Don't panic, it's just a static...image that is.

In my last post I informed you all that I will be creating a multi-modal project that will persuade my audience that standardized testing is useful but should not be used as an exit exam.  Here is one static image that I will most likely be using in my presentation.

This is a satirical cartoon that actually makes a very important point.  The point of standardized tests is to make sure EVERY CHILD has learned what they "should have" learned by a given point in time.  They do this by giving as many children as possible the exact same tests as all the other children get and tell them if they don't pass, they don't get to go with all of their friends to the next grade, which in my opinion is frighteningly insensitive and horrifyingly un-american.

Don't we as Americans supposedly take pride in the fact that everyone here is allowed to be their own individual.  Their own individual who may be enthusiastic about math and science but never really cared too much for history or map-reading.  This individual may want to go on to higher education and become a scientist or a doctor, and this individual may also pass the standardized tests in math and science with no trouble, but as soon as this individual fails the social studies exit exam they are told that their dreams must be put on hold until they pass, even after they've completed 12 years of coursework and passed every single semester of that coursework.  Imagine how hearing that would feel?  Now imagine how hearing that would feel if spoken in a language you weren't quite proficient in?

I don't understand how this can be thought of as fair or in line with our country's principles at all.  High school diplomas are extremely important in this country and a person can feel crippled and discriminated against for not having one.  Maybe exit exams entail what one would need to know if a great deal of higher education is desired, but these tests are keeping an important survival tool from these children.  So thank you to the US education system for trying to return our country to the forefront of education, but don't do it at the expense of those individuals who may just have a different skill-set from the norm.  It doesn't mean they don't deserve a chance to reach the top of the tree as well.

Scholarly Articles & Standardized Testing

The end of the spring semester is coming up for us college students and as a final project in my advanced composition class, I am required to put together a multi-modal, research driven, persuasive argument.  The aspects of this project include a research paper and some other mode of presentation (a slideshow in my case).

Standardized testing has increased in popularity with each year since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act was approved of by the federal government in 2001.  Schools are using these tests as the "accountability measures" required in NCLB.  I have chosen to research these standardized tests for my project, in order to acknowledge the fact that, while these tests are beneficial to some students and to the curriculum, they should NOT be used as exit exams.  One scholarly article I am going to utilize in my paper is a journal article entitled, 'To leave or not to leave?  A regression discontinuity analysis of the impact of failing the high school exit exam.' written by Dongshu Ou.  Ou is an assistant professor in the department of educational administration and policy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

I know this is a scholarly article because the author is a P.H.D, which she received from Columbia University, a rather distinguished university if I may add.  Also, the journal in which this article was published is a peer-reviewed journal entitled Economics of Education Review, which means that the content is professionally accurate, and encompasses my topic within its scope.

In the analysis, Ou first gives the audience background information about what standardized tests are and how they have been implemented in our school systems as of yet.  She then continues on to make the claim that students who barely fail the high school exit exam(s) have a significantly lower likelihood of making it to post-secondary education than students that barely passed these exams.  Ou also states that, in a lower-income or non-english proficient setting, the stakes are raised, and those students who barely failed were now significantly more likely to drop out of high school before graduating than their counterparts that barely passed the exams.  Ou backs up these claims in the rest of her analysis by concentrating her statistical research efforts to New Jersey high schools from 2002 to 2006.  Using various data sources Ou proved through her New Jersey examples, that all of her previous claims were in fact true.

Let me know in comments if this topic is something that interests you and I will try to remember to share my paper with you upon completion.

Ou, Dongshu. “To leave or not to leave?  A regression analysis of the impact of failing the high school exit exam.” Economics of Education Review 29.2 (2010): 171-186. Web. 10 April. 2013.

Depression in College Students...

College can be, and probably is in most cases, the most enjoyable years of one's life.  You get to meet tons of new friends, escape from your parents, and even escape your hometown and state if you so choose.  Living on your own and having ultimate freedom can bring unlimited joy but it can also bring a lot of stress and anxiety to your life as well.

Oh you have plenty of scholarships and loans to cover the semester?  Not if you blow it all on insignificant things.  Don't worry about it though, you'll always get the same amount at the start of next semester right?  Not if your GPR falls below the scholarship requirements.  What starts off as the American teenagers dream can quickly turn into a nightmare.

Those troubles only concern scholastic and monetary issues.  The emotional struggles that arise are what can truly bring some students to the brink.  Best friends from home become strangers due to distance.  Trust is lost and bridges are burned that you once believed, with all of your heart, to be flame proof.  The person who is perfect for you in your eyes may decide it's not the perfect time.  The different levels of maturity between people varies the most at this point in life and it can be hard to deal with.  Trust me, I know.

