Building the Egg a Home

Before anything else, I must say that our planning/crafting lesson was one of the best classroom experiences I have had in Baruch so far. It would have been the outright best if our egg hadn't cracked. But hey...no complains, really.

Our team had set the goal to have a cushioned base and we brainstormed for ideas to achieve that goal. Although we came up with quite a few ideas, we kept jumping onto the newest idea for development and in essence, we did not have a proper alternate plan. We worked well together in both the planning and building phases, but we did not specify any tasks for any member of the team. But the reason we did not have to specify any tasks may have been because our team members constantly volunteered pro-actively for tasks at hand.

Our execution of our plan was very rushed and we were not able to replicate the design we had in mind. This was because we failed to evaluate our resources properly and were left with unused materials at the end.

All in all, I think we did a pretty good job of working together. We achieved our goal of making a cushioned base for the egg. Our downfall was in the fact that we neglected the sides of the egg.

The Kids Are Crazy...But So Are The Parents

I am usually pretty okay with what I see in new cultures...I have moved around a lot in my childhood, so I have gotten used to getting-used-to-new-things. But one of the things that I absolutely, could not believe was true was how little respect young children have for their parents here in New York.

I am not talking about teenagers or even about "tweens". I am talking about pre-adolescent CHILDREN! I remember being of that age: me, or any my friends for that matter, were scared pants-less of our teachers, parents and maybe an older sibling here and there. The point is that we were scared of our elders and we paid them the respect they deserved. Yes, there were cases where elders were abusive and did not deserve any respect, but even in those cases the most we could do was NOT pay them any respect - as opposed to verbally/physically abusing them.

Not to say we were complete angels who were tamed by fear, no! We had our moments of daring. It was a thrill when we could get away with spur-of-the-moment craziness. But I can confess that being scared of my parents as a child makes me respect them greatly today.

Seeing children behaving so disrespectfully and having such control over their parents was something that made me very uneasy, when I first moved to New York. Today however, I am very shocked at how parents actually put a leash on their children. Personally, I think leashes are for animals not for a human being. How is a child to learn and explore if s/he is tethered to one spot?

Two sides of the same coin or something different? I would love to hear about it from someone else.

Quick Introduction

Hello everyone,

I am originally from Nepal. I have lived in different countries for different periods of my life, but by far nothing beats NYC. I live alone out here and battling hard so as not to get sick in this weather.

I like soccer and computer programming but am pursuing a career in Finance - don't ask me why. I enjoy administrating back-ends of websites but this will be my first incursion out on the front-end; I'm finding this exciting and looking forward to it.

So until next time, goodbye.