Journal
July 5, 2008, 9:00 PM
Summer Holidays (Week 1 & 2)
Qiao Yu
The Summer Holidays, a time of exotic escapes to various destinations, savoring the most delicate cuisine around the world, hanging out with friends, and simply relaxing after a whole term of school work; or so what every adult thinks. However, for me, this summer holidays is rather a time for work and redemption. Having taken part in the ThinkQuest as a leader of a group for 2 years straight, I have never been successful in either of them. The first group I managed failed miserably, with members unwilling to work and having very bad time management skills, we didn’t even finish the website before the deadline. The second group was formed the following year and it too was a failure as it was disqualified due to problems with the links on the website that were mostly my fault. After so many failures, it left me rather heartbroken as I had wasted not only my time but the valuable time of my members as well. This year, it was to be different I promised myself. It was indeed time for a redemption.
Thus, before the summer holidays even began, I began assembling my team, and the team was very much a carbon copy of the team from the previous year. I reunited with an old friend, Ian, who is currently the chairman of the Infocomm club in my previous school. Due to his impressive resume in the field of computer science, I thus invited him to join my group. The members managing content were about the same from the previous year, comprising of Lea, Shuwen, and Albert. I chose Lea to be in my team because she could influence everyone with her bubbly personality that seems to inject life into the most mundane of environments. Apart from that, she was also a master of the English language, being able to effectively transform a boring piece of literature into an exciting and compelling read. Shuwen would be able to translate our site into Japanese and she would be able to help all the other departments in our group as she is a rather versatile worker. Albert, on the other hand, is a good researcher who is able to cherry pick all the most essential information out of articles online or from books. He is able to transform the information into something entirely different and be able to add a new perspective to it through his unique style of analysis. He is also able to motivate the team in the most unique of ways.
With the team assembled, we were ready for yet another year of ThinkQuest. We are currently planning to do ThinkQuest continuously throughout the summer holidays and attempt to squeeze in whatever time we have during the next school semester and finally finish off during the winter vacation. Before we start writing the content and designing the website however, we had to come up with a topic. Thus, I have given the group two weeks to brainstorm and research to come up with a suitable topic and we will get together within a fortnight to discuss which topic we will be using. The excitement is growing, all our hearts are set on succeeding this time and failure is not an option in our minds at the moment.
Just to note, Ian will not be starting on the actual website until we finish our content so we really have to use whatever time we have to allow him to work on the content as soon as possible. I do not want the same scenario as last year where we were disqualified to website issues, thus we have to give Ian all the aid he could possibly get by finishing the content with quality in the shortest time possible.
July 24, 2008, 3:47 PM
Summer Holidays (Weeks 3 & 4)
Lea
I am sitting here typing this in the computer room of Jerry House in Stanford University. Qiao Yu told me just before I left Shanghai for the summer that he wants to join ThinkQuest again this year and wondered if I would be interested. Of course I told him yes but that it would be difficult to work in the summer since he and Shuwen would be in Shanghai, while Albert would be in Inner Mongolia teaching English and I would be in California at Stanford Summer School. However, he confidently told me that we would be able to work it out through e-mail and instant messaging. (Isn’t internet a wonderful thing?) So here I am replying an e-mail of Qiao Yu’s and at the same time doing some basic research on the most current events to try to pick a topic.
Qiao Yu tells me that Albert has very little internet access up there in Inner Mongolia and so is limited in the amount of work he can complete. Shuwen is apparently taking a piano test later in August so has to prepare for that but is also interning at a law firm. It seems like all of us are very busy this summer; I do not know if we can get much work done. Qiao Yu also says that he wants us to alternate in keeping logs during our ThinkQuest project and that it should be my turn this week. Thus, here I am writing this journal.
After a few discussions in Shanghai, here are our general topics:
- Cloning and Its Controversies
- Politics – the Bane of Human Society
- The Global Food Crisis – A Tale of Hunger
- From Dickens to “Yo Sup” – The Degradation of the English Language.
