Work Experiences

         The best job I ever had was working at the movie theater. I was about 15 years old and I worked part-time at AMC Movie Theater in Emeryville, CA. It was the best job to me because everybody that I worked with was all high school students and went to the same high school or another local high school. The managers were down-to-earth and there was a lot of excitement throughout the day. It was 3 main roles and those were ushering, concession worker, and box office cashier. The roles for everyone switched up almost every shift, which made it fun and different every time. It was very well a customer service job and from there, I gained excellent guest/customer service skills and knowledge of what goes on in a movie theater.

        The worst job that I ever had was working at a fast food Mexican restaurant called Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill in Emeryville, CA. The title was Guest Service Agent where we had to take customer’s orders, maintain cleanliness of the restaurant, sweep and mop the floors, and clean the restrooms at the end of the night. When I first started, it was overwhelming because all the job duties were new to me and different from the Movie Theater. The management wasn’t so great either. At the time, I was still attending high school and management never wanted to work around my schedule. The store manager was cogent when he said that if I wasn't dedicated, he'd find somebody else. As a company, I understand that they are more worried about their business, but it made me feel as if they didn’t care about the employees. Although this job did not turn out to be a great job, I did learn new skills for that particular job title. It taught me how to manage my time and be more patient with rude customers.

Looking Back on the Reading

“Freakonomics,” is a non-fiction book that makes people second think about certain situations. It talks about situations that occur in people’s daily lives and the authors express their opinions and point of views. This book was very one-sided to me, so I think the authors wrote this book to try and change people’s views to what they believe or how they see things. I think the message that was trying to be conveyed was for people to look at things from every aspect. For example, they talked about the difference between a swimming pool and a gun and which one was more dangerous. Although people might think that a gun is more dangerous, in reality, they show how a swimming pool is more dangerous.

The chapter that inspired the richest group discussion was probably Chapter 5, What Makes a Good Parent. We discussed different parenting skills and how what works for some parents, don’t work for all. Personally, I don’t think the book was written in a way that was easily readable because there were a lot of words that many people did not know. That made it hard to understand what I was reading the first time. After finding the definition for those words, I was upset because it was the simplest meaning used in a big term.

After reading this book, I would recommend this book to somebody who has a really open mind and is an active reader. I definitely would not recommend this book to anybody who doesn’t read much and who isn’t interested in other people’s opinions or point of views.

               

While Reading "Freakonomics"..

The reading process for this non-fiction book so far has been a challenge for me. I usually don’t read and I tend to take more time finishing the book than others. A reason for that is because there are many words that I never heard of and it makes it hard for me to read or understand what the author is really trying to say. Since reading this book, some of the active reading strategies I have employed are writing down the words that I don’t know, looking them up to see the definition, and then going back to the phrase to get a better understanding of the text.

Honestly, I didn’t do any annotations while reading, which I should have because I think it would have helped me a lot when trying to write my summaries. If I were to annotate while I read this book, I would have been able to remember what the text stated in short and refer back to it. A piece of advice that I would give to another reader to help them with retention and understanding of this book, is to be assiduous in annotating and writing down words they don’t know. Also, read the book sooner than later because you don’t want to get caught up having to read 80 pages in 1 day.

I tried to keep up with the assigned reading schedule by reading any chance that I had. I sometimes pulled out my book and read on BART and if I had any other homework, I usually saved the reading for last because I never knew how long it would be to read a few pages. I admit, I didn’t read as many pages as I should have at a time, but I read enough to where I could see where the author was going at the time.