A Letter to Myself

          A time in my past that I regret and wish I could go back and change would be the time that I got a bad grade on my calculus math exam in my junior year of high school. Up until that point I had a 3.8 GPA in the class and after that exam, my GPA fell. In order to prevent this grade on my calculus exam, I would give myself a few tips on how to prevent this.

            In order to keep your GPA up in the math calculus course, you need to follow these simple steps. Make sure that you attend class every day. This is very important to do so that you are there to listen to the lectures. Also, take notes during the lecture. This will help you better understand the material when you write it down and the notes will be available to you when you do your homework and to study for the exams. Attending class and taking notes is the easy part of getting a good GPA. The next step is to do all the homework assigned to you. Spend time on each homework problem to make sure you understand the problem and to get the correct answer. Don’t save your homework for the night before it is due. If you get homework on Monday and it is due Friday, make sure you progressively work through it throughout the week and do not save it until Thursday night. The homework assignments count towards your GPA in the class, so if you do not do the homework, then your GPA will drop just from that. So, make sure you attend class, take notes, and do the homework in a timely fashion for part of your GPA to be good.

            The next important pieces to having a good GPA are the exam grades. These exams are very important because they are more heavily weighted for your GPA and the grades that you receive count for more in the class. These exams cover a certain amount of chapters that have been taught in the class. If you attend all the classes and take notes, then you can use those to study. To study, you should read through your notes that you wrote and make sure you understand everything. Then, you should use the assigned textbook for the course and go through the chapters that are going to be on the test. After reading the chapters again, you should work on review problems at the back of every chapter. Most answers for these are in the back of the book, so if you do not understand something then you can look at the answer and try to figure the problem out from that. After studying your notes, the chapters, and doing reviews if you still have questions you should ask your teacher. Most high school teachers are available before school or after school to help. If you do the review before the day of the test, then you can email your teacher and set up a time to meet with them to ask them questions to help you study. If you have questions from your notes or review problems that would be a good time to ask the teacher.

            After doing all of these steps, it comes time to finally take the exam. The day of the exam, make sure you eat a good healthy breakfast and relax. You should not get nervous for the exam because if you did all of the previous steps to study and do your homework, then you should be prepared for the exam. By attending class, taking notes, doing homework, and studying for the exam this will help you succeed in achieving a good GPA for a calculus course.

          

Advertisement Redesign Reflection

Going into this assignment I thought it would be a lot of fun and incorporate some creativity. I like the fact that we discussed this assignment in class and did a group redesign of an advertisement in class before we had to do this advertisement on our own. From the in class work, I felt prepared to go into this assignment. I chose a Louis Vuitton advertisement for this assignment. I chose this ad because it was in a magazine that I frequently read and I really like Louis Vuitton products. I also chose it because I know that Louis Vuitton sells many products for both men and women and I thought it would be fairly easy to change the advertisement completely.

For the redesign, I came up with the idea to change it in my head.  I did not sketch anything out on paper. I just simply thought of the ways in which I wanted to change it and then designed it to the way I wanted it to look in my head.  As I began the essay for this redesign, I faced the challenge of not knowing how to begin the essay. I'm so used to writing an essay with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion that this essay was hard for me to write. To overcome this challenge of structure, I just listed out all of the main points I needed to make within the essay and started writing as if I was writing to an advertisement agency to change the ad.

The thing I liked most about the redesign assignment was the creativity part. This assignment allowed me to think outside of the box and to recreate an advertisement from scratch. I used the creativity to my advantage by creating a completely different advertisement, while changing the background, the model, and the products that were being advertised. The learning outcomes that I learned the most while writing this essay were the use of ethos, pathos, and logos. Before this assignment, I did not have a clear understanding of the three and how they could be used in everyday things like commercials and advertisements. Now, I know what each one is and I know to look for them in advertisements if I ever have to analyze one. If I were to get a second chance at writing this essay, I would probably pick a different audience. I liked the audience that I picked to change the advertisement to (upper class men), but if I could change it I would want to pick another audience like young teenagers or elderly people. I think it would have been harder to pick one of those audiences rather than upper class men, but it would have been even more different than the current audience of the ad which was upper class women.