Week 16

This semester, I believe I have picked up much of the poop that I believe you wanted us to grasp. I have learned to reed complex material, and rite “with style.” As I snicker cleverly to myself, I wonder, “have you enjoyed reeding my papers as much as I enjoyed riting them?”
I am only keeding. If you examine it to the bone, I’m sure you’ll realize it was all just an incredibly humerus joke. This is not one of those end-of-the-year papers written to get back at the teacher, I was just pulling your femur.

In all seriousness, I have enjoyed this class and have enjoyed the added motivation that it has given me. I have never written so many words that “adhere to the rules of standard written English.” Without this class, there is no way that I would have read “Teaching as an Amusing Activity” by myself. It is good to be encouraged to grow and expand your talents.
Through these, our periodic readings, I think one of the most valuable things I learned, was to evaluate everything I hear more critically. I’ve noticed that I don’t just accept things for what they are, quite as much as I used to.

I have also gained endurance for writing papers. Do not misunderstand me, I am glad to have to had the opportunity to write them. What I’m saying is, writing simply isn’t one of my favorite hobbies. The reason I am glad to have had the opportunity to write, is because of all the things I have learned from it. Also, I love the feeling of knowing that I’ve finished my paper. It helps me to feel like an academic scholar; searching for knowledge and truth while helping others to learn through my thoughts.

Thanks Marcia, for helping me to learn and grow.

Peer Review Experience
Week Fifteen

Personally, I think that doing the whole peer review thing is good for all of us.
Why would it not be? One person can catch mistakes another may have missed even if they are of equal intelligence. I only have a few grievances with it. Sometimes I feel a little uncomfortable correcting someone else’s paper because I don’t want to offend them. I also sometimes most of the time feel unsure about whether or not I’m actually helping to correct their paper. I’ve never been very good at knowing for sure where commas are supposed to be placed, if things are spelled correctly, and stuff like that.

How do you know while grading someone’s paper, that you are grading it correctly? By the way, I’m not implying that you (Marcia Smith) have graded one of my papers wrong. I would have told you if you had. I consider myself to be pretty good at math, but even in my best subject a lot of the time I’m not perfectly sure that I did a problem right.

I think one of the things I don’t like about the peer reviews is actually a good thing. Seeing other student’s mistakes and my own mistakes shown to me helps me learn things that I don’t think I could easily learn otherwise.

I was thinking that maybe it would be cool to see how well sitting down with the person who corrected your paper and discussing your mistakes would help us to learn. Then again, people might feel a bit uncomfortable. Especially if the person who did the correcting considers him/her self to be unintelligent. Even though I don't consider myself to be unintelligent I think I might feel a bit uncomfortable doing that. But maybe that's good

I hope that I didn’t make it seem lik I dislike peer reviews, I think they are an excellent idea and that they should do this in every English class and maybe in other subjects if possible.

By the way was there supposed to be some connection we were supposed to pick up between peer reviews and the articles that we just read? Both seem to be pro peers teaching other peers.

WEEK 14

A few class days ago, as a class, we read “Teaching as an Amusing Activity” by Neil Postman. I feel that I was one of a few in our collaboration of pupils that generally disagreed with Neil’s opinions on teaching methods. For whatever reason, when people try to persuade me to agree with them and I notice it, it will often have a reverse effect on me. I tend to scrutinize everything they say, so that if I find fault in their argument, I can criticize it. I think I do it in an attempt to balance out any persuasion they may potentially accomplish and overcompensate. I imagine that subconsciously I don’t like the idea of my values, opinions and personality being manipulated.

Examining my mistrust of Mr. Postman and what he had to say now, as well as trying to evaluate his ideas fairly, has resulted, I must admit, in our “values, opinions, and personality” fusing in accordance. Of course, we watch too much T.V. While there is an abundance of information you can catheterize from television, it (television) cannot compete with what you could potentially learn in a classroom with an instructor.

Watching the history channel just isn’t the same as going to history class. Your friends watching the program with you simply couldn’t answer difficult questions like your history teacher could. Most people don’t have friends that are history teachers. Where would you turn to clarify your quandary, then? Would you turn to the Internet, perhaps a book, or possibly your dog? Nay, you know you’re just going to sit there eating your ice cream watching as blood spews from Kennedy’s head while he gets assassinated. Why was Kennedy so unprotected, anyway? You fumbling fink, you just got a delectable mixture of chocolate syrup and ice cream on your only white shirt. What’s Sarah going to think of you when you show up at her party in five minutes? Suddenly Kennedy is no longer interesting.

What did you learn from watching the discovery channel? You must eat your ice cream before it melts too much and can spill out of your bowl so easily. What would you have learned if you were in a history class? One can only wonder.