This post goes out to all of those people who are going through a struggle in their college career, whether it's from one or all of these reasons.  What I want you guys as readers to get from this is that I understand you.  Whatever hardship you're going through right now, there are many others around you that are experiencing the same thing.  The good news is that from the bottom, all you can do is go up.  Coming from the most sensitive and understanding part of my heart, gig'em.

Struggles of the minimum wage worker

Minimum wage sucks!  I have no idea how some families are able to survive with most members making little more than minimum wage, much less individuals with no support or minors to claim??  I did the math.  Working at 7.25 an hour, even with a 40 hour week, will not even amount to 300 dollars per week.  It is these circumstances that force some Americans to take on two full time jobs, especially single parents.  There are 168 hours total in each week.  Two full time jobs will take 70 to 80 hours out of that.  If one wanted to sleep at least 7 hours a night, that would leave just under 40 hours of "free time".

You would think that a minimum wage job would be easy to obtain.  Wrong!  Albeit I am a college student with little work experience, each of the minimum wage jobs I have obtained were only after a great deal of time looking around and applying to countless employers.  I have never even gotten an interview unless I applied to 10 or more businesses/employers.  If you count all the man hours put into job hunting, it makes the minimum wage value seem even more thin and stretched.

Good news though.  Minimum wage is going to be raised, rather significantly compared to previous raises, from what I've heard.  It will certainly be a nice couple of weeks, maybe even months.  Nice, that is, until inflation sets in and the value of our dollars gets reduced down to make minimum wage feel the same as it always has.

What about food stamps and welfare?  Sure those things can keep a family afloat, but think about what it does to the moral of that family.  Do you think the parents feel good about not being able to provide for their kids and themselves, by themselves?  Do they even care about their pride at that point.  Not to mention those individuals that take advantage of the system to get more welfare support, leaving less for those that really need it.

The true solution may lie in the distribution of wealth here in America.  There is simply not a large enough percentage of this nation's money being circulated in the lower and middle classes.  The majority of our country's wealth is owned by a very small minority of disgustingly wealthy individuals. Sure some of them donate to certain charities, but the sad truth is that a lot of the charities they give to aren't even for the poor in our country but for third world countries.  Worry about OUR country first people!

I may be up on my soapbox right now for little to no avail but these are things that cannot be thought about enough.  What do you think?

Literacy

To be completely honest with you, the instances where I fully understand what my teacher wants me to get out of assigned literature are few and far between.  I blame the teachers, but even more, I blame American culture.  Perhaps blame is the wrong word to be using in this scenario.   Blame has a negative connotation.  The reason I hardly understand what exactly my teacher wants me to grasp is because I have been taught to reach for everything from a very young age.  I have been taught about so many different ways to analyze a single piece of literature that I feel it is a shame to just loommok at any work through a single lens.  In the article "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle", the author Min-Zhan Lu grew up speaking two different languages, English at home and standard Chinese at school.  Due to the fact that at school, Lu was assigned readings that were mostly communist manifesto, I can see why she began to read her assigned readings and her pleasure readings through different lenses.  But in present day America, the land of endless opportunity, I have learned the art of total analysis no matter what the literary venue may be.  I appreciate descriptive language and metaphors about roses and lilacs and the summer breeze even if it has been assigned to me by a teacher.  I take note of every excellent utilization of ethos, logos, or pathos in articles I read for business or for pleasure.

It is these reasons that I approach every piece of literature, school or home related, the same way.  I approach each for what it is, a piece a literature.  I take in everything.  I think of all the underlying meanings that could exist.  I ponder the possibilities of each subtle nuance of the reading.  And once all that is done, I think of why exactly I read the article or novel and react in the appropriate manner.  It is in this un-biased manner of reading literature that suits me.  I need to understand what the piece is saying before I can understand what my teachers are asking for.

I Love Stephen King

To continue along the topic of storytelling I would like to take some time out of my day and thank a man that has kept me entertained throughout my teenage and young adult life, Stephen King.  In my opinion Stephen King is a master storyteller.  The way he draws you into his creepy little world, has you sitting on the edge of your seat, and then throws a plot twist at you harder than a Roger Clemens curve ball.  Although I have never been required to read one of King's novels for any scholastic reasons I have read dozens.  Would you like to know why?  Because I love to read.  Would you like to know why?  Because of people like Stephen King.  Master storytellers that entrance us and bring generations together.  It is because of people like Stephen King that little kids begin to pick up books and increase their vocabulary, their imaginations, their creative minds, not teachers.  Teachers can lay the tools down for kids but through stories are how the human being learns to use these tools to tell stories of its own.  You don't even have to be a master storyteller to inspire.  Parents who pick up books and read to their children or tell them stories that have been passed down by generations past, are storytellers.  What I want from you, the readers of this blog, to do for me today, is to sit back and think of your favorite storyteller, and think about what they have done for you and how they have helped you grow.  Whether that storyteller is your favorite author, your mom, your grandpa, even your 1st grade teacher. Just sit back and creatively give them a little mental appreciation, it's what they helped teach you how to do.