We tried to cover a wide range of subjects, from science to literature to current events. Most of us are leaning towards “The Global Food Crisis” and “Politics” because they have more global value. The controversies of cloning only apply in those more technologically advanced countries at the moment and the degradation of the English language only applies to English-speaking countries. I hope we can reach a decision soon.
August 2, 2008, 9:47 PM
Summer Holidays (Weeks 5 & 6)
Albert
Today we had a small discussion through MSN Messenger to start deciding exactly what topic we should start choosing. During the past meetings, we have decided on two main topics. After some debate, we finally settled on the global food crisis as our topic. Personally, this was a relief because I am not very fond of politics, but I am quite interested in current social events. This is mainly because it less general than the topic on politics, so detailed information will be more available. There are many news reports, articles, and magazines that are all about the food crisis. We also realized that millions are starving around the world, so we thought that such a topic may also bring more public awareness on this issue. With that decided, Qiao Yu told us to do some research on the subject. After the discussion, I searched the global food crisis up on Google and found an overwhelmingly large amount of information. We will need to set up subtopics, but we are all too busy during the summer holidays.
August 7, 2008, 10:52 PM
I am currently in a village in Inner Mongolia teaching the children English. The only access to the internet is through a very slow and unstable wireless modem card, so I was not able to research much more. After all, I am over a hundred miles away from a city. Qiao Yu also told me to focus on the solutions of the food crisis because I will be doing the outline for it. However, I was not able to make much progress because it took me a minute just to get on www.google.com, not to mention the time it takes to search for and load other even larger web pages. After about two hours of waiting, the pages I wanted were finally loaded, but many of them turned out to be irrelevant. I decided to stop there paste all the information onto a word document.
August 13, 2008, 8:56 PM
Progress for ThinkQuest was slow, for I was quite busy in Inner Mongolia. First, I had to teach the children English two hours daily and spend another two preparing for the next day’s class. After, I had to help with the farm chores. When I finally find time for ThinkQuest, the internet always fails me. Due to this, I felt that my solutions outline was rather incomplete because I could only access a handful of the websites with my internet speed. Nonetheless, I finished most of it. The others were quite busy too: Lea is at Stanford Summer Camp, and Shuwen is busy with her internship in Shanghai. Only Qiao Yu is relatively free, and he made a basic webpage design. I guess we would not make much progress during the summer holidays, so we must finish it during school days.
August 19, 2008, 2:30 PM
Summer Holidays (Weeks 7 & 8)
Qiao Yu
The past few weeks had been rather unproductive, with minimal results from most members. After the topic was decided and the global food crisis became the sea we immersed ourselves in, we haven’t been able to get much done due to the overwhelming amount of work everyone had. I mainly assigned research roles to everyone while I handled a bit of graphic designing at the same time. Lea had to research on impacts, Shuwen on government and organization efforts, and Albert on solutions for the time being. I was to research and draft up causes on my own and this was rather frustrating and I didn’t really know much about the global food crisis prior to tackling it as the topic for ThinkQuest. At many times, I was tempted to simply reword what the website had and not bother understanding the true meaning beneath the explanations. However, after a paragraph of that, I realized that this was never going to work. This was of extremely low quality, the content had no “spice” at all, and there was no in-depth analysis and personal view inside the content. Thus, I decided to fully understand all the content before I start outlining causes and drafting up the document.
Apart from the research I was doing, I took some time to work on the right side of my brain. Through the means of graphic designing through photoshop. I wanted to add to the wow! factor of our website and thus went online to search extensively for tutorials and tips on how to manipulate images and produce stunning designs. Surfing the web, I came across with a lot of free tutorials from various websites and I thought about integrating all the tips within these websites. While looking through these sites, I discovered a lot about photoshop that I had never known before and I was amazed to see how creative people can be. Some people have been able to draw real life flowers with a simple and rather humdrum sketch along with a few blending effects. It was simply amazing to see how people combine such images that previously seemed completely unrelated in every possible aspect. I hope I will be able to complete one possible design by the end of the day to show my members.
