Talking to groups
I have always been good at talking to groups. However, talking to large groups of peers always frightened me. This changed during the 3 day of the MUN, when I had to talk in front of a lot of peers about something I wasn't really an expert on. At first I freaked out, I stumbled through my speech and wan't able to focus on any of the important points I wanted to bring up. After a while though, I started to realized that whenever I watched a speech, My focus was always on what the person was saying, and less on how they were saying it. This realization helped me through the rest of the speeches I had to make during those 3 days. Speaking in front of groups is very important in 8th grade, so I'm glad I've gotten good at it these past 2 years.
Following orders
During the past POL's and TPOL, I've always talked about trusting my group members to make good decisions, but even if I wasn't the leader of the group, I still have always had some important position in the project. Just recently, though, that all changed. During on of Ms. Bagnell's many math Mini-projects I was paired up with someone who REALLY wanted to be the leader. Realizing this was a perfect chance for learning how to take orders I obliged, and while I originally was confused about what the leader wanted, things quickly came together to form a very nice poster. Because your not always going to lead a project, being able to follow orders is a great skill to have in 8th grade. Unfortunately, because we were told to use the poster as a net for a box, I cannot show it to you today. However I can say that It explained all the things It needed to explain very nicely, had no pictures, was black and green in color, and had a couple of jokes thrown in to break up the stream of math data.
Helping others
During this semester I have been getting better and better at giving help to others. This is mostly due to aleks giving lousy explanations for their problems. In any case I have been getting a lot of training. For example, one day I was doing aleks when the person sitting next to me started yelling at the computer because aleks was explaining the answer to a problem one way, but expecting the problem to be solved another way. I looked at the problem that was given and suggested another way to solve the problem; this way was not the correct way either, but eventually through trial and error we found the correct way to solve the problem. In 8th grade, being able to help others can greatly increase the effectiveness of a team.