Final 20 Time Reflection

Gillian’s:

For our 20 Time project never really had a final product for our discoveries and self experiment but we still had a lot to take away from it. You can watch our Ted Talk about our project here to see everything about it. Our experiment of sorts was to observe our own lives to find what aspects of a student's life cause the most stress and how our extracurriculars play into our stress levels. After we started this, it became a very large part of how we reduced stress because of how we were recording our feeling by ranting, that release relieved a huge amount of stress from our lives. On this blog post you can see our realization of how we were noticing pattern in our lives and when our project became what it is.

Making a Ted talk for the project was actually pretty fun to do because I got to work with Amelia, and I knew that we could rely on each other to carry the weight needed to have a good Ted Talk. Because we rehearsed the talk a few times it went quite well even if I forgot a few things since I get a little nervous. After re-watching our talk it was better than I thought but definitely was not as professional and comfortable as the real Ted Talks scientists do. I feel like we did pretty well because we payed attention to the rubric carefully even if we did forget a few things and did exactly what was required.

I completely plan on continuing to record my feelings to reduce my stress because it really did help. I hope other teachers can put something like this into their classes to get student more passionate.

Amelia’s:

As you may know, I've been doing a semester-long project about stress. I made a new blog about it, where I explained what we would be doing and reported our progress on a bi-weekly basis. It was really fun to see our progress and to see what we discovered. At the end of the year, we concluded this project with a Ted Talk presentation, which was actually our final "test" for this class. If you want to see it, here’s the link.

Overall, I think our Ted Talk went really well. Our presentation had to be within 4-5 minutes, and we almost nailed that. (I think we went a few seconds over the limit). We had rehearsed well enough so that we had our presentation memorized, which made everything run really smoothly and made us look really professional. I liked working with my friend; we're really close, and it really helped to have someone who knew what I was thinking contribute to this project. Time management was also pretty easy for us, especially since this project was pretty laid back. Honestly, I would give me and my partner the same grade that our teacher gave, since I feel that he graded us very fairly. Also, I think we did really well.

What I took away from this project was actually a surprise to me. Throughout the semester, me and my partner had written down our feelings at the end of every week to monitor our stress levels. It turned out to be a stress-reliever in itself. Basically, since it was a really easy and good reliever of stress, I am going to continue this in the future (and suggest you do, too). We hadn't actually planned this when we started our project, but it was really nice to discover this helpful tool for the future. This project was a really fun thing to do over the semester, and I'm glad that I found this technique!

Gillian's 20 Time Reflection

I am not one that likes to talk about my feeling but for this project I made myself pretty much rant about my feeling and my life and somehow it was really nice and productive. Our project was intended to discover the main cause of student stress and then figure out how important extracurriculars are in student lives in relation to stress. We wanted to focus on stress because as students at Saratoga High and juniors specifically, we saw how high the stress level was for ourselves and our peers and wanted to find out more about that and what factors into it. By doing this project it really made me realize what specific events cause that stress students feel and what types of things I do to control it that I wasn’t aware I was doing until I started to pay attention to my life and my habits. Honestly I don’t know if we had a true goal that is specific and could be achieved other than discovering truths behind stressors and how our activities outside of academia played into the stress process but that is something that cannot really be shown in a presentation since it is different for every person, there were obvious patterns sure, but we can never have an exact answer to that question.

This really did start as a school project but then when we starting realizing that just doing this project every week actually reduced our stress, it became pretty important to our lives. The project as a whole went well even though it did not go fully as intended as I said before. Doing this study of myself and other students brought validity to what we have learned about stress and health in general because I saw the affects the different stresses had on my mind and body. I saw how from day to day my feelings fluctuated fully dependent on the amount of stress I went through in those days or what I had coming up so I utilized this project to understand how to deal with the stress and control it a little bit. If I could redo this project I probably would have chosen something that was more proactive so that it wasn’t purely research and working on a computer, but I definitely don’t regret choosing this topic because it greatly improved my mental health and understanding of student life by just becoming aware of it. I hope to find a way through this TED talk or sharing our findings with students and adults alike, to show how important having those outlets is and that if a student wants to do well in their classes and be mentally healthy, they should find something outside of school to focus on and be passionate about so that they aren’t overwhelmed by school as many students at Saratoga are.

Amelia's Reflection

As we are wrapping up this school year, we have to start to wrap up our 20 time projects.

I really enjoyed this project. Me and Gillian were both intrigued by the idea of student stress, and, as we are students ourselves, we hoped that we could find ways to reduce this stress and even help others to do that as well. Since we were both in a unique extracurricular that we love, we decided to see if that would have an influence on our stress.

It was really hard for us to go through and find out what stresses us out (obviously pretty mentally challenging). We got through it though, and found some really helpful tips on how to control your emotions. You just have to tough it out sometimes. We also had some struggle getting our information out to our school. We posted in school-wide Facebook groups, but still didn’t get the response we needed. We did get a response, and the response was really helpful.

I learned a lot about how stress works in my life. The amount of stress often depends on when I have color guard and how heavy my homework load is. This project helped me get control of my stress when it was overwhelming. By taking a minute out of my day (nothing compared to 20% of a week) to just breathe and take a chill pill, I became a calmer and more organized person. Many studies, like this one, have proven that mindfulness reduces stress and thus benefits the body. We had been doing this in class every day, but our teacher has stopped recently (but I don’t know why). I actually really helped me keep control of my emotions and concentrate on important things. Just now, I realized that “keeping control of my emotions” is basically the Star Trek practice “kolinahr” (used by the logic-loving Vulcan Spock). (shh I know I’m a nerd)

Starting this project, we kept a journal to record our feelings and stress levels as they correspond to our other activities. As time went on, this journal of feelings turned into a place where we could relive our feelings. Accidentally, we had created a ranting journal that actually helped us relieve our stress as we were writing about it. Every week I found myself waiting to write about the crap that went down at school and how much the color guard instructor was being impatient and annoying. I’m really glad of this accident, and I’m going to start keeping a real journal next to my bed for writing about my feelings at the end of every day. We can definitely expand on this project throughout our lives, and see how our grown-up work lives affect our lives.

We have also released a survey about stress to our junior class at our school. It was really interesting to see the results. We had a scale of hours spent studying and hours used for extracurriculars, and some people had over 40 hours per week of studying. The corresponding question, “Does this cause a lot of stress?” was often answered yes. It made me so sad to see how much stress there is at this school. However, many people, who were in some extracurriculars, had written that they enjoyed being in them and that they had reduced stress! We were happy that we had relevant support of what we had been studying.

In our research, we discovered that “student stress” and “extracurriculars” were common themes together. The typical scenario is that the parents take their kids out of their sports or clubs so that they can study more (causing more stress, since the time away from studying to collect oneself and to do something they love actually relieves stress).

I learned so much about myself and others and stress through this project. I wouldn’t do anything differently, since that would have caused us to have a different result (maybe not this one, the best one, in my opinion).

Our next steps is to collect our knowledge we learned from this project and spread it around so everyone can benefit. We hoped that through this project we could get rid of the idea that extracurriculars are, well, extra and unnecessary. We need them to reduce stress by doing something you love. Overall, we just want a happier and better environment in the school (and the world).

~Amelia