This finals week is already a doozy and it is not even technically finals week yet! I am trying to get all of my finals done way ahead of time so I can have the ability to return home when I please. Part of me is so ready for this academic year to end and for summer to start. I cannot wait to get home to my family and friends in Jacksonville and have a fun but productive summer. But another part of me does not want to let this year go. I really enjoyed my third year at New College and the thought that I will be a fourth-year student soon is nerve-wracking to say the least. But the last few weeks have mostly kept my mind off of such worries and have really helped me enjoy the end of my third year here at New College.

Our production of Farragut North went splendidly! Our audiences were really wonderful and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the shows. I even had many of my professors come up and congratulate me! Those were some pretty ego-boosting moments, I must admit. Though I had a lot of guests visiting me and my roommates that weekend, it was surprisingly not very stressful, even with the play going on. All of our guests were here to see the play, so they understood when we had to go to rehearsals and call times. It was really nice to see familiar non-New College faces in our audiences! Now the production is over and we all must move on with the rest of the semester. Even though our final performance was bittersweet and I miss being able to hang out with such an awesome cast so often, it is nice to have so much of my free time open up.

After the play ended, I had a lovely week of relaxation. I had most of my work done before the performances, so I was able delay getting ahead on my work and spend some quality time unwinding. I even went up to Orlando to visit to Universal Studios with some friends! Though it was a rainy couple of days, we still had a really fun time. It never hurts to get a change of scenery once in a while! It is also really interesting to be in places outside of Sarasota with people you know from New College. That may sound funny but it is true! When I was in high school, my friend and I hung out at so many different places. We were not limited to hanging out just at school. However, when I first came to New College, I mostly hung out with friends on campus or at restaurants near campus if we were hungry. New College has a great campus for just hanging out with friends, but once in a while it is really awesome to see new places and new things with your New College friends!

Now I must face the work that is on my plate for the next two weeks. I have six finals due by the end of the semester. I have two of them done so far and am hoping to get the rest done within the next few days! I have already written and turned in my paper and rehearsal journal for my Farragut North tutorial. I also wrote one of my first fun papers in college for my Personality Psychology class on the character Leslie Knope from NBC’s show Parks and Recreation. That was a really enjoyable one for me to write since I love the show so much and was really interested in tying in my observations with what we have learned in class. However, I still have four more finals to go! I am working my way through my Laboratory in Social and Personality Psychology final paper. I still have revisions to do on my Theatre and Society course and Modern Chinese Literature course finals. And my essay for the Jorge Luis Borges course will also be due in a little less than two weeks. It is admittedly a lot to handle but I am so ready to plow through this work!

I am trying not to think too much about this summer and next year yet, so I can focus all my energy and thoughts on finishing these finals. I have got a lot going on in the next year and it is going to be a busy but overall really exciting ride! As always, if you would like to ask me anything or just talk, feel free to email me at Rebecca.Wucker@ncf.edu!

Bisous,

Becca

With the afterglow of BACC week almost gone and with it the pre-graduation feelings of nostalgia, I’ve been in Finals mode since this past Sunday. It was fun seeing most of my friends since my first year finish their requirements to finish with New College, so they can move on to the next step in their lives. The real world. Going to multiple BACCs last week was very helpful in preparing me for what to expect next year for my own BACC. It has also given me ideas on what to do for how to present my thesis, as well as refreshments. I’ve even started thinking about titles to use for my BACC. One idea I had was “Quick to the [BACC]mobile!” Incorporating my love of Batman. The other was “Shut up and eat some [BACC]on!” expressing my insane never ending craving for bacon. (You can thank preheat for that). I feel that the funniest part of BACC week would have to be that of all the BACCs I went to only one of them was political science related, the rest were either natural science, or psychology.

This week as I said earlier, I’ve been in finals mode. But somehow I’ve still managed to keep up with everything and not go insane-I thank fire spinning. He had our fencing tournament for our new Vice President, Captain, and Vice Captain. I was proud of my team during the tournament, and really happy that they paid attention whenever I showed  them something new. On top of the fencing tournament for office positions, my fire spinning club had a professional hour long photo shoot. I wore my sith robes for the event and had a blast! Spinning Tuesday night was a nice relief from hell week. Hopefully I’ll finish all of my work before classes end next week, so I can spend final week with my graduating friends one more time before they all graduate.

Last weekend, I went to a three day burn festival dedicated to music, the arts, and flow. It is called Preheat and it’s one of two annual events that take place in Lakeland, Florida where I was also visiting family. For those of you  familiar with New College but not so much with burn festivals, They are like the three themed parties we throw on campus except with more elaborate decorations, and far more people actively participating. When I first arrived Friday afternoon, I helped my friend who is a New College alum unload his supplies with his theme camp which had constructed a giant jungle gym 20 yards from the entrance of the ranch where we were the festival was being held. 

Once I finished helping my friend unload his car of his supplies, we drove around the ranch looking for a place where I could set up camp. During the first drive around I almost camped in the middle of “Naked City” but opted for the large tree on the opposite side of  the ranch facing a factory. I ended up camping with a New College alum named Story and her fiance Aaron. We helped one another set up our tents, and we agreed if need be share our food. I went off on my own and explored the theme camps that were still being set up. One of the camps was set up where they had a giant set of Jenga using 2x4’s. They would give anyone 21 or older a drink if they could pull a block out without the whole setting crashing to the ground. At another camp you could paint pendants that would be brought to Burning Man and passed out as gifts.