August 28, 2008, 11:36 PM
Summer Holidays (Weeks 7 & 8)
Qiao Yu
It is nearly midnight and I am almost finished with yet another design. The past week had been relatively productive. Research had been done, attitudes towards work had been set right, and a few designs had been done. When I showed some of my designs to my members, they all stated that it had been much better as compared to those that I had designed last year. Personally, I did not think they were that satisfactory and only then did I realize how inexperienced I was with the software barely a year ago. It also taught me that trying to learn something by yourself only works for the selected few geniuses in the world. For the rest, we have to be able to be humble and learn from someone who is more experienced than we are to truly develop in that field.
I have also been able to partly finish causes. I have drawn up the preliminary outline for causes and been able to understand fully what the food crisis is truly about now. I have also started drafting but I am afraid I have written too much for each subtopic. After all, a simple section such as biofuels ended up to be more than 1000 words! This was simply unexpected as I didn’t really plan on being so verbose.
Lea hadn’t been able to work much due to the summer college she was involved in while Albert had limited internet access in Mongolia. Shuwen was also rather busy but managed to complete some research. All in all, it had been a rather productive week. School is also beginning in less than three days. With the mountain loads of homework that is going to be coming our way, I really do hope we can maintain this streak and continue working on ThinkQuest even while juggling with schoolwork.
January 15, 2009, 10:47 PM
Winter Break (Week 9)
Lea
We just finished our final exams and started our winter break this week. All of us know that we have a lot of catching up to do and that we’re going to need to work some serious hours to pull this off. But I’m confident that with Qiao Yu’s perseverance, Shuwen’s diligence, Albert’s spirit, and my motivation, we’ll be able to get through this with flying colors.
We held our first official group meeting today on MSN Messenger (January 15). Mainly, we discussed the plan for the next three weeks and how work is going to be distributed. Albert will be mainly doing research and outlining, Qiao Yu will be putting the information into words, I will be revising the information and making it more reader-friendly, while Shuwen will be translating and helping all of us out with our jobs. However, since we don’t have much information to write about, revise, or translate yet, we are all going to make a collaborative effort to do extensive research first. Qiao Yu distributes the work as follows: Albert: Impacts; Qiao Yu: Causes; Shuwen and I: History. Information is due on Sunday (January 18). Oh man.
January 19, 2009, 11:13 PM
I just got off the phone with Shuwen. We each researched three famines in history and put them into bullet-point form. We’re going to send them to Qiao Yu in a while so he can start on the rough draft. He just sent me the first draft of the Causes too. I will need to focus on sentence structure, diction, grammar, and conciseness when I’m revising these documents. My goal is to make sure that the writing is academic and informative but still reader-friendly. He says I should try to finish it within three or four days. Shuwen will be translating parts of the document as I finish and Albert will continue researching the other information we need, including Solutions’ information, and Government Actions’ information. Shuwen, Albert, and I are all taking SAT classes in the morning and Qiao Yu is taking SAT classes in the evening so all of us are really going to need to work on our time management skills if we’ll finish all of this. Nevertheless, I believe in us!
January 24, 2009, 8:26 PM
I finally finished Causes! That took much longer than I hoped but that’s probably because I still haven’t gotten the hang of it. I sent all of it to Shuwen as I revised bit by bit so she could translate it all into Japanese. Qiao Yu seemed a little bit irritated by my missing the deadline though. He’s doing a lot of work these days and is juggling around a lot: SAT classes, English reading assignments, an internship at a bank, and of course ThinkQuest. As group leader, he really does have a lot of responsibility and a lot of work to finish. I am determined to be more efficient next time in order to lessen the burden on him.
Meanwhile, Qiao Yu also told me to start writing introductions for each section. I was pretty clueless, not sure how to present our information in a more interesting way. I was discussing this with Albert on MSN Messenger just earlier and he gave me this really great idea: story-writing. He says that since I like story-writing, why not try to use stories based on real events in order to try to get our point across? I was really inspired by this idea so I have just written the first introduction for Causes. I really hope Qiao Yu likes it. It might be a little bit too “out there” for him though.
