Day by Day

It has been too long that I haven’t posted a senior journal to my blog. Some were because I didn’t want the reflections out in the open, but more just because I was too lazy to post them here. In the extended body of this post I have my page-long thoughts on this senior journal topic. Hopefully from here on out all my future senior journals will get posted here even before they’re technically turned in. Enjoy, Alex. Read the rest of this entry »

The first published application from Tenseg just went live on the App Store, SubCalc. This is really cool! The first application with my name in as one of the developers on the App Store. Please go and check it out. Enjoy, Alexander Celeste, Tenseg Developer.

There are only a few categories of students that can succeed at Avalon. I know I’ve mentioned this somewhere here already, but I look at Avalon’s student body as a wide range of students. On one end are those that are individual enough to almost need the unique learning environment Avalon provides, and then I feel like there are only enough students as could be counted by hand that end up at Avalon because no other school would take them.
Now, that low end doesn’t succeed. Anyone between the low and high ends has a good chance of succeeding at Avalon. Then those students, like me, who almost need the learning environment Avalon provides to succeed well will always succeed at Avalon. We can take the existing project process, and then expand it to our own levels with little things here and there improved upon.
Overall we Avalonians are quite unique. In pretty much every other high school you’d find certain solid categories. But at Avalon all you find are certain students sticking together based on one common characteristic, but that are otherwise entirely unique. I also believe that it becomes clear pretty fast which students won’t be able to succeed, and so they don’t necessarily succeed. It just depends, but usually per year by winter break most of the students at the school have a decent chance of success.

I can’t immediately think of a specific incident in my own life, so much as an event that no doubt changed millions of lives. That event was just under a year ago, on January 20th. As you could no doubt guess, the event was Obama’s presidential inauguration. For most people this was something they saw on TV, or not at all for a small amount of people. In my case, I was actually one of the (relatively) few who was standing on the National Mall as the event unfolded.
The question of exactly how this changed my life? Well, to put it bluntly, because Obama’s our first African-American president and not only was I alive when he got elected and inaugurated, but I was also just barely 2 miles away from him as he took the oath of office. The entire trip was crazy, to say the least, but it has definitely changed my life with the feeling of how deeply important and historic an event it was that I had just witnessed with my bare eyes.
Beyond that fairly obvious reason, I wouldn’t be able to say a whole lot about how the incident changed me that much right now. I just have this feeling that it did.

The way that educational institutions measure what I have learned is using tests. If I can see the results of these tests then they are certainly one tool I use to measure what I have learned. But outside of those tools I measure what I have learned based on what of it I can recall for use in the real world. So, in some areas tests may show that I learned what I needed to but I may say that I didn’t because I can’t seem to draw on that knowledge when it is really needed.
I won’t exactly say any solid examples. But rather I will simply say that math, the one subject at Avalon that is purely seminars and not projects for me, is the one that though I succeed in have the hardest time at. Not in the learning and comprehending of the content, but rather in the use of it later. Though oddly rare, when writing the Objective-C code for my senior project and in similar situations I may know that I learned something I need, but can’t pull it out. The standardized math tests are of a similar nature.
What I can say is that the way I work I will definitely learn the content I learn through projects much better than that which I’m learning in seminars. I can imagine that this is the stark opposite of some, if not many, or my classmates. But it is the reason why Avalon is such a good fit for me. I always say that those who end up at Avalon are ¾ the top layer of frosting on the cake of Minnesota’s students and (sadly) ¼ the students who were kicked out of every other school. This statement, too, is deeply rooted in the way Avalon has allowed me to grow.

Literally just minutes ago I finalized my most recent independent project that I’ve been working on for over a month. This project was entitled Tri-Religion Exploration, it focused on Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. I also did some research on the Ancient Indian and Roman civilizations. Like with my first world religions project, most of the deliverables were comparing various aspects of the religions. I also made two timelines, one for the civilizations, and one for the religions. There were just a few parts of the rubric I scored low on (and one point I’d entirely forgotten about), but my overall grade was acceptable for me. Enjoy, Alex.

My ideal career, put simply, would be as a software developer. Now, there are tons of details within that. The first piece is connected to the technical restraints. When talking about computers the different operating systems are considered “platforms”, and each platform has to have one, but most have more than one, programming language in which to write code. The platforms I’d focus on are Mac OS X and the iPhone OS using the Objective-C programming language. My senior project is already starting me off on that.
Another detail is in how I’d like to work. I’m the kind of person who would in the long run love to have his own full/successful development company. But I also understand how getting to that point involves working through sufficient years in college as well as being a successful component of some other software development company.
As with anyone’s ideal career (hopefully…) I want to have fairly permanent job security and more importantly enjoy at least 90% of what I do. The security part is less in my control, but the enjoyment part is fully in my control. I’d love to be able to work without feeling like it’s work, and still get the satisfactions that come from having a sturdy job.
The sad piece of this is that there is a very small chance of ever getting to experience my ideal career. Some of the reasons are linked to the economy, some to the amount of time it would take, some to demand, and most to my will. If it gets to the point where other paths become clear to me then this path is one I’d skip over and not look down ever again.

