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.

Our World Today

Clive Thompson’s article on “The New Literacy” did hit me in some ways but also was just like any other old article talking about the same things everyone else says. Things like Facebook, Myspace, and Text messaging, and saying that we pay more attention to digital learning then to real hands on classroom learning. I this case I would have to side with Clive. When we use that kind of technology, we automatically lose all literacy in what were writing. We forget all about punctuation, spelling, etc. and that can affect students in the classroom. It also shies us away from learning how talk to an audience instead of one individual person. If we took as much time on our writing prompts and essays then we do our texts and IM’s our scores and skills will increase. But, having all of this new technology shown to us (by the author who’s name escapes my name right now) and seeing how fast and how much it’s changing, makes us want more. And this makes it harder to be better at writing and harder for teens to keep away from it all. At the same time, all this technology is putting a lot stress on people and can be a scary thing. Because we have all this, people expect that what we write and do should be close to perfect and that is not the case. Seeing how fast the technology is growing so much that one day things could go terribly wrong and maybe one day technology will take over and would have created our own humanity death. Although I am a victim of using texts and Facebook, I know that taking advantage of my writing probably will affect me. That’s why I agree with Clive and his theory of the new literacy.