The Donkey Lady

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”  An excellent quote by Philip Pullman, one with which I happen to agree with.  Stories are dynamic.  They are told to entertain, to relate, to teach, to inspire, even to scare.  Although the stories told by different cultures vary, they are all meant to instill and reflect the values (some good, some bad) of each individual culture.  Today I feel like sharing a story that was told to me, and many other children from San Antonio, at some point in my childhood, that instilled interest, and that has stuck with me up to this point in my life.  It is the story of The Donkey Lady, and yes...it is meant to scare...children at least.  Here we go!

A long time ago, when San Antonio was only beginning to become what it is today, there lived in the rural country-side, an old lady.  While she was a sweet old lady, she kept to herself.  She had no friends, and any relatives she had left, if any, had stopped coming to visit years ago.  Her only companion in life was her pet donkey.  For many years they lived in solitude.  Everyday the lady would take her donkey over the bridge that spanned an old creek, so that the donkey could graze in the fields on the other side.  It was a peaceful existence.

As the years passed more and more people moved to the countryside and the lady and her donkey got neighbors.  The children of those neighbors would go across the bridge everyday as well and play in the fields where the donkey would graze.  One day two young boys got into a fight and one of them got a big bruise on his arm because of the scuffle.  The boy who caused the bruise didn't want to get in trouble, so he told the other boy to tell his father that it was the old lady's donkey that caused the bruise instead of him.

When the little boys father heard that the donkey had bruised the boy he was very angry.  He gathered up the other fathers and went to the bridge the next morning to wait for the old lady and her donkey.  As soon as the two arrived in the very middle of the bridge, all of the men jumped out and grabbed the lady and threw her poor donkey over the edge of the bridge.  Seeing as the donkey could not swim, it was swept away by the current and drowned.  The old lady began to weep and the men began to make braying sounds, taunting and making fun of the old lady.  As the men started to walk away, the old lady threw rocks at them, in order to cause them pain just as they caused her donkey pain.  This angered the men once again, so they went back to the bridge and threw the old lady over the edge as well.  She was never seen again.

Rumor has it that to this day, if you go to the bridge on Old Applewhite Road, past the Toyota plant, at night, and if you wait long enough...you will hear the old lady crying for her dead donkey, and if you start braying just as the men did...the ghost of the old lady will come to throw stones at you, and that donkey hooves will slam against the hood of your car.

An Elaboration on Texting and Driving

In my last post I spoke about how technology, at times, turns us into mindless zombies.  During the post I briefly mentioned that, sadly, this occurs while people are behind the wheel of a car as well.  Texting and driving is a topic of great interest to me, so I decided to look into other blogs that cover this topic, to find out what kind of rhetoric others use while trying to warn people about texting and driving.

The first post I read was from the blog of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).  The post was a guest post written by Sandy Spavone, the Executive Director of National Organizations for Youth Safety (NOYS).  The fact that she is an executive director of a national organization already spoke to her credibility (ethos). Spavone began her post by sharing an intimate moment of her life, where she tells us her brother lost a child to drunk driving.  This immediately appealed to my emotions (pathos) and invoked a feeling of sympathy towards her brother, and scorn against the act of drinking and driving.  Once she had me on her side (as if I wasn't already), she got to the topic I had been waiting for.  The new threat of distracted driving due to texting.  Spavone then began throwing numbers and facts at me (logos).  She told me that, "while 97 percent of teens know texting while driving is dangerous, 43 percent of them admit to sending a text while driving, and 75 percent say their friends text and drive."  You know what that means...Yup!  People are much more likely to snitch on their friends than on themselves...but in all seriousness, this statistic clearly shows that more people need to own up to their bad habits and figure out how to remove texting and driving from their lives.  Spavone then increased her credibility further by mentioning that AT&T is taking an initiative to prevent texting and driving and even gave me a link to the page where I could make my pledge to not text and drive.  Here is the link  www.itcanwait.com I certainly hope you decide to take the pledge as well.