Speaking of gifts, part of the nature of these festivals is “gifting”. It can be through music, flow arts, food, or a gift of a trinket. I brought my poi, and little fuzzy trinkets to give while I was walking around meeting new friends. Throughout the entire burn I spun my practice and glow poi. Sadly in my excitement to come to Preheat, I forgot my fire poi. But that didn’t stop me from having a blast!  My friends from New College kept coming in until l 12 AM, and I managed to meet some of the alumni I’ve heard impossible stories about but never actually met. I was fortunate enough for my first burn to have them all camp under the same tree as me (literally!).                    

The greatest part -for me at least- was the friendliness of everyone who goes to these festivals. I ended up giving more handshakes than I did hugs, and more often than not when I put my hand out for a handshake someone would just pull me in for a bear hug. Throughout the day I went to poi workshops where I learned about the concept of “3D spinning”, and a workshop where I learned to eat fire. I made a necklace from the beads and jewelry I collected from all the theme camps I visited, and I was massaged by several buffers which worked wonders on my muscles.



On the second day I made a friend at a photo shoot I stumbled in on and we spent part of the festival walking from tent to tent getting to know each other. We ended up going to the conclave together, which is this huge fire show put together by the best fire spinners at the burn. In place of burning the effigy this year because of a dry grass fire warning put out by the state, the conclave was an epic fire fight with poi vs staff, sword vs fire breather and so much more! Almost immediately afterwards the effigy was torn down to the ground and everyone rushed to the center to destroy the remains. I joined in kicking a gaping hole into the side of it. I don’t know what came over me, but I enjoyed it immensely. Later on in the night, I put on a fire show for a camp that thought I was a professional fire spinner and loved my flow style.

One the last day, I said my goodbyes and traded contact information with the people I grew closest too. I invited some of them to come and visit New College some time in the near future, and they gladly took me up on my offer. Before packing up my tent and l leaving, I passed by a bartering tent and found a beautiful heart shaped pendant. I traded some stuff in my tent so I could get the pendant as a gift for a friend back at New College. When I made it back to New College I was still feeling the glow from the energy of the burn when I crashed into my bed happy to finally get some sleep after three days of living, learning, and loving.

It’s with nostalgia beginning to build in my heart that I introduce the avid readers of New College’s student blogs to my thesis. I began blogging for New College my second or third week of classes as a first-year, and now I have turned in both my thesis prospectus form and my Institutional Review Board application to do research on human subjects as a third-year, almost fourth-year student.

I am thesising on Second Language Acquisition, a field that deals with the pedagogy and learning of languages. Initially, when I was an alternate for the Chinese Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), I was planning on returning to China and teaching English to children, where I would also conduct my thesis experiment. Professor Heidi Harley and I were beginning to amass articles and fill out forms to prepare for such a thesis when I received an email saying that my status as an alternate for the CLS was changed to recipient, i.e., I was bumped up!

So, the past few weeks have involved changing my thesis project around and redesigning it completely. Now, I will be working with four sections of Spanish (two beginner and two intermediate) along with one section of Chinese (beginning Chinese). For the Spanish classes, I will be creating them intelligent flash card decks using the program Anki. Two sections will have decks whose cards use phonological (oral or listening) stimuli on the front of the cards and two sections will have decks whose cards use orthographic stimuli (written). The experiment is to see if students use the decks and find them helpful, and to see if practicing and reviewing vocabulary with listening flashcards can improve students’ scores on listening vocabulary exams without hampering their scores on orthographic tests. Furthermore, past studies have used self-report vocabulary tests and I may use self-report vocabulary exams and translation vocabulary exams to see how reliable the self-report tests are in predicting scores on the translation test. Regardless of my hypothesis, I expect students to find the decks extremely helpful and keep using them as they progress to other levels of Spanish.

For the Chinese class, I will be the TA. I will be focusing on vocabulary acquisition in the TA sessions and will be using interactive role playing games to see how they assist with learning. Past studies have shown interactive games to be useful for children and online multiplayer role playing games to be useful for adolescents and adults learning English, so my study seeks to examine the role of interactive role playing games in a classroom setting on college students learning Chinese.

My studies’ data could be valuable because: many studies in SLA focus on the growing number of English language learners worldwide, so a study on Spanish and Chinese learners in the states provides a look at SLA through a different lens; it could lead to more widespread use of Anki and intelligent flashcards, in addition to a more useful way of creating intelligent flash card decks for language learners; I will also be comparing the difficulties experience by Spanish students with those experienced by Chinese students, data that will be insightful for Chinese and Spanish language teachers who would like build their classes around their language and the difficulties associated with that language for learners whose first language is English, or at least western.

This experience will be useful to me personally because: I will gain no small amount of experience working with statistical tests and statistical programs; I will learn more about language pedagogy, especially Chinese language pedagogy; I will be writing a thesis of seventy to one-hundred pages that, along with my baccalaureate exam, will serve as the coda to my New College career.

The experience will be useful to New College because: there will be an information session on Anki for all of the language professors and students to learn more about the free program and its multifaceted build that has so much potential for language study; students in the Spanish class will hopefully retain much more vocabulary while using the decks not only throughout the course in the fall but throughout their study of the Spanish language in the long term; Chinese students will hopefully enjoy fun and interactive sessions full of learning Chinese and will be encouraged to keep studying the difficult language, a path from which students are known to stray between the fall and the spring beginner classes.

And, now that I have my thesis prospectus and IRB form in, I can go full steam ahead. I am already excited about my thesis sponsor, Heidi Harley, because she has been extremely helpful and willing to go the extra mile to help me do such a broad project. Of course, we may be planning for too much, but it is better to cut out the excess or the unmanageable rather than wish you had accomplished more.

And with that, I leave you readers to the first (probably of many) blogs that will deal with my fourth-year thesis project.

Questions, comments, concerns? email me at robert.klinkel@ncf.edu.