Time Management

U.S. History

 

This year in US History, I grew in being more focused and using time management. This year I learned what it was like to be under a lot of pressure due to procrastination. I used to put things off and be off task instead of getting the work done. This resulted in a stressful crunch time to finish assignments to my best ability. I started to really grow in time management in the comic book project. In this project we created a comic book that consisted of five events of the Revolutionary War through an African American perspective. The purpose of this project was to explain the Revolutionary in a fun and visual way that could be easily understood.

 

The steps that we took to create the final product was to first learn about the 13 events of the American Revolution. After this we completed event summaries of each event as well as how our perspective would have viewed that event. Based on this we picked five events that we thought related to our perspective the most. We chose The Boston Massacre, Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, Common Sense, The Declaration of Independence and The Battle of Yorktown. We then created storyboards that described the plot of each story of the American Revolution. Storyboards are basically the comic’s dialogue. This helped us to know what to put into the bubbles when we started to draw out our comics and arrange them. We started to draw pictures for the comic to go along with the plot. We organized these images into a PowerPoint. After this we added captions to these pictures to create each event. We also got peer and expert critique and revised accordingly. We included all of our feedback we finished our final draft.

 

An artifact that supports my growth in time management is my storyboards and my final draft. You can see in my storyboard that we started out with really good drawing but then started to have less impressive drawing towards the end. This was because we spent a lot of time on the first event and rushed through the others. This was because we had a lack of time management. Our final draft shows my end result after my growth in time management. You can see in our final draft it is consistently well crafted, this is because we planned out what we needed to get done so that we could draw to our best ability.

​

The content in these two artifacts include, many of the dates, places and setting of the events in this time period.  This is shown not only through words but in the pictures. For example, in the Boston Massacre, we explain that setting in the first panel…” ’Twas a cold, dark, wintry night on March 5, 1770 in Boston, Massachusetts.” We explain the date, the weather, and place of the Boston Massacre. We also show this in our pictures. In our comics we have a winter seen with snow falling to the ground. You can tell the time period through the stick figures hats which have feathers in them. Another hint to the time period id in the court seen in which everyone wears wigs. All of these aspects created an atmosphere of how the event actually was.

​

My partner and I created to-do lists for our comics. Some of the things that we included in this was to add captions and pictures to fill in the gaps of the plot. One of the “gaps” in our story was that we didn’t emphasize that slaves wanted freedom and equality during the American Revolution. The main reason that African Americans risks so much in this time period was because they wanted this freedom and equality that Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence was talking about.

 

These to-do lists show my growth in time management because they helped me to know what I needed to get done that day. It also helped me to see my priorities better showing me what I should get done first based on due dates and critique session dates. I also realized that I started to use these to-do lists towards the end of the project. This shows that in the beginning of the project this quality of time management was not strong. Now I know how I can use lists to help me to focus on what needs to be done at a certain time.

 

I’m glad that I made this growth because I know that this will help me in high school and my future career. Time management is something that I will use in future projects and assignments. This will also help me in the future because in many jobs you have to have certain things done at certain times.  I will need this quality to stay focused on what needs to be done. I hope to improve on this skill as I grow up because, I still have times in which I do get unfocussed and I hope to improve on this.