January 25, 2009, 5:43 PM
Winter Break (Week 10)
Shuwen
It is the second week of winter break but our ThinkQuest group is busier than during the school year. Because all of us were occupied with other activities during the summer, we did not get much work done. As a result, we must make up a lot of work during this winter break. During our latest online group discussion (January 15), our group leader, Qiao Yu, decided that he would prefer for me to focus on translating the English text into Japanese. He also said that since translations would not begin until a lot of our text was finished, I was to first help Albert, Lea, and himself with the other jobs.
Last week, Lea and I did research for History. I researched the Great Chinese Famine, the North Korean Famine, and the Ethiopian Famine while Lea researched the Great Famine, the Ukraine Famine, and the Bengal Famine. We sent the notes to Qiao Yu at the end of last week. Earlier on Sunday, Qiao Yu told me that he would only use five of those events in our History section and take the Ethiopian Famine out and turn it into a Case Study. He wanted to make sure I was okay with that and of course I told him I was. Qiao Yu is a very thoughtful leader and keeps peace in the group most of the time by trying not to offend anyone.
Yesterday Lea asked me to help her with one of the sections on Causes because it was taking a little bit longer than she had hoped. I expected the work to be somewhat like last year’s: checking grammar, diction, and those small errors. However, when I heard Qiao Yu’s expectations, I realized that this time, the writing would have to possess a sort of literary quality as well, so as to not make it too dry. This is easier said than done. It took me about two hours to revise a page of the Causes document. The whole time I was wondering, if it takes so much effort to revise it in English, how long would it take to translate into Japanese?
February 1, 2009, 9:14 PM
Today I got my first real job: translate Causes. Lea finally finished revising the document and sent it to me earlier this afternoon. As I expected, translating it was not an easy task. My English excels my Japanese so sometimes some of the words are difficult to translate into Japanese. As I expected, it took a very long time to translate only a tiny portion, about 2.5 hours to translate 1 page. I realize that I will really need to learn how to improve my efficiency if I will complete this on time. I noticed that I waste a lot of time trying to think of the proper word to match the word used in English. Perhaps if I focus more on general meaning rather than individual meaning though, the words will flow more easily and my efficiency will be improved…頑張って！
February 4, 2009, 10:37 PM
Winter Break (Week 11)
Lea
Monday (February 2) was Shuwen’s birthday, but that didn’t mean we could slack off. Qiao Yu was extremely productive the past week and finished History already. He sent it to me on Monday morning so for the past three days I’ve been revising that. It takes a lot more time than one might think to revise one of these documents and to make it meet standards. An average A4 page of Times New Roman-12 material takes at least one hour and a half. The first step I must take when revising the document is scanning it and taking some mental notes (ex. these paragraphs should be arranged in this order, these sentences are unnecessary, this wording is awkward, etc.) Once I have a general idea of the paper, I begin the real editing process. Last time while revising Causes, I did this by making changes directly onto the original document Qiao Yu sent me. However, this time, I tried a new method while revising History. Instead, what I did was print out the document on scratch paper, and as I read it, I would reword the information in my mind and then type the entire document over again with the revisions. This, though I assumed might take longer, actually improved my efficiency by at least 30%. Through revising History, I learned what kind of methods worked for me and what my weaknesses were. (For example, when I am forced to directly change the wording on the original document, my mind is confined by what is already there and cannot think of better ways to express the information.)
Meanwhile, Shuwen has been having some trouble translating. The final English version is difficult for her to translate into Japanese because her English language ability exceeds her Japanese language ability. Qiao Yu suggested that he send her the draft version along with the final version so that she can have a more basic and direct version for reference. This seemed to have helped quite a bit and her speed has picked up since that improvisation.
Albert has continued doing research for solutions. He tells me that it’s very hard to find good, credible information on the internet these days. I understand what he is saying because I remember while doing the research for History, I also had the same problem.
5 more days before school begins. We’re catching up, but we still have a lot of work to do.
