The Living Dead

While searching through a plethora of articles this week one caught my attention, "Zombies crawl through Downtown Denver” by Victoria Barbatelli. Dances and group gatherings are fun and entertaining, especially when the guests are all dead. In the month of October, everyone was welcome to Downtown Denver to celebrate the fourth annual Zombie Crawl. Parents and children of any age were welcome as long as you had something with blood on it. Babies who couldn’t even talk were holding bloody rattles. The one thing that was probably the coolest thing ever was when everyone danced to the Thriller song by Michael Jackson. It was choreographed and everything! One thing that is really amazing is that the Zombie Crawl was founded by just a small group of people and became such a large event. It makes me wonder what I can do to leave a great mark in history and to know that I created something amazing. The strange thing, while writing this, I was watching Legally Blonde. It is a strange connection to zombies but has a good meaning to it. Elle Woods is a misunderstood peppy girl who proves everyone wrong by making it into Harvard Law. She changed a lot of peoples view on life and on people in general. It shows that a small person can make a big change in life and that maybe one day I can become like Elle Woods or the founders of Zombie Crawl.

Looking into the Future

How do you know if you’re learning the right things now for a good future? You don’t, well not very well. While reading “Rigor Redefined” by, Tony Wagner, I learned some important things that could help every person out there to be prepared for a 21st century future. Tony interviewed hundreds of business and educational leaders around the U.S. asking them questions on what skills they are looking for in young people. He was shocked by the responses he got. Instead of them looking for skill and knowledge of the job, they were looking for people who could think. Not just any kind of thinking but how to ask questions and how to get involved in the thinking of the job the skill they have. There are seven ‘survival’ skills for the 21st century that are key to getting through it successfully. 1.) Critical thinking and problem solving. 2.) Collaboration and Leadership. 3.) Agility and Adaptability. 4.) Initiative and Entrepreneurialism. 5.) Effective oral and written communication. 6.) Accessing and analyzing information. 7.) Curiosity and imagination. A senior executive from said that “Yesterday’s answers won’t solve today’s problems.” I agree very much with him. Every day is a new beginning and it takes new knowledge to accomplish things. That is very important when it comes to critical thinking. You have to use your brain and your knowledge to think through things. Teamwork is also very important today. You have to be able to work with people from all around the world even if you don’t believe the same things they do. You have to solve things together and work things out the right way. Being flexible is also very important. You need to be able to move around and solve different problems whether you’re used to it or not. My connection with that is cheerleading. If something goes wrong, you need to be able to move around at the last minute and not think so much of yourself, but more of your team, in this case your company and colleges. Today, we have so much to learn that maybe it’s too much to learn. You need to be able to take things one step at a time. For instance, you can’t take Spanish 2 without taking Spanish 1 first. If you don’t, you will be frozen in your path and won’t know what to do. In one of Tony’s researches, he viewed an AP Chemistry class. They were doing a lab will mixing chemicals into a beaker. One of the groups experiment went wrong. He asked them what their hypothesis was. They had no answer. Make take on this is that we are not learning how to solve or mistakes. We don’t know how to figure out what we did wrong and we are not being taught the proper things necessary for problem solving in life. If we could learn that and add it to the seven steps above, I think 21st century students will be some of the smartest we have yet.

Trick or Treat??!!!

Some pranks people do may be funny. But what happened to a home in the town of Sioux City, Iowa wasn’t so nice. Usually when you find a dead animal you leave it alone, but some “funny” pranksters decided to put a dead deer in a clown costume (complete with outfit and wig) and leave it on some families porch. Police thought this was a Halloween prank because it is just around the corner, but it was unsafe, immature, and illegal. The pranksters have not been found yet. This article “Dead deer in clown suit left on Iowa porch” by MSNBC struck me and made me think. What would lead someone into thinking that this was funny? Why would they do something like that? Did they have a grudge against this family? Why? Usually when people do stuff to other people, they don’t think about that person. They don’t know what they have been through that day or what is happening in their lives. When these pranksters did that to the Iowa family, did they think about what they felt like? Do they regret what they did to that poor family? My response to that would be inconclusive. Some people have a conscience and some don’t. But I hope the people that do, use it well and realize that what they did was wrong. My advice, just don’t prank people if you don’t want to hurt them in the long run and to make the right choices. If you do that then maybe a dead carcass wont be left on your porch saying trick or treat. Because if you don’t odds are, you’ll only be tricked and wont be left with such a good treat.

