RUFFA'S ARCHIVE

In my 15 weeks as a volunteer math tutor in the Academic Skills Center at Mesa College, my primary mission was to help students stretch their minds so that they could absorb and apply mathematical concepts to a variety of problems.  I believe I largely accomplished my mission, but my tutees were not the only ones who benefitted from our work together.  I benefitted as well, in ways that have already begun to inform and enrich my own academic life.       For one thing, my experiences as a tutor fueled my appetite for learning – not only new concepts, but old ones as well.  I found that if I was to succeed as a tutor, I had to re-learn material that I had not thought about in some time – for example, the various Algebra-based factoring methods that I learned in Math 46 and Math 96.  Before each tutoring shift, I made it a point to spend time browsing my old notes from previous semesters so that the basic concepts would ...

                     Developmental Topographical Disorientation (Topographagnosia) 1.       Symptoms Getting lost in a home where you have lived for 25 years. Being unable to find your way from the living room to the kitchen, or to find the bathroom. Forgetting where your own bed is even though you woke up only two minutes ago. Just how big must the world seem to people who get lost in their own homes?  What about when they leave the house and venture into the outside world? They have no physical symptoms; they are not mentally deranged. They can be of any age. They can accomplish many things, just like most people. But when it comes to finding a specific place within their immediate surroundings or beyond, they are lost. Such people suffer from a disorder known as Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD), also known as Topographagnosia.  DTD is an incurable condition that imposes severe co...

Ruffa Aquino Communication 100 Term Paper 1 April 12, 2012   Nike’s Dream Crazy Advertisement It seems that everywhere you look these days, someone is trying to sell you something or otherwise trying to get you to part with your money.  It’s impossible to get through a single day without being exposed to advertising of one sort or another – television commercials, highway billboards, Internet banner ads, even Hollywood feature films that discreetly insert branded products into the script to subliminally invade the viewers’ consciousness.  No one can get away from advertisements, it seems, but not everyone views them or uses them in the same way.  Partly for this reason, the tools of persuasion available to advertisers are as plentiful as the products and services they promote. One way of thinking about the effects of advertising on the consumer is the Elaboration Likelihood Model Theory (ELM).  ELM theorizes that when an audience is exposed t...

Head of a Buddha   Ruffa Aquino ARTH 32: Survey of Contemporary Art  November 9, 2012   Head of a Buddha Before I visited the website of the Harvard Art Museums, what little I knew about Buddhism could be summed up in four words: Spirituality, serenity, immortality, and the vehicle for achieving all of these, meditation.  I never did much to explore the history and beliefs of Buddhism; I was raised Christian, and not even a practicing one at that.  But as I clicked through the Harvard Art Museums’ website, one work of art jumped out at me as the embodiment of everything I understood about Buddhism, literally putting a human face on what had always seemed like mere abstractions to me .   To the extent a work of art could capture the essence of Buddhism as I understood it, this white-marble sculpture came closer than anything I’d seen before. [1]             First, some context. ...