The reactions I saw when first describing Avalon to my friends outside of school was a fairly universal one. Really all of them were interested in how the school functions, though some were more interested than others. A few of the friends I ended up explaining Avalon to shortly after starting at Avalon knew other students at Avalon too, but hadn’t fully understood the school. Of course, unless you’re a student at the school or part of an Avalon family you can’t fully understand the school, but I like to expand their understanding as much as I can.
My explanations for each different person that asks all start out the same and then expand based purely on their initial reactions. Like any Avalon student the first thing I say is that Avalon is a project-based charter high school on University Avenue in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That single sentence comes packed with a lot of simple facts that could be branched out upon, but universally the “project-based” one is what I need to explain.
After I explain in brief the inner workings of a project-based school and how Avalon functions as one I will generally get the understandable reaction that Avalon is unique and to their eyes barely seems like a real school. Both comments make perfect sense to me. It’s a simple fact that project-based schools are unique, when compared against traditional schools there are just a handful of them.
The second comment is also understandable. Most people are used to school being entirely driven by the teachers, with in retrospect minimal student input, and all the work being assigned by the teacher. At Avalon it is the opposite for the majority of students and our time. We create the projects, hence we create not just what the assignments will be, but largely what our entire curriculum is. The only solid requirements we have are laid out in the form of the 208 state graduation standards.
The overall reaction is interest in how the school functions but a clear sense of not really wanting to be at Avalon as a student themselves. This is a human reaction when looking at a way of doing something that is entirely different from the way the masses do it. Project-based learning is exactly that. A major divergence from the traditional structure of a school, but one that definitely engages students much better and as a result we end up learning more and being active citizens when we graduate,

There are many ways that I have grown as a student. One of the obvious ones is the growth of a student that comes by nature of growing up. But the more important ones are deeper ways and tie closely to my experiences in school. The other major category of growth comes through those that I’m a fellow student of and those that have taught me.
My time at Crosswinds was definitely a time of sure growth as a student. This is due to the very cores of what Crosswinds is. I’ll start with CARES, this is the basic set of values for the school, and by nature of it existing we all grew by its model. C stands for Cooperation, A for Assertiveness, R for Respect/Responsibility, E for Empathy, and S for Self-control. But their focus on the arts and sciences also helped me grow as a student/learner in those areas. Through the requirements of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program, we all grew as students who are active in our communities. These are just a few of what Crosswinds has done to let me grow as a student.
Avalon has helped in its own ways to let my grow as a student. Most of the skills needed due to the independent nature of Avalon were already under my belt, but lots of the true and tangible benefits of a school that functions as project-based were not. The past 1.25 years of me being at Avalon has seen me growing as a student who has many skills needed in the workplace that traditional high schools, and even colleges, simply don’t give you. Organizational skills and the task of setting up meetings are two of the biggest of these.
But not only have the places allowed me to grow, but so have the people. In both schools the teachers/advisors really care about their students and help them along when needed. Likewise every student at Avalon, and nearly every student at Crosswinds, really strives to learn. The combination of the two make for a solid and nourishing learning community that truly fosters not just learning, but also growth of the learner as a student.
These are just the bare icing of the deep structure of ways that I have grown as a student.The list is as endless as the single topics that I’ve learned about. The final important thing to state is that this is an unending growth cycle. Even after college I’ll be continually growing as a learner (same as student in this case) and at the same time continue to be one from which others of all ages grow and learn.

I’m definitely a competent reader and you only need to look at my habits to find examples. For one, though I’ve pretty much stopped doing this due to tiredness levels, I was deeply in the habit of reading each night before going to sleep. This is what makes it clear why I’m one of the students in my advisory that actually reads during Reading Time daily. The literature projects that I’m in the dead middle of right now are another key example. Some students can’t really sustain literature projects simply because they may not be as competent a reader as others. Those students take literature seminars to meet the requirements instead of running independent projects to do so. I simply love to read, which is what makes me so competent at the task.
Now, how can this help me, or any of my classmates? That can have quite a lot of discussion surrounding it. Here are a few of the ways that it has helped me so far. Reading provides a decent and endlessly vast escape from reality, so I like that reading provides me with those kinds of escapes, and that Avalon facilitates it with Reading Time. I may be one of just a few (in retrospect) today that reads the newspaper daily, but the bits of news I get out of that is definitely a useful way to stay “in the loop” on some of the news. Now, even more so, I read blogs all the time, which is also a great way to get news that is relevant to my interests and life. There are many other examples, I’m sure, that just aren’t coming to me at the moment.
One final note I think should be made in response to this question is how the term “competent” can technically have slightly different meanings for different individuals and families. The basic definition, as I see it, is that not only are you reading on a regular basis, but you’re picking up at least some of the underlying message of what you’re reading. If you’re reading more for pleasure than work or school, then the key for competency is that you’re enjoying the story and feeling like you’re truly diving into the universe of the story when reading it. But as I just said, this term is one of those that is a fluid scale of meanings, so this is all just one point of view.