Microfiction: Life Lesson Story XC

 End of Time

On a slow sunday morning young boy lays in the beach with nothing but calm winds, warmth of water and peace. You hear seagulls, waves crashing and swooshing from the wind. Memorable smells of aromatic sea air, salty waters and family cookouts. He feels the sensation of sand between toes, dry mouth, and warmth. The young boy reaches for his water to relieve the sensation of thirst. The boy layed there to take his time to himself. He wakes up to see the moonlight in the distance as it reflects off the glossy waters. Your sense of time disappears when you are enjoying it. 

Two Sentence Story

There is a beginning to everything. There is also an end. 

The Beginning and Ending

Time Strategies for Class

 Time management is an important task to learn for any field. It is a tool that needs to be turned into a habit. Multitasking has always been a game changer to those who can do it, myself being one of them. Since majority of OU courses are online, time managing has been made a priority. Not only is it a good thing to learn for education, but overall for life and success. I believe I have picked a great wide spread schedule that helps me balance my other tasks in life outside of education. The article written by Aine Cain titled, 11 Ways Unsuccessful People Mismanage Their Time, showcases several reasons on how you can identify your mismanage in time and how you can utilize precious time. The first point in this article states how failing to schedule your time can lead to slow progression. I utilize two calendars, one being canvas and the other being a physical calendar that I have to personally write down. In my own experience I find it harder to forget something if I write it down. I recommend reading this article to anyone finding themselves in a hole, or even finding to better themselves. One of the biggest challenges in college is balancing a heavy workload along with a job. I have learned to utilize time efficiently over the years through failure. I adapt to new habits and learn life skills as I go, and one recommendation I can give anyone is to not stress so much about stuff, and just ride the wave. 

Ride the Wave

Technology

 This course teaches you a lot of technical and mechanical errors that people might make and I am very thankful for that. The technology tools shown in the web page was very helpful and I am familiar with tools such as the spell check and word counter widgets. These helped me my freshman year with comp 1 and 2. These are great helpful tools to add to your browser to further help improve writing and reading. The online environment causes for a more wider spread and open minded work space. Everyone seems to have the grasp of this course, due to the organization of this course and its routinely similar workload every week. I have gotten a lot better in terms of my computer skills along with microsoft office. I want to better my writing skills overall in this course. One extension I would recommend adding to web browsers is grammarly tool. This tool offers not only an advanced spell check machine, but included word count, dictionary, thesaurus and many more. This tool has definitely helped me advance in my writing skills. I look forward to learning more interesting tools and tips along this course. Down below is a picture of what I will be doing 24/7. 

Writing Better

Assignments.. 1st Impression

 My honest first impression of this course was that it looks like a busy workload, however the organization in this course made it a lot easier. I am interested in seeing how online courses play out especially because it is done at our own pace. The blog posts are really interesting and its great to see everyones opinion on topics. I look forward to the storytelling aspect of this course. It seems like a really interesting way to showcase different unique styles of writing. I cannot wait to read some of the stories written by other students.  This course is nothing like any class I have ever taken, I look forward to seeing how this course plays out. The topics chosen in this course is topics that have an open minded and wide spread answers. Seeing that many classes are online, I wonder how hectic and unorganized many peoples schedules are. I have been very organized this first week, however like every year as we dig deeper into the course people start to lack. My schedule thus far has been easy, however once I start working I will have to learn to adapt to the new wave. I have always been good at multitasking, however sometimes I wish I had a couple more hands and arms like the picture below.....

Multitasking

Growth Mindset

 This is my first time hearing about Carole Dweck idea about a growth vs fixed mindset. However my parents have raised me with essentially the same idea about having a growth mindset. I would consider myself to be a growth mindset person as I rarely say no to a task without giving it an attempt. I have always had a determined and enthusiastic mindset. Everyone at some point in their life experience trouble with life that might drive you to change mindsets. I have taught basketball to young kids and it is important to pursue that mindset onto young adults especially to increase their confidence in themselves. I always try to focus and excel in whatever task is at hand and if I can make improvements I do so. When you are learning new tasks you will find unique ways subconsciously to improve, for example I have learned that I am a visual and hands on learner, therefore I try to isolate that behavior into my learning skills. This helps me stay goal oriented and be more of a growth mindset person. I am very interested in learning more about the growth vs fixed mindset as it can have a huge role in someones life. My personal learning goal this semester is to achieve a 4.0 gpa and push myself both physically and mentally to better myself as a student. 

