While my original plan for my Capstone was to work with English and Reading-challenged students to help them better understand and comprehend what they’re reading, the actual practice rapidly diverged from that plan. While the core of the project remained, that is helping students comprehend their work, what work I assisted them with broadened into anything they needed help with. At school I helped them keep on task, reminding them they have work to do and even assisting with some work, and after school, I’d tutor one of the students in math over a Zoom call. I’m particularly proud of the tutoring sessions because it wasn’t even my idea, it was kind of sprung on me and I adapted to it, even coming to enjoy it somewhat. I feel that my work benefited the community of Science Leadership Academy at Beeber, which is both the students and faculty. The students benefited by receiving assistance with their work and staying on task, as well as the enrichment of their experience. The faculty benefited because by assisting the students myself, I freed up some of the workloads from the teachers because they don’t get paid enough to deal with us, so any help is probably appreciated.

In my PSA I first talk about what food insecurity is, who is at risk for it, etc. This includes some vocabulary terms and other information. Then I talk about how to counter food insecurity by setting up a community garden, including a basic overview of how to set up a community garden. I chose this topic for my PSA because I thought it sounded interesting, there wasn’t any other reason, I just thought it was the most interesting of the available options.

I think I did pretty well writing the script and gathering information, considering I chose to work by myself and did all the work personally. If I were to do this project again I wouldn’t put off recording for so long, because by the time I got around to recording, I had a case of hiccups and I couldn’t put it off anymore. There wasn’t any particularly meaningful part of the whole project, I kinda just did it because I had to, although the feeling of finally getting it done was pretty nice.

Essential Questions: 1) Earth Systems affect each other by cycling matter and energy between themselves, feeding interactions and reactions on a micro and macro scale. Said interactions and reactions impact the Systems in their own ways and can create cascading effects that in turn cause more reactions. 2) An understanding of environmental sciences can aid in handling natural disasters because it allows us to predict how interactions and reactions will take place and how natural disasters can cause more interactions and reactions. This includes how to prevent natural disasters from causing a cascade effect that in turn can cause more natural disasters. 3) In order to create a sustainable future we need to clamp down on the burning of fossil fuels and other such things that cause climate change because climate change is causing changes in how the earth’s systems interact, making it harder to predict how natural disasters and other interactions will play out, often resulting in more damage both from a lack of proper preparation and because the disasters are just getting worse.

I’m not exactly surprised by my findings, I was already aware of most of this information because I looked into wildfires over the summer after seeing a bunch of memes about how California is always on fire. As for the project itself I’m ambivalent, I don’t particularly like the project but I don’t dislike it either, its just something I have to get done, and that’s the extent of my feelings about it.