Keep Pushing

Due to the pandemic that everyone hates, I'm now stuck at home. I'm living in Shanghai China, which is half an earth from Irvine and I have to get up at night and go to sleep at noon to match my schedule of classes these quarters. That is why, although the pandemic has already being controlled in China and everything is now back to normal, I am still stuck in my bedroom and can't really go anywhere else since there's nowhere for me to go during the night. While this is already the 4th quarter we're doing remote learning, I'm now used to the pattern of it. In my past experience with writing courses, I'm kind of afraid about it because it's usually consuming me a lot of time reading and annotating and writing. However, I know that it is necessary for me to improve my writing in the future and help me better manage my major courses, I will try my best to overcome the difficulties. Due to online learning, it is hard for me to get help immediately when needed since my schedule is still different than life in US. About my writing skills, I definitely still need improvements in academic writing. Last quarter I made a huge mistake that I misunderstood the requirements for an essay and needed to almost rewrite the whole thing at the last minute. I still need to work on the balance between original thoughts of mine and sources from others' works to support my claim. I sometimes feel that I'm including too much original thoughts and too little proofs. Usually I would read and annotate articles and get a general idea for my claim. Then I would create a outline. Then I would write my first draft which includes more of my original thoughts. Then I would choose sources to add in and replace some of my thoughts to prove it. I think my close reading skills are decent for me to understand the texts. I have not done any kinds of researches before and I don't think I will have chance to do them in the future since my major is Computer Science. Animals Have Brains, but do They Have Minds? suggests that animals also have thoughts and emotions we used to think only exist in human. The article suggests that although it is still impossible to completely cut off consumption of animal products, it is possible and necessary for us to treat them better with care and give them some rights. I found this interesting because it made me rethink of animal rights. I used to believe that only a few species have feelings and self consciousness, but the fact is that it is a common thing in the animal world. Perhaps more rights are deserved also for the animals that are proven to have self consciousness. The Power of the Pack: Life in Animal Society informs about animals would gather up and form societies to benefit from each other. They would have restricted rules and class differences, and would sacrifice for the greater goods. Animals would form societies to be better predators and try their best not to become preys. Human does the same thing. We form guilds to protect workers' rights. Even the weaker ones can also be treated fairly and be protected from the share owners who are in control of wages.

This is a picture of me trying to adapt to remote learning of courses this quarter. I'm uploading the scanned notes to Canvas.