Reflection: Week 13 and 14

I could lie and tell everyone that I won't talk about how we're almost done with school... but I won't lie..

I cannot even believe that we are almost done with the semester! This is absolutely the craziest thing I have dealt with in a long time. whoa!

Week 13

We started off Week 13 but watching Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard. This short movie was about how everyday "stuff" that we use, hurts the environment more than we think! Every piece of "stuff" has to go through extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. I had definitely never thought of half of the things that Annie mentioned, let alone realized how bad like everything that I use is for the environment! I liked this video also because I think it'd be good for a lot of different age groups, I loved it, but yet I think you could show it to middle schoolers and they would understand and get the point of it, while still finding it fun. We also kept up with our advocacy projects during week 13, and did an issue overview on the bill that we chose. This was to help familiarize ourselves with our topic that we chose, and to make us think from a variety of angles of information. Then, on Thursday we hit up Bagley Nature Area for some Navigational skills exercises! This was probably my least favorite part of this class so far, and not because I don't love being outside, because I do... but because I'm a horrible navigator, and felt very lost throughout the exercise! Thank goodness I had a good group (Sara J., Autumn M., and Katie N.) so even if we didn't know what we were doing, we could laugh and have a good time!

Week 14

On Tuesday we had a speaker from the Civil Engagement Office here at UMD come in and talk about his career in environmental health. I really enjoyed this talker, although for the life of me I can't remember his name (and I feel really really bad!) I enjoyed learning a little big more about Americorps, because it's something that I've thought about joining, but definitely need more information about. We then wrote a letter for our advocacy project to a representative. This was a new experience for me, and it was hard at first, because I didn't want to sound ridiculous when trying to get my point across. Everyone's turned out really great though! On Thursday we had a junking day in class, definitely one of my favorite days so far! Lots of great ideas from Group 1 ;) and of course all of the other marvelous Groups in our class!

I continue to learn so much throughout the course of this class... it's too hard to pinpoint a few couple things! I will be mucho sad when this is over!