I wonder sometimes. I wonder how someone could attend a four year institution and one hundred percent want to and not be able to succeed. How could you flunk out and not care? Not attend classes for two weeks? And how does the department especially with everything going on in the world not think it was important to contact the student?
And what really gets me is that another individual can get As and Bs, work hard, get connections with a internship, and be organized? The worst thing is that these two people are related. How can two siblings be completely different? Where is the division between what the parents did and what the child did to their selves?
I wish that I could explain it.
Why do we do the things that we do? Like today, for example. I took a leap of faith and did something that I would normally not do. Recently, I have been like that. I started interviewing for internships and taking the effort to be ahead in the world and try to find a connection for a job. Since I am starting to panic since I’m going to be a writer. How many people want to hire a writer? I’m not sure.
The best though is the interviews that I will be going on. I have one Friday and another organization called me to ask a few questions, but my resume was being looked at. I worked really hard trying to portray myself as someone they might want to hire.
And then you stop and think about it. How much effort is putting into making ourselves ready to sell? Couldn’t a resume be compared to a bill stub for services rendered? I had to go out and buy professional clothes since I had an interview and I might actually have a job. One that I care about? I’m not sure since it may not involve writing.
I may up in Business after all. Maybe following your dream isn’t what its cracked up to be.
A hot topic circulating through the halls of the education building of Rowan University is one of standardized testing, their efficacy, effectiveness, efficeincy and future in our nation’s educational sysystem. No one really likes taking tests. No matter how old you are, the “pressure to perform” is not always pleasant or comfortable. Tests are a fact of life; we have all had to take them, whether to pass the eighth grade (the GEPAs), high school (the HSPA), be accepted into college (SATs), graduate school (GREs), or take the BAR exam (LSATs). Unpleasant as they are, they are needed to assess students learning and understanding of what they are learning and gauge their academic proficiency. Another useful purpose for testing students is something I never considered until studying education last semester in a course titled: Teaching in the Learning Community I. Another useful reason for assessments or testing students is to see if we, as teachers, are effectively teaching our students. So, tests can measure our abilities as educators and serve as a implement of self-reflection. Having stated these arguments or justifications for the need to test students, I would like to throw out a question to those interested, whether students, teachers, professors, administrators, or parents: “Do you think it is advantageous or necessary for elementary school students be tested each year or would it be better for all invoved to only test basic skills every other year or every third year of a students educational career?” If not, “What years, in your opinion would be the most important?” I believe there is a growing disdain for standardized testing among future educators of America, and I am not exactly sure why. Is is that teachers are being forced to teach to the test and this phenomenon is stifiling creativity and innovation in the classroom? Could the reason be that standardized tests, as presently written, formatted and designed, are not holistic and a fair assessment of the various, multiple intelligences of a diverse student body? Whatever the reason, I sense a growing “itching” for change.
David Blakesley and Collin Brooke’s article “Visual Rhetoric” struck a nerve in me. The article made me think not only about the concepts that they were talking about what but what my mind thought about when I was reading the article. My immediate interpretation was that the visual means in which something is organized provides a necessary assessment of what the reader is reading and provides the momentum for the reader to actively participate in the mechanics of reading and distinguishing the important parts of the segment.
For example, the way that a specific website is set up. If you go to the social networking website, Facebook , the organization is easy to navigate. On the top of the homepage, tabs indicate the each sections of your personalized area of Facebook. In addition, the homepage is set up like a newspaper listing all the headlines so you know immediately what your friends are up to. In the right corner, where visually your eyes go to first is your status and your friend’s status which is what you want to see first. However, Facebook does make an error by putting advertisements on the left hand side. CNN proves their marketing genius and understands the idea of Visual Rhetoric when they place ads on the right side where the viewers look first. CNN’s website makes it easy for the reader to interpret the information easily and efficiently.
Organization is the most important means of visual identity and without divisions into the must read and the what we can wait to read later browsing the Internet becomes increasingly difficult and takes more effort.
Thought this article was interesting since it deals with alot of the issues we talked about in class.
I absolutely loved reading “The Vocabulary of Comics”. Everything that it said was completely true but I would never actually think of it on my own. I enjoyed reading the brutal honesty of how humans are so wrapped up in themselves all the time that they somehow manage to see themselves in everything even though we don’t actually see ourselves that often. I had actually been talking to my mom a few weeks ago about how my brother’s girlfriend was homecoming queen. When she won, my mom said that she could hear some people asking each other who Kim even was. My mom then proceeded to go on and on about how teenagers are so self-absorbed and narrow minded that they never bother to get to know people outside of their little “cliques”. I don’t think that is just teenagers though. I think that is everyone. People are too afraid to go out on a limb and meet new people. Thousands of insecurities seem to pop up out of no where when we are introduced to new people. We wonder if they like us or what they think of our clothes and the way we speak. Even the most confident people worry about what others think.
Insecurities may be what drives people to hide behind their computers and get so obsessed with a second life and creating avatars. It’s a whole different world where you can be a completely different person. People get so wrapped up in what they want to be instead of accepting who they really are. Their second life becomes more important than their real lives and they focus on cultivating relationships that way instead. It can’t be healthy for people to hide themselves that way. They need to put themselves out there in their real lives so that they can take chances and have real relationships instead of ones that are based solely on a false image of what they want to be.
The internet has basically made life for students 100% easier. We can access so much information at just the click of a mouse without ever having to venture out of our rooms. I know that I’ve definitely been in positions where I needed to get information fast for papers that I put off until the last possible minute, so I would jump on the internet and before I knew it, I would have enough information to write a 20 page paper. It is extremely hard not to plagiarize off the internet though. You always think that no one will really find out if you copy a sentence of two, I mean whose professors actually check the bibliography sites anyway? I can see how this would cause so much frustration to teachers and professors who are just trying to get their students to think and do their own work. Their main job is to make sure we learn something and then we students just go onto the internet and copy down what someone else wrote without even giving it much thought.
It amazes me that websites that you can buy papers on actually exist. With all of the copyright laws and plagiarism issues, one would think that sort of site would be illegal. Who knows, maybe some of them are. I just can’t believe people actually use those sites as well. It’s just not worth risking your reputation and legal record to buy a paper off the internet and turn it in, especially in college. How much time are you really saving yourself? An hour, maybe two depending on the depth and length of the paper. It would be better to completely make something up and fail than to copy someone else’s work, pretend that it’s your own, fail the class, and get kicked out of college which would pretty much ruin the rest of your life. Good luck getting your reputation back after that huge mistake.
Kate and the Fab Four 