Sight For Soar Eyes

College sports games are fun places to watch a good football, interact with friends, and just have a good time. Well that’s what the viewers of the CU vs. CSU football game got to do. They also maybe got a little more than they bargained for. In the article "CU-CSU Streaker Susspended" by The Denver Post, a reagular football game turned into something differnt. As this game was just starting half time, Mason Lacy, a CU student, decided to mix up the fun by streaking in front of the entire crowd. The police soon arrested him and his two cheeks (if you know what I mean!). When I read this all I could think of was “What an idiot!” and “He must be one of college partiers.” The question came to me if I would ever do this. My response, only if that were my last day to live or I got paid a million dollars. But if I got caught I would probably need that money for my bail. What I’m trying to say is, don’t go streaking in front of thousands of people unless you have the money to get out of jail, don’t mind missing a semester of college, an can take the public humiliation.

The Big A

The other day I was given an assignment where I needed to write a blog on education. I was searching for almost an hour and couldn’t find anything. I was just about to give up and write about anything till a discussion came up in my class. It was about Mr. Krause’s blog, "The Possibility of More”(part 1, part 2, part 3). It sounded more interesting than any of the other blogs so I decided to check it out. I started reading it and thought it was really good. It was about how a high school American Literature teacher decided one day to give his class an A for the semester. He had several thoughts on this idea and wasn’t really sure if it would work. But with the support of his wife and fellow colleges, he decided to go through with it. When he told his class his brilliant idea, they all just gave him the look. (You know, the look when you have no clue what is going on, or when you’re totally confused.) Eventually they took in his exiting new idea and understood what it meant. The only thing that bothered him was the final project due at the end of the semester. Were they going to take advantage of this grade, not learn anything, and fail their final? Or would the grade encourage them to take their learning to it’s fullest and do amazing on their there final?

One thing Mr. Krause said really caught my attention. “I think I’ll have a difficult time giving an A to someone who I see as taking advantage of the system- do I still give that A then? Will the parents and the administration demand the A that was promised on the first day of class? This statement put me in his shoes for a moment as I got to feel the same torturing question as him. Yes or No? I was really not sure if that was such a good idea anymore. I mean, if a student is trying his/her best then they should get the A. However, if they are slacking off and not taking in what they learned, then they don’t deserve the A. If I were him, I would do what he promised and give the A fairly to the students. But it is not up to him to feel like he made the mistake. It should be the student who knows they did not deserve the grade. It’s up to them to try harder next time and prove to the teacher that they really do deserve that big A.

Wedding Day Gone Wrong

In the BBC news article “Yale Worker Charged with Murder”, Ms. Le, 24, was found in the wall of cavity of a Yale basement last Sunday. She had supposedly been missing for a week. Her alleged murder was Raymond Clark, a lab technician also working at Yale. A video surveillance camera showed her walking into her office, but never leaving. The two of them did work in the same building but no one knows if they knew each other. After several searches, she was found 5 days later by a sniffer dog in a Yale basement wall. Mr. Clark voluntarily gave his DNA to be compared to the 150 pieces of evidence. He was arrested later at the Super 8 motel in Cromwell, Connecticut. Although her death was already a very sad thing, she was found the day she was arranged to marry her fiancé, Jonathan Widawsky. This was a tragic day for her and her loved ones but she is remembered by her former students who have shown much gratitude towards her by leaving flowers and pictures by her office.

You Never Know Who's Watching You!

After reading a blog on Learning Is Messy by Brian, “Should you or I Care Who Follows Us on Twitter?” some of the points he made are great ways of showing why some digital sources are affecting us and our future. As I am not a user of Twitter, so I do not know how it works. But from what I do know is that it doesn’t seem very harmful. I mean all you’re doing is posting random things of what happened to you 5 minutes ago and that nothing really bad can happen to you, right? Wrong! On Twitter, you have people who like to follow a certain poster and can read everything you say. They can be anyone from your brother, your grandparents, people across your town, or people across your country, people who you have never even met. This type of thing could attract stalkers and bad people. You could give those types of people the simplest information and they could find you faster than you could say “I wish I didn’t say that!” There are also people that could affect your job and reputation. Other Twitterers can see who follows you, so if you were to have Hitler as one of your followers (just saying) people would probably not want to hire you for a job or your friendly neighbor wouldn’t even want to be living by you. Although you can block who follows you, just be sure if you’re blocking the right type of people and keeping your “Tweets” safe and friendly, because you never know who’s watching you.