Assignments

Mostly I had positive thoughts about my SDA but in addition, I can see a lot of room for improvement in the future. An example of something negative or something that I was lacking in my SDA was to specify the significance of what I communicated. I believe that I had decent time management skills during this SDA and also decent attention management. This doesn’t mean that it was the best that I could do, rather it was the appropriate amount of time that I could manage. Some of the “C’s” that I feel like I was hitting are creativity, collaboration, curiosity, and some criteria of critical thinking and communication. Although in my SDA I meant a lot of the criteria I feel like I was missing some criteria from the category of critical thinking and communication. The most important thing I learned is that the Coptic language is such a rich language in grammar and grammatical rules and that there is so much for me to learn. Compared to my first SDA I believe that this SDA was more difficult to construct than the first but in essence, they both shared somewhat of a similar difficulty. I’m proud of my journey with the Coptic language and what I have accomplished so far during this year. I still need to work on my knowledge of the rich grammar of the Coptic language and my skills of critical thinking and communication. I believe that the information that I have inquired about during this SDA will help me build my knowledge in the future about Coptic grammar and it will be the foundation of my future research. The higher-order thinking questions were a critical part of my SDA. These questions helped guide my research for the SDA. I have a lot of previous knowledge about scholarly sources and this is due to my current enrollment in the college class at the University at Albany called Science Research. In the future, I’m planning to share my SDA ideas with classmates and ask them for suggestions about the SDA.

SDA 

• Your Contribution:

I worked on my chapter of the podcast for the most part while helping my partner with the editing process of the podcast. We also worked together on the development of the slides and the outline. We ended up bouncing ideas off each other to ensure they were good.

• Team Communication:

I thought we were a very dynamic duo. We were on the same page for almost everything and split our work evenly. Sometimes there would be miscommunication but it was addressed by communicating better through meeting in homerooms and texting.

• Decision-Making and Roles:

It was a democratic process and there wasn’t a certain leader. We both agreed on all the decisions that were made and made compromises when necessary. We each worked on our sections of the project but collaborated on the slides and the creation and editing of the podcast.

• Conflict Resolution:

There were no conflicts or disagreements within our group. We made sure to agree on everything beforehand and worked together to achieve the same goal

• Time & Attention Management:

I would say that we managed our time well given the fact that we finished the project a couple of days early. Also, there were challenges in meeting deadlines.

• Learning and Growth:

I learned that collaboration can be very important when carrying out a project. It allows you to get ideas checked out and gives you a fresh perspective on your topic. I would say that one of the skills I improved was time management.

• Feedback and Future Improvements:

We talked about each person’s section during our homeroom meetings or via texts. We made sure to give each other constructive feedback. If I were to collaborate on a similar project in the future, I would suggest that my group get familiar with the software we use way before the time of recording so that we don’t run into any technical issues.

I believe I spent more time on this SDA than I did on the last one. I did end up changing my need-to-know question because as I dove deeper into the research, I felt like it was better to talk about the people who helped preserve the language and tradition. In addition, I found way more information on that that allowed me to talk for more than 10 minutes. I feel like I wouldn't have been able to talk about dialects as much as I would have wanted to. I also thought it was an interesting touch to add Coptic music as background in the documentary to give the audience a feel of what it would sound like. Next time though, I would attempt to do more research about my need to know before actually announcing that I will be doing it. One research skill I think I could work on is finding credible sources that present a lot of information about my topic. I feel like it keeps getting harder the deeper I dive into the topic. 

My new need-to-know question is going to be: to what extent does the Coptic language influence the current Arabic vocab of Egypt? I feel like a lot of people might overlook this or even not know it but some Coptic words still exist in the Egyptian vocab. I feel like it would be really interesting to see which words are still used or which words are roots of current words. I would also like to see if there is some sort of theme or pattern among those words.