February 6, 2009, 8:06 PM
Qiao Yu is really on fire! He sent me Impacts yesterday morning to revise and I finished them just now. What’s really amazing is that even though he does it in such a short period of time, the writing is still very exceptional (which is why it took me only 2 days this time). All of us are working a lot more efficiently these days, probably because school is starting in less than a week and we’ll have barely any time to work when it starts. Shuwen is a little bit behind on translations and Qiao Yu is getting a little bit worried. I reassured him that she’s a diligent worker and that she’ll definitely get the work done in time so he doesn’t need to worry too much. Nevertheless, him being Qiao Yu and team leader, he is still rather anxious.
February 8, 2009, 11:34 PM
It’s the Sunday night before the first day of the next semester and I just finished writing some introductions. The story-telling introduction idea that Albert inspired me with during the first week was up to Qiao Yu’s standards. However, this means that he has been rushing me more than ever to write the introductions for each section, including the main introduction. Earlier in the evening, he and I got into a small quarrel when he again started pressuring me about writing the introductions. I told him that these stories cannot be written by force, that I must write them when they come to me. He grew impatient and agitated though I assured him that I’d have the introductions to him before his deadline. He was not too convinced though and became lost in a rage, which further threw me into a flurry. However, fortunately, like all of our group quarrels, the upset was resolved within the next hour and we were back on track. Qiao Yu and I compromised and we came to an agreement: He would stop pressuring me everyday as long as I would have all the intros done by the end of the month.
Though we fought, there are no hard feelings. Both of us know that there has just been a lot of pressure on us lately and that that has put us in a bad mood. After all, working as a group, we must be able to forgive each others’ tempers and tantrums and compromise in the face of dissonance. That’s what team work is all about.
February 13, 2009, 3:35 PM
Winter Vacation, School (Week 12)
Qiao Yu
Our winter vacation has just ended and to tell the truth, we were pretty productive in the amount of content we churned out over this period. For one, we all felt pretty bad that we didn’t do much during the school semester as we had promised to do. Also, we actually managed to managed time properly this time, and the quality of our work was also higher than usual. All in all, it was a productive month.
To supplement the content of the text, we have agreed that it would be best if we were to interview someone who knows much about this crisis. Thus, I have decided to ask my dad’s superior, Mr David Lynch, who is currently the head of wholesale bank operations in China for Standard Chartered Bank. I have decided to interview him as he is a close friend of my dad’s and I know him pretty well too. Also, he holds a high position in the bank and he is very knowledgeable. Thus, I met up with him the night before the new school semester began and interviewed him in his daughter’s play room. The interview went smoothly apart from some minor disturbances in the form of her daughter running all around his house. Through this interview, I also saw what a composed character he was, with the aura of authority around him.
I had recorded this interview with a voice recorder but once I attempted to type out the interview while listening to the recording, I realized how difficult it was going to be. There were noises in the background from the visitors in his house and I wasn’t exactly a professional in handling recording equipment. Volumes fluctuated and it was hard to keep track of what he was saying. After I finally finished after around 4 hours of listening and typing at the same time, I read it over once again and discovered that there were discrepancies everywhere. Thus I sent the file over to our language specialist, Lea, for her to edit it. It’s really going to be a tough job for her and I hope she’ll be able to squeeze this assignment into her busy schedule.
February 20, 2009, 7:20 PM
School (Week 13)
Qiao Yu
With school work setting in and pressure slowly mounting, we were determined to not let history repeat and slack off any further at such a critical time as this. We still had a lot to finish and we knew it fully well. Interview had more or less been edited by Lea and I just had to add in the final transitions to make it all sound logical. However, apart from Interview, we had to have something else to supplement our content further, thus I have decided to conduct a survey.
The survey will most likely be handed out to people in Singapore and Shanghai, most notably students with different nationalities. I thus decided to come up with the survey questions and I called up Lea to help me with them. From afternoon to night, we came up with various questions and we discussed about how each question will be able to help supplement out content. We were able to come up with a whole list of questions and we managed to pick out the ones that would help get our point across the most effectively. By the end of the day, we managed to come up with the final version of survey and we were ready to hand them out. The very next day, we printed the surveys out in school and handed them out to students of various nationalities as well as our teachers. Meanwhile, in Singapore, Ian was doing the same thing, handing out the surveys to students, teachers as well as some to the general public. By the end of the week, we had all the results collated and I was able to write up the survey analysis.
