Last Sunday was the last presentation I will ever do for an IDC class. Honestly, it makes me kind of sad to know that I probably won’t see other Macaulay students from other campuses unless I join one of the clubs at Macaulay. However, everything must come to an end eventually. I felt my group could have done a bit better on the presentation. Our group got our points across for our presentation but due to time constraint we weren’t able to go into detail everything we were going to say. A member of the audience asked a question and we provided an answer that seemed satisfactory to him.
Something I felt kind of disappointed about was the lack of an audience. My group went in the first hour on Sunday between 10 am to 11 am and almost no one was there. Half of the room was empty and there were no teachers there to watch our presentation. It was less pressure for us to do well that way but I feel like the work we put into the project was not very rewarding.
Among the presentations I watched, a few were pretty interesting to me for different reasons. One thing that surprised me was the variety of topics the topics were about. Some projects were about neighborhoods, some were about education, and there was one comparing the managerial techniques of different clothing stores. I honestly did not understand why the project about the managerial techniques of different clothing stores was even there. I think it vaguely fits the topic of this IDC class, “Shaping the Future of New York City.”
One of the most interesting presentations to me was the education presentation. I came from one the specialized high schools and I can attest the racial disparity in my school. I was among the many Asians in the school and the number of black people in the entire school, not just my school year, is less than 15 people total. The freedom they have in other countries where there is no set curriculums has made me question about our education system. Our school system can be too restricted and luckily there are teachers I have met who were able to step outside of the rules but they are rare.
One of the projects I saw was the use of social media in Sandy and the students who presented were from the College of Staten Island. The teacher who assigned this definitely took into consideration their school’s location when thinking what the students should present about and I think it was very fitting. Even though the electricity may be out in certain areas, I learned the advantage of having a smartphone can help people alert others whether they need help and if they are safe. I don’t have a smartphone and as time goes on, the usefulness of a smartphone becomes more and more apparent including during disasters.
