Last week,

I posted my most up to date essential and foundation questions.

But here are some more foundation questions:

• In what ways can teenagers help out their community?
• Do teenagers enjoy the experience of volunteering?
• In what ways do students/teenagers benefit from volunteering?
• Do organizations like having teenagers as volunteers (or would they rather have adults)?
• What are the basics to volunteering?
• In what ways do the organization teenagers volunteer for benefit?
• How can teenagers benefit the most from volunteering?
• What are some of the best ways teenagers have volunteered and helped out a good bit throughout Pittsburgh?
• Does Pittsburgh have a lot of volunteers (statistics, in general-not just teens)?
• What is the best part about people giving back to their communities?

Combining Two Questions

Same question basically, just worded a bit different:

• Which type of volunteer oppurtunities would benefit teenagers futures the most?
• Which type of volunteer oppurtunities benefit teenagers the most for their futures?

I really need to start going out and looking for different types of volunteer oppurtunites that I could benefit from and base a good project off of.

Who:

• Who will I be helping?
• Who will I interview for my project?
• Who am I benefiting and in what ways?

What:

• What is the point in volunteering?
• What are the benefits of it?
• What oppurtunities benefit you the most based on future career interests?
• In what ways do teens/young people benefit from volunteering?

Where:

• Where will I volunteer?

When:

• When will I make the time to find a volunteering oppurtunity?
• When will my volunteering be complete?

Why:

• Why am I volunteering?
• Why is volunteering important?
• Why do individuals volunteer?

How:

• How long will my volunteering oppurtunity be (if its a program, certain time fram, etc.)?
• How many different ways do people volunteer?

And I'm sure there are going to be many more things to figure out throughout this project..

Information.

Today, we went over different individuals' grad projects ideas and tried finding out their foundation and essential questions and the points that build up to it. The way they focused on finding things out helped me out with how I can maybe begin to find my essential question, and the build up process to it. Maybe one day this week I'll sit down and focus on making a list of good questions and start narrowing it down to the best I can come up with.

So I've Made Some Improvement

Today I'm getting everything done on time. I completed my list of ten sources + an extra four, I think. I always finished my essential questions sheet, which hopefully will help me come up with a really good essential question soon.

Questions, questions, questions..

In this class, they seem to never end. No matter what decision you make, what you ask, or what assignment you have to complete, questions are always thrown back at you in some way. I don't have a full-on essential question yet, but I've thought up about ten questions that can maybe help me lead up to it. I hope I end up coming up with a really good one so that in the end my project makes a lot of sense, and gets a good point across.

Yesterday,

So yesterday, I talked to Ms. Savido and she helped me out a good bit with narrowing down my topic a bit. She told me that I should mainly focus on volunteer work in Pittsburgh, and base my thoughts/project mainly on one volunteer experience that may be longer than just volunteering a few times. Today, after I talked with Mr. Hamilton I figured out a lot more about my topic. Now back to my original thought, I think I'm going to work on maybe trying to find some type of volunteer oppurtunity at a pharmacy.

So..

Okay, well I haven't posted anything on here for a few days now but I have been trying to search for some links that may relate to my topic of volunteering. It seems like an easy, yet hard topic to focus on. If you search on Google, a lot of the results that you get are just different volunteer oppurtunites, which are a plus - but I still feel like I need that main question to focus of and answer. Except, that's the hard part about all of this, I can't think of one, therefore, it's hard to think of a good search term to look up information. A few of the different volunteer ideas that I've thought about doing are, 1. volunteer at Animal Friends in the Strip District and help out with the animals there, 2. volunteer at a nursing home/hospice around where I live, 3. volunteer at Children's Hospital (I also have a cousin who volunteers there), 4. and maybe more volunteer work with R.E.I and Venture Outdoors, 5. also in April I'll be going to Costa Rica with City High so that'll be a big volunteer opportunity for me. So overall, I really just need to wait until Wednesday when I finally have my talk with a teacher and get more of a main focus, and then maybe this all will become a little easier.

Still Undecided..

Today, I searched a lot on Google for different teen volunteering oppurtunites in the Pittsburgh area. I found a good amount of good oppurtunities. I'm leaning a lot towards doing my project based a lot on something revolving around volunteer work. I'm thinking maybe volunteer at a bunch of different places and write reviews on each oppurtunity, and maybe even try to get others to volunteer with me so that it makes an even bigger impact on the company I'm volunteering with. But I'm still not fully decided, it's a really hard decision.

Still Trying To Figure Out A Good Topic

Yesterday I talked to my mom and was asking her if she had any cool ideas for me to maybe do for my grad project. She came up with one that I thought would probably be a pretty cool idea, her idea was to base my project off of the conspiracy theories of 9/11. The one bad thing about that topic is that I don't know if it's something I'm going to be able to be interested in every single day to be able to work on it and stay focused. I also took some time to search through Google a little bit to find some more topics that might interest me, some topics I thought of were something based off of voluteer experiences and what else I'd put with that topic I dont exactly know yet. And another topic I thought about was charter schools vs. public schools vs. cyber schools and all the different ways of teaching and what methods succeed and which don't. But I still have a lot to think about.

Three Answers

1. I think that in a way blogging can be healthy or unhealthy - just like any other obsession. A lot of people just do it to waste time, talk about memories/or maybe their days, or anything else. Others are using it rather than doing their real jobs and whatnot, and that could cause problems. But I think that if you really love blogging there is no problem with doing so on a daily basis.

2. Other peoples' blogs can be interesting to read so that you can understand that person more, or read about how they're feeling or their personal interests. You could learn a lot about a person through their blog and if its what someone loves doing, then they should be allowed to do so without other peoples opinions getting in the way.

3. I think that bloggers shouldn't work on their blogs at their jobs because it could cause a lot of distraction to themselves and others. They shouldn't be distracted from getting their work done at their job with a blog. Also, just to not let it become an obsession like how some people get with other sites like MySpace or Facebook, because a lot of time before you know it you're on there for hours at a time, when you could've been being more productive and doing something else more important instead.

So far, I'm not exactly sure what I want to do for my graduation project. I've considered being a Pharmacist, so I thought about maybe completing my project based on a career of interest. I don't really know any of the students who have already graduated or are currently in the 12th grade, so therefore I don't know any ideas of what their projects may have been. If I wasn't to do my project on the idea of maybe becoming a Pharmacist, I'd maybe do it based on a point of interest (like fashion, or something of that sort). Some of the main concerns I have about my graduation project would probably be that I wouldn't finish on time, but I'm quite sure that I would so that's not really an issue. Another concern would be that I'm going to eventually get bored with my topic and not want to work some days. But as of now, I'm kind of exciting to start working on my graduation project.