Throughout my tenth grade year I have had many times where I have not done my best work on an assignment, and other times where I had exceeded in the expectations. There was one project in particular that I thought I did very well on and was happy with the end result. This was the cancer project. The cancer project was a multi-week activity where students were put in groups of around 6-10 and tasked to create a PSA for their assigned cancer. There were many steps that involved giving roles to each member of the group, creating scripts that our actors would use, figuring out our recoding space and lighting methods that would work best for our video. I was put into a group with 5 other boys making us the smallest group. We were put together to create a PSA about prostate cancer.

                As a first example to prove that I was successful for this project was my group members. Group members were chosen by the teachers and not the students, making the groups random. There was a pretty big chance you would end up in a group with someone you didn’t like or didn’t work well with. I was lucky, everyone in my group were people I had no problem with being around them. We worked well as a group and we were able to get everything done when we needed to and on time. I never had a problem with any of my group members, we were basically a well-oiled machine. I was the director of the group, my job was to oversee all of the other roles and help them, I wasn’t the boss of the group but I played a major role in our group’s success.  To prove our groups success I could show the end result itself to prove that our video was original and planned and good. When I am in a good environment I tend to be a team player more than a flying solo guy. Which means that because of my group, I was able to stay focused and on-task much more rather than someone I would goof off with. I think that I was lucky to have this group but I do think that it will help me later in life with my team building exercises. I am aware that I will be working with people later in life for other projects, and having the necessary skills to be able to make the group stay on task and focused will help me. I am interested in becoming a personal trainer or a fitness teacher, so it will be important to know how to do these things to teach others, and to help them with what they need.

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                 Secondly, I was not the only one in the group doing work. Going into this project I was worried that there would be one person doing all of the work and everyone else would just sit there. But with the people I worked with I was not the only one doing work and I was able to keep everyone on task and doing something. I never really had to step in and tell someone what to do. Everyone knew there role and knew what to do. Throughout the filming part of the project, is where our group struggled a little.  We had some struggles with where to film, how many lights to use, positioning of actors. But this stuff only slowed us down for a day or two. Once we figured it out we were right on track to filming and editing our video. Throughout the rest of the project our group had little to no struggles. I understand that every group that I’ve ever had was not as good as this one, but it’s still good practice, even though there were no internal struggles, we all still had to the same amount of work as everyone else. Which meant that we still had to focus and continue working even when someone else in the group was goofing off. These skills will help me later in life with team building skills and implementing these ideas into my students or people that I work with.

               

                Overall, I think that this is one of my most favorite project I have ever done at STEM. Everything just went well and everyone was able to work with each other. One of the big things that helped is that there was no drama in our group. We just simply worked with each other how a group should.  The entire project was just one big success and I wouldn’t mind doing any of it over again. This project was a ton of fun and that is why I would chose this project to be one of my biggest 10th grade successes.