Our work this week was rather commendable, given that a mere 4 months ago, we couldn’t even squeeze in time to do ThinkQuest. This was indicative of our improvement in time management and all of us were pleased with this improvement. Shuwen has been translating the documents we were finished with such as impacts and she encountered some problems. As a result, she went to consult some of her Japanese friends, namely Taiu, Fumika and Jim to ask about the translations. They were kind enough to help and Shuwen managed to finish her part quickly.
March 3, 2009
School (Week 14)
Albert
This week, I have been assigned a new task – government actions. However, this is also the monthly test week, so there will be a lot of work. The good thing is that two tests will be moved to next week, so there will be a bit more time to do ThinkQuest. Today we all worked on our assigned tasks and reviewed for the tests. Qiao Yu worked on the solutions draft, Lea on survey revision, and Shuwen translated the case study. I went on the internet to find some information on actions taken by governments, but to no avail. I have decided that I was on the wrong track, so I plan on searching different keywords during the weekends, when most of the tests will be over.
March 6, 2009
We finished most of our tests this week, which is why we will have more time to do ThinkQuest during the weekends. Today, I tried searching for current actions being taken again, since I failed to find any information earlier this week. This time, I had a more thorough search than last Wednesday because there was less to worry about, and it did yield results. I found over fifteen pages of raw information that I used for the actual draft. After gathering all the information, I started working on the draft. One major difficulty is that almost all the information comes from news articles, so it becomes hard to write a draft that does not sound like an article. The others are also busy with their work, continuing what they did for the past few days. We are also working hard studying for our tests on Monday and Tuesday.
March 7, 2009
Today I was free from school work since I finished reviewing for the tests. This meant that I could devote more time on ThinkQuest. I continued working on government actions. I edited what I did yesterday and organized the content so that it makes more logical sense. However, this started to look even more like an article, since I was listing the logical progression of events. When I finished the actions, I found that the language was a bit awkward and the transitions were not good. I decided to leave it for today and ask a friend to help me proofread tomorrow at school. I was not the only one to have trouble either. Lea started editing the solutions today, and it seemed like she had trouble. The structure of it was a bit chaotic, so she found it a hard to edit. I felt guilty because it may be because some flaw in my outlining of it. Qiao Yu and Shuwen were also busy with work and did not appear to have any problems though. I also had a glimpse of what Ian and Hubert’s website draft. It looked very professional, and I hope that our content will also be good.
March 13, 2009, 11:43 PM
Winter Break (Week 15)
Lea
These past few days really have been the most awful. I have been deathly ill this entire week and the ThinkQuest work has kept me up to past midnight everyday. Thus, I have not really been in the greatest mood these few days. Albert and Qiao Yu did not finish Government Actions and Solutions on time, which delayed my introductions for both pieces, as I did not know how to introduce something I have never seen. Thus, I had to write both introductions along with the main introduction within three days (one per day). In addition, Qiao Yu had only sent me Solutions about 2 weeks before and it was of extremely poor quality. Instead of taking the average one and a half hour per page, it took over two and a half hours per page. Understandably, I was not too happy about being forced to work like this when I was ill only because other team members did not follow the schedule. I felt like I was being forced to pick up others’ slack and make up for what they did not do. As a result, there were many arguments these few days within the group, with each person blaming the others for not doing enough work or whatnot. It was certainly a tough week to get by with. However, we know that all groups have fights and that the only difference is how we deal with our dissatisfactions. Our group has adopted a “keep personal out of business” attitude to cope with this situation. When we are talking about ThinkQuest these days, we remain strictly professional and leave personal grudges out. This is necessary, as our time has slowly dwindled and our time must be used wisely now if we are to complete the project.
I suppose that the current situation of our group should worry me but ironically it does not. For one, when we joined ThinkQuest last year, the same sort of chaos had erupted at around the same time (2-3 weeks before the deadline). In addition, I believe that all groups experience this issue when put under a lot of pressure, and not just our group or other ThinkQuest groups. When people are forced to undertake tasks in groups at work, the same situation must also occur. Thus, though these past few days have not been the greatest experiences of ThinkQuest, they have been a very real experience.