Growth Mindset Bulletin

Introduction..PB

     My name is Prabath Adikaram, I go by the nickname PB. My major is Pre-Med/ Biology, I find this major very interesting due to its deep investigation into biology. This aspect combined with the hands on experience with the labs make it a very fascinating major. One of my biggest role models is my mother, she inspired me to follow in the path of health care. She was a nurse for over 30+ years, and showed me why the healthcare field is such a magical place. My longterm goal in life is to open up a free clinic for the unfortunate in my home country of Sri Lanka. This has always been a dream of mine, ever since I lost family of my own due to the trouble-ships with healthcare in Sri Lanka. This task however is not an easy task, it requires dedication, endurance and determination. I am on the right path so far and have support from not only my family but my friends as well. I try to surround myself with people that push me to be great and follow the same dreams and ambitions as I do. Aside from career and educational goals, I do enjoy free time with my peers. I enjoy listening to music and watching movies with my friends and peers. I enjoy sports and physical activities. One of my hobbies is drawing and producing music, which I found an interest in the last couple years. My friends support my hobbies and help me improve in my hobbies. I have always been a huge fan of learning new things and music was a great start to this adventure. Aside from myself, I look forward to learning in this course and finding new aspects that I would enjoy learning about. I hope everyone reading this has a great semester and good luck to all. 

This is a picture of my producing setup. I spend a lot of my time here. 

Picture was taken by myself on Feb 6 2020

Storybook Favorites

                      Life as Animals of the Epics

    This specific story caught my attention off the bat with the title, "Life as Animals of the Epics". I am familiar with the idea of reincarnation, through my experience with the Buddhism religion. The concept behind this story was great and played out in a very interactive way. I enjoyed the control the author gave to the readers. It allowed for a much more fascinating experience. The introduction does a great job in grabbing and maintaining the readers attention through creative techniques in writing. The author made the whole experience feel like a video game, which many people will find attractive. Therefore making this a great story telling piece of work. My personal favorite in this specific story was the story of the horse, and how it created an environment where you essentially find yourself through tough battles in life, and find comfort in unexpected places. It reminds us to always keep a positive mind and never let things out of your grasp. 

   RBA

    RBA or Ramayana Basketball Association was such a brilliant idea and quite simply put hilarious to me. As a fan of the NBA, it was hard for me to not click on such a story titled as such. I enjoyed the comedic change in names in basketball players. The author did a great job playing a script close to the reality of the game. The author made relativeness to the real life resemblance to the NBA. The page layout was very appealing and easy to navigate. I could tell the effort was put into this page as the visual clues tied along with the story telling. The authors creative story telling allowed for visual clues. From a readers point of view, this serves the readers a greater comprehensive ability. One addition I would have made to this page is try to tweak the resemblance of the page to the main NBA page. I feel like this would have been a minor adjustment that would greatly increase the purpose of this page.  

          The Beginning of the End

    Great Topic and brilliant attention grabbing heading is what bought my attention to this page. I like the twist and the double meaning behind the title, "The beginning of the end". Overall the layout of the page was great and was easy to navigate. I liked his story, however he could have gotten creative with the technique of storytelling. He took a pretty basic approach by leading with his introduction by name and the purpose of the story. This is pretty common, however he made sure to dig deeper into the story line which definitely made this story interesting. My personal favorite section of this page was The Golden Egg. It had such a mysterious plot, which lead me to think and have my own perspective in the story. I believe he did this on purpose in order to give the readers some freedom in the reading and story comprehending.  

Belief in evolution- "The Golden Egg"

Favorite Place.... Paris, France

 Paris, France. I have always dreamt of visiting and maybe even living in France. It is a wonderful place with such a heavy culture. Paris also has one of my favorite sports teams (PSG). The city is known for their rich taste in architecture, art and especially cuisine. It is such a beautiful city that is most likely on many peoples bucket list. Just look at that view, its beautiful!!!!

                                                    

                                                               (Photo by Marie Nadine Pierre)  

Sri Lanka

 I was born in Sri Lanka and came to the wonderful country of United States at the age of nine. I have learned a lot about the history of Sri Lanka through my parents and by word of mouth. Aside from Sri Lanka being one of the largest tea producers, there is a huge connection in terms of religious and moral values. The main religion in Sri Lanka is Buddhist. Sri Lanka is a very ancient country is still underdeveloped. The country grew up on the preservation of Buddhism, and later grew into wider cultures such as Hinduism and Islam. Many of the religious stories much like the well known Bible is based upon stories which traveled by word of mouth. I will share a story that I learned from a very young age. My parents taught me life meaning through religion. One of the main lessons you learn as a buddhist is the Four Noble Truths. This story breaks down the truth of suffering, truth of the cause of suffering, truth of the end of suffering, and finally the truth of the path that relieves us from suffering. This essentially teaches you to learn from life lessons and how and why humans experience suffering and how to overcome. This can tie into many moral values and other lessons, such as the saying "no pain, no gain". This is just one of several thousands of lessons to be learned from Sri Lanka.