Genius Hour Reflection

I found the Genius Hour project overall pretty challenging. I enjoyed the final results of my efforts, but I will say this took more time than I expected, in trying to balance everything on my plate. Honestly, I don't know how some people accomplished all that they did in the time that we had. I am really impressed with all of the projects that people completed. I feel like the continued feedback from my classmates, and the opportunity to look at other people's projects provided me with motivation to keep going, but also comfort through my struggles.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for me was the time component of getting the project completed. I love cooking, and am glad I chose that for my passion project; however, I feel like it took a lot of time to get the recipes done and revised. It also took a great deal of time looking up and tracking all of the nutrition information, taking pictures, and writing down individual ingredients. These are the tasks I DID NOT enjoy completing! In fact, this is probably why I have given up on going on diets where you track food, because tracking of all of the nutrition information and food measurements is such a pain! 

The aspect that I enjoyed the most with this project was the creativity portion. Being a creative person, it was fun to discover new ways to add flavor to vegetables, and cook new foods. Ideally, I would love to be able to get to the point where I can cook meals "on the fly" quickly. I don't really like looking up recipes because they take alot of time, and during the week I really want something fast. I feel like I got a good start with this through the project, and at least have a place to continue.

What I did learn throughout this project is that foods may "seem" healthy based on their ingredients, but in certain combinations or cooking styles they can become unhealthy. Many foods are touted for their health benefits, like olive oil and whole grain foods, but they also contain many calories and/or carbs, so if you are a person who is watching either of those it is difficult. I was proud of myself for finding healthier options, and in creating at least a week's worth of meals that I could fix when I get back to school. I do think I will continue modifying some additional recipes as I go, now that I know what ways I can make them healthier.

What will I take back to my classroom? I will probably take the idea of student choice and self-paced learning back to my classroom. While I don't have the ability to implement the full concept of Genius Hour in my classroom, I can probably give students more choice when we do have project-based learning. If we continue to use remote or digital learning, I can definitely design more self-paced activities for my classes. Seeing students only 25 minutes per week, twice a week (that assumes we will ever go back to something similar to this), I will have to leave the full Genius Hour experience to the classroom teachers.

I found the Genius Hour project overall pretty challenging. I enjoyed the final result of my efforts, but I will say this took more time than I expected, in trying to balance everything else on my plate. Honestly, I don't know how some people actually accomplished all that they did in the time we had. I am really impressed with all of the projects that people completed. I feel like the continued feedback from my classmates, and the opportunity to look at others' projects provided me with motivation to keep going, but also comfort while I was struggling with some aspects of my project.