March 15, 2009, 9:03 PM
My illness has cleared up recently so I’ve been working extremely hard on Solutions for the past few days. As I mentioned in the last journal entry, Solutions has not been written very well and thus is very time-consuming to revise. I have mentioned this to the other group members and they have been very diplomatic about the entire issue. Qiao Yu has apologized most sincerely for the lapse of productivity, while Albert and Shuwen have offered to help me revise, even though their hands are also quite full with what they’ve got to do. (Shuwen still has quite a bit of translation and Albert was given more research tasks.) I appreciate all their help and understanding and it is at times like these that I realize that I even though our group often quarrels, we are all still great friends and willing to give everything for ThinkQuest.
I have also heard from Qiao Yu that our overseas members in Singapore, Ian and Hubert, are working very diligently on the tech aspect of our website. They have shown him the draft, and he in turn has showed it to the rest of us here in Shanghai. I must admit that working with team members and a teacher in another country is rather challenging but it is also very rewarding, as we get much more global perspective and interaction, which I believe is a huge aspect of the ThinkQuest learning experience.
March 18, 2009, 12:03 AM
School (Week 16)
Shuwen
Originally, Qiao Yu had set yesterday as the deadline for translations. But we were all drowning under loads of English homework, and there was so much work to do. I had finally, finally finished Causes and History. There was a lot to translate, but I was fortunate enough to find two classmates who helped me with translating Impacts and Case Study. After doing Causes and History, which constituted of a huge amount of facts and information, it was relieving to translate the Survey questions and analysis. At the same time, I had finally stopped trying to translate word for word. Instead, I simply got the general meaning, eliminating or adding some things while doing so. I was surprised as to how much more easily it came to me. Trying too hard had actually hindered my progress.
March 21, 2009, 12:05 PM
Last night, during a group meeting on MSN messenger, Qiao Yu told us that the teacher said we needed pictures. It was completely true. Seeing a lot of text with no pictures whatsoever can be intimidating. It was decided that I, who carried my camera around, would take some photos that relates to the food crisis.
I headed out this morning, hoping to capture a few good frames of food, pictures that would make it easier for the readers to relate to our topic. First, I set out for the local marketplace, where people in pajamas could be seen haggling with the sellers. Afterwards, I went to the supermarket to get some shots of a greater variety of foods. I haven’t gone grocery shopping for some time, but it was scary how much prices had increased. A pound of salmon that cost 45 yuan/pound was 68 yuan/pound now. When I had just moved to Shanghai four years ago, a carton of milk was 6.30 yuan, but now it had risen to 9.20 yuan. Even the XiaoLong Baozi at this local fast-food shop near our home had increased greatly in price. The dish of 8 XiaoLong sold at 3.50 yuan before was now 5.00 yuan. It was daunting to see prices rise by such great percentages, especially since the current economy isn’t in its best state either.
March 22, 2009, 2:22 AM
Lea had called me at 10:35 PM, telling me to go on MSN asap (as soon as possible) — it appeared that there was some kind of huge crisis. Apparently, the teacher had urgently emailed, telling us that we needed to make our content more accessible asap. I suppose that we had been so focused on the content, and on the writing, that we hadn’t really considered the reader-friendly aspects of the text. It was true that people probably wouldn’t want to read the enormous chunk of text, more text, and nothing but text. Within 10 minutes, 1.5 pages of Causes had been changed into bullet-point, reader-friendly form. I don’t think I ever experienced something as efficient or intense as during that 10 minutes. Outside, thunder could be heard, and as Qiao Yu said, “our intensity rivals the storm outside.” Albert, Lea, Qiao Yu and I continued the intensity for the next few hours, and in no time, we had made Impacts, Causes, Government Actions more reader-friendly. It was pretty amazing how much we could get done under the pressure. Late into the night, or I should say early morning, we were all fatigued. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep our eyes open, and it was hard to think. I really need to learn to be efficient like we were today.