Group 9

The weekend blast is over and another week has commenced, shifting us back to our weekday schedule packed with lessons.

During the Blogging lesson in the morning, we learnt how to weight information. Information in the media may not be created equal as the author may take a bias.  We should avoid being fooled by biased information or rumours on the platform by checking it out before believing any sources.  We also learnt how to edit pictures through Google.  It is a useful mean to make edits according to our own preferences.  After the break, we did a breathing exercise.  We stretched and take deep breaths under the trees. Suprisingly this seemingly easy exercise can help us to reduce stress effectively.  We made summaries on our journey in the US so far and uploaded to our personal blogs.

In the afternoon we had a legal studies class where we first watched a 20-minute excerpt of the movie The Verdict. We grasped knowledge of the mechanism of direct and cross examinations and tried to apply it on our later mock trial case. After that, we split into two groups: plaintiff and defence, consisting of several attorneys and witnesses on the teams respectively. We discussed among our own teams for 30 minutes. We discussed on what questions to ask the opponent team and prepare well among ourselves to have a smooth flow throughout the mock trial. The mock trial finally began. The attorneys took turns examining the witnesses on their own and opposite team and the atmosphere became more tense by each round. Some of us shouted out ‘objection’, which made the process more interesting and intense. At last the jury concluded our mock trial with several comments and we felt our minds bombarded with a plethora of legal knowledge by the end of the class. Time passed really fast, we wanted to have another mock trial lesson again. It was surely a remarkable class!

We spent the rest of our afternoon tie-dying shirts. We first curled our shirts into spiral patterns, bound the spirals with rubber bands to create wedge shapes, and squirted various colours of paint on them. Fortunately the paint was well handled and did not leave spots all over the place. Finally we placed our shirts in plastic bags and waited till they were ready to hop in the washing machine for a shower. We can't wait to view our kaleidoscope patterned shirts tomorrow morning. Adieu!