it correctly. Same goes with being a crime scene investigator, I’d need to know what happened to the person and how it happened. Then I would need to know the correct way to tell the family of the person and all the health words about the incident. Having communication at a young age and adapting more and more words into the vocabulary throughout a person’s life will go far. The person will have a successful life and a successful career to go with it.
My skills have been growing stronger as the years go by. The English classes that I have taken including ENG 111 have informed me of new vocabulary words that I have adapted into my life. My future profession will hopefully be a lawyer where I will be needing a lot of communication skills. One of these skills is verbal communication where I will have to choose my words wisely or I may get in to legal trouble. Another skill is the attention skill which will be needed a lot as a lawyer due to the fact I will be in front of a judge and maybe even a jury. So I will need to gain all of their attention somehow. Lastly I will need the skill of resolving where if I am in a bad predicament in the court I will need to raise my voice and find a way to make sure the defense doesn’t get what they want or even how they want it. My skills are proceeding as plan and will be growing stronger and wider as I chase my future down.
Communication will always be the number one thing in life to learn. There’s a reason why the earth has so many languages and different cultures. We just need to learn the right steps of communication and use it for our life ahead of time. Our choices in life will “define” us for the rest of our lives and the lives that will come in the next generation and so on. Just remember, communication is the key to life.
Works Cited
Adams, Susan. "Why Grammar Counts At Work." Forbes., 20 July 2012. Web. 9 Apr. 2016. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/07/20/why-grammar-counts-at-work/>.
Wiens, Kyle. "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why." Harvard Business Review. 20 July 2012. Web. 9 Apr. 2016. <https://hbr.org/2012/07/i-wont-hire-people-who-use-poo/>.