So what did I learn from that first post?  I learned it is definitely effective to utilize pathos at first when trying to get your readers attention, and to make sure they're interested in playing for your team.  After that, it is in the writer's advantage to gain credibility by quoting a more reliable source or spitting out some relevant facts to really draw the reader in, and make readers feel like the initial feelings they experienced during pathos were rightly felt.  After reading the first blog post I felt that all three rhetorical strategies were necessary to truly convince an audience, although, in Spavone's post, even during her pathos inducing story about her brother, her tone made it feel like a boring public service announcement or commercial...the second blog post left no sort of feeling.

The second blog was started by this family run and family owned company that is against texting and driving called, 'Don't Text and Drive'.  The post is an email that the company recieved from a reader.  It is called 'I wish I never saw it!', the author is anonymous.

When I began reading, I expected another short anecdote (I don't know why, the title doesn't appear to relay that) and maybe some facts spit at me afterwards...I received nothing of the sort.  This parent from London proceeded to tell me a gruesome story of how they work at a facility that handles wrecked vehicles before they are sent to the junkyard or sold to another facility for parts.  They said that plenty of vehicles come in with blood stains all over the place and that they were used to that, but one day they saw a van with a child's seat in it that, "was half its original width in the middle and was obviously twisted out of shape from the impact."  The parent then admits that they, "lost it right then and there i just sat down and cried."  Later the parent finds out from their boss that the crash occured because the mother driving was texting and ran a red light...

Holy smokes batman...the second blog post utilized literally no logos and little pathos, but evicted a much stronger reaction out of me than the first.  What it really goes to show is if you have a compelling story, tell it.  If you have some compelling facts, share them.  But in the end I believe there is an appropriate ratio of ethos, logos, and pathos for each and every situation.  It just depends on the scenario, and the audience you're trying to reach.

Blog 1: http://www.madd.org/blog/2012/sept/texting-while-driving.html

Blog 2: http://www.textinganddrivingsafety.com/dont-text-and-drive-blog/

My technology rant, fools.

The scene is set...it's a beautiful day. Birds are chirping. Squirrels are getting abnormally close to people as they walk by. Thousands of students are on their way to class at Texas A&M University. I myself am one of those students. I look down and notice that my shoe is untied so I kneel down to tie it. Several seconds later, I proceed to be kicked in the face by another student who was too busy "hash tagging" to watch where they were walking.

Sadly this is the scene almost everywhere. What's even more sad is that people do this in much more critical situations than just walking. Many a student, myself included, have absolutely wasted entire class periods due to our obscure obsession with finding out what homegirl is doing later tonight. AND STILL...the scenarios get worse. Every one of us has seen those horrendous commercials of that guy with no limbs that was texting and driving...ok maybe he had a couple limbs, but I for one would like to have all of my limbs.

I admit it, that last paragraph got pretty intense, so lets get into some of the subtle nuances of this technological invasion. I take it back they're not subtle at all. Have you ever been out to dinner with your friends or a certain special someone like your grandma, and after noticing silence you look up form your meal to find one if not all of your compadres nose deep in some app they just downloaded? I bet you have. Have you done that to someone else? I bet you have. Have I done that to someone? You better believe it. It's gotten to the point where I see people completely stop in mid-step just because they are so into what's on their tiny little screens. I for one am terrified. Terrified of a world of technologically dependent zombies that don't know or care whether they live in an alternate computer, Matrix like, reality because all they ever look at is their tiny little screens.

Who knows? We may be living there right now...

What is culture?

What is culture?  Can you even give it a single definition?  What am I even talking about?  I am talking about being cultured, embracing culture.  But what is one man's definition of such a broad topic?  In order to gain a true understanding of culture I believe it takes the collaboration of many cultured minds.

This whole time I've been speaking about two different things.  Culture and being cultured.  Culture, my best definition at least, is the lifestyle and daily actions of a group of people that share similar backgrounds.  I know, that sounds like the definition of a nation, I told you I was trying my best.  But when you think about it most people that share a nation share a lot of the same culture as well.  They go hand in hand, in my opinion.  It was put best by some hot shot author whose definition of culture I read.  I would like to quote him but I forgot to bring my book with me, I am sorry Dr. Melzow.  His statement went something like, "Culture is not the pre-packaged things you come to expect from an area but the subtle nuances of the population." Once again, please excuse my horrible etiquette, I will include an exact quote in my next blog post.

It is impossible to understand the word cultured unless you understand the word culture because, in my opinion, being cultured is having an understanding of many cultures besides (and including) your own. I am again incredibly sorry but I am about to quote another intellectual without any material.  "Being cultured is knowing the best things that have been done and said."  Or something along those lines, but irregardless it is a near perfect definition if you're asking me...oh wait, this is my blog...

You are asking me...