The New High School Musical...?

This week in class we started to watch Across the Universe. It is a musical featuring a bunch of songs from the Beatles. I feel this movie is like the next High School Musical. It seems like every 5 minutes the characters break out into some random song and dance number. By far, the weirdest one to me was the one with all the army guys. It was beyond strange to me. So far the movie is just really weird. There have actually been plenty of times where Patrick and I have looked at each other and have been like, "What the heck?"

The one thing I wonder know is why was this movie chosen. I know Dreier wanted to pick a movie where they was plenty of psychological stuff happening, but why this movie... The whole thing just seems so bizarre to me. I can think of plenty of more normal movies that could have been picked to watch rather than this one.

The AP test!

This past Tuesday we took the AP Psych test. Going into it I wasn’t actually feeling too nervous about it. I was feeling confident that I knew the information and I knew all that I was going to know. In the weeks leading up to the test, I had been doing a lot of studying so that I was prepared. This definitely lessened my nervousness and stress as the test approached. I wasn’t stressed out at all the day before the test while most of the time before a test I start to freak out a little. After the test I feel ok about it. I don’t think I did as amazing as I wanted to. I hope I did ok. I am really glad it is over now though. Now class (school) is going to be a breeze for the rest of the year.

Now all this class is going to consist of is working on our project and discussing a book we are reading. I am actually kind of excited to write a paper for my project. I think I have a really interesting topic and am excited to find out more about it. I also was able to find a couple books off the list that i might enjoy so I can't wait to see what book I am going to read.

Performance and Pressure...

Today we talked about our performance under pressure. In the reading, it said that on easier tasks people will perform better than normal but on more difficult tasks, people will perform worse and much slow than normal when being watched by others. I can definitely relate to this fact. On some types of math problems, I have no problem doing them. I can do them no problem even when people are watching me over my shoulder. But then there are certain things that are newer to me and take me more time to do. And then when someone wants to watch me do it, I usually will get a little nervous and it may take me even longer than normal.

We also discussed how people will be faster when racing others rather than racing the clock. I would definitely agree with this fact. For example, for me when it comes to swim, it is very obvious. Sometimes during practice when we have to do sets on a certain time interval. There are some days that I find it more difficult to come in on time. But when it comes to a meet and racing others, I will get best times and usually do much better than the intervals. I find that I am much more motivated when there are others racing against me. This is mainly because I want to beat them and get a better time, which is plenty of motivation for me.