Hey, my name is Garrett Iwamoto, I'm 18 years old and this is my first semester in college. I lived in Westchester, CA for most of my life(near LAX) and moved to Torrance my sophomore year. I attended West Torrance until I graduated last year. I played basketball and baseball when I was younger and played football in high school. I like making videos with my friends and to entertain people. In school, I was a smart kid back in middle school. But once I got into high school, I got kind of lazy and didn't really do the best in school. Because of that, I wasn't able to get the grades that I wanted. Also football took a lot of time from me and I was hard for me to focus after practice.
          In chapter 4, it talks about time management and how you can manage your time better. In the book, it tells you to use your course outline, to keep a monthly calendar, make a "to do" list, and a daily planner. A course outline is syllabus of everything the class is going to do and focus on until the end of the semester. I tells the students what to expect in the near future. A monthly calendar is a way to put the course outline on the calendar to see what is coming up instead of looking at a piece of paper. A "to do" list is a list that helps you organize and manage time. And a daily planner is a little book that you can write things that are due down and can put your course outline into. These are all important and useful tools to help you manage your time better. For me though, I think I used one of these throughout my entire high school career. I used something I like to call, the hand manager. because I was in football, for the most part I only had 5 real classes. I would number each finger as a period, for example, my thumb was first period, my index was second, and etc. What I would do is for each class that I went too, if we had an assignment due, I would put up one of those fingers to remember that I had an assignment in that class. And at the end of the day, I would remember a weird hand gesture that would signify the assignments I had for the day. some days I might have a "shaka" sign or a "rock out" sign or even the "F U" sign. Its weird I know but it worked for me for 2 years. Its surprising that I actually remembered assignments because of it and I still use it today.
           In chapter 5, It talks about note taking in class. In order to take good notes, you want to sit at the front, write your notes in a systematic way, watch for signals of importance, write down examples and connecting information, read your textbook and review your notes. Sitting in the front of the class is a good way of paying attention. There are less things to distract you and you focus on the teacher more.  writing notes in a systematic way means having notes nice and neat. Use regular line paper to write notes and date each note taken. Watch for importance means recognize when information given by the teacher is important. The teacher isn't going to write something on the board for no reason unless they specifically say its not important. Writing down examples, these are important because it shows you a similar problem that is on the assignment or on the test. Reading the textbook is another important task to do. Teachers usually test and give assignments on everything that is in the book. It will help you in the long run. And reviewing your notes. If you write down the notes that you've taken in class for an hour, dont you think its important and might be on the test. Looking at your notes will help you on homework assignments but also help you on tests. For me, I was a great note taker. anything the teacher wrote down, I wrote it in my notebook. It was simple as that. But their were time where the teacher was going too fast and I wasn't fast enough to write it down. Also because they were going fast, my handwriting was very sloppy and even I had some trouble reading my own notes. other than that, I wrote down everything the teacher asked me to take notes on.




This is a short video me and my friends did to represent kindness. The moral of the story is "what goes around, comes around"