Week 13
The title of my annotated bibliography was “ADHD/ADD Reality or Myth?” Which I feel pretty much sums up what I was researching. While doing a bit more research for paper five I came across a section in a website that talked about how some people think that the symptoms of ADHD/ADD are the effects of the consumption of an excess of sugar. It says, “Children whose mothers felt they were sugar-sensitive were given aspartame as a substitute for sugar. Half the mothers were told their children were given sugar, half that their children were given aspartame. The mothers who thought their children had received sugar rated them as more hyperactive than the other children and were more critical of their behavior”
As I read this I began to consider that, a component of the problem pertaining to children who have ADHD is not the way they act but the way they are perceived to act. I can testify of this premeditated judgment because I’ve experienced it first hand.
A while back I was talking with my mom about some of my past teachers. Mostly the ones I liked and disliked. Mrs. Smith you could probably get a good review from me if you just happened to accidentally give me some extra credit… Some how my mom and I started talking about how she had told some of my grade school teachers that I had ADHD. For the most part, the ones she revealed my dark secret to were extremists. I mean that in the way they treated me or viewed the way I acted. They were either really lenient or exceedingly critical of the way I behaved.
I remember the effects of this were especially prevalent in scouting campouts where some of my leaders dreaded taking a bunch of squeaky teenagers on a backpacking trip. They would expect us to goof off which we always did. But my point remains. They, our scout leaders, would perceive a friend and I as acting worse than we really did. We were the two hyper kids that you did not want to deal with. Everything we did was exaggerated. Everything the other boys did was standard teenager goof off that was accepted on campouts.
Maybe I am off in the way I view their response to how I acted. I do know however, that it really bothers me when I think I see people treat others unfairly. I found that quote at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/adhd.cfm under the Food Additives and Sugar section.

Week Twelve

For our next paper I chose to research the validity of ADHD as a disorder. In the process of my efforts I came to realize that the reason some people don’t think it is a real physical disorder, is because they think parents are using it as a cover for their child’s misbehavior. This made me start to think about how people have to convince themselves that they are right. For example, when someone buys an Xbox, Xbox’s suddenly become the best videogame system. Everything else is crap. Everything else isn’t even worth having. In the words of my cousin, a proud owner of an Xbox, “You couldn’t pay me to own a PS3, Xbox 360’s are where it’s at.” Obviously the PlayStation 3 has value so why would he pretend to not want one, even as a gift, as a means of income? This bias doesn’t just happen with video game systems, either. I’ve noticed it in the old truck competition. Which is better, Chevrolets or Fords? The deeper I think about it the more I think that that is all it is. A stupid bias; one in which one comforts one’s self for one or more moments by siding with one or more things against one or more other things.
I think I can see why this happens. Someone purchases, is, joins or does something that is competing with something else related to it. The person then has to make him/herself feel like they picked the right side. So they justify their actions. I bought a Chevrolet, so it is the best. After all, FORD stands for Found On Road Dead. Do they know Ford engines backwards and forwards? They may try and convince themselves that they do.
I guess what fascinates me, is the power of a biased person’s mind to be so ignorant about his or her own ignorance. The PlayStation 3 hasn’t even come out yet, that I’m aware of. My cousin doesn’t know all the games that will be on it. He has never played it, and yet he wouldn’t be paid to own one. Granted, he may have been exaggerating, but the principle remains the same. Why do people do this? It baffles me. I wonder if I sometimes I do this without noticing. I hope not, it’s completely ridiculous.

WEEK 10
For my research topic, I decided on a topic related to higher education. Yes, I know, I’m uncreative. More specifically my question is, “What are effective ways to learn?” I chose this question because I figured that since I’ve already done some research pertinent to this subject in class, I’d have a head start. As I read AS LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT FOR BORED COLLEGE STUDENTS for our third paper, I started to wonder if expressing and communicating our ideas with one another is the only efficient way to learn. While studying for my American History class, I read about a guy named John Locke, who thought that basically there are three things we use to learn: environment, experience and reason. While reading the paper by Mark Edmundson and writing paper three, I began to think that there were more, not so much faster but more efficient ways of learning things, than by simply talking and listening in class. Now that I think about it, if you have a good memory where you don’t have to experience things to remember them well, then maybe communication could be the fastest way to learn. I’m scared to say that I’m actually quite excited to see if I can find some sort of statistics on this.
I think the difference between higher education and living on the streets figuring everything out with half a high school diploma, is the difference in education through reason (your own thoughts) and education through environment (discussions with people more intelligent than yourself).
In class I think it was Mrs. Smith herself who mentioned that it’s good to have someone to talk to about theories and ideas because two people, unlike someone alone, have two separate brains; and don’t get absorbed in their own limited creativity nearly as easily. When one person gets stuck on an idea that’s going nowhere, the other can pull their partner out of the rut they are in. I think this is the essence of learning through communication.
Something else I was wondering was; isn’t the “environment” and “experience” that Mr. Locke speaks of kind of the same thing? Doesn’t the environment provide experiences for you? In fact, along this same train of thought, isn’t “reason” or your thoughts an experience too? To me, it just seems like there are two things you use to learn: environment and reason. If someone has any ideas, don’t be afraid to let me know. I need help out of this rut.

WEEK NINE

A few days ago in class we were discussing grades and whether or not they are a reliable method of measuring a student’s value. Some people were saying that they aren’t a reliable method, which I feel is the basic “regurgitated” comment that they thought our teacher, Mrs. Smith, was looking for. By the way, I mean no offense if you were one of those people. According to Mr. Edmundson in “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”, all of us students offer these regurgitated comments. I’m sure I do it more than most.

I started thinking about all the classes I thought I got gypped in. When I look closely, I realize that there are very few, and when I did get screwed, it wasn’t that bad. I think people over-exaggerate when they tell experiences of teachers giving them bad grades. I feel that grades are actually quite accurate.

I have one friend who is pretty smart and hardworking. He got just under a 4.0 GPA in high school. Another friend of mine is a bit of a slacker and his GPA was/is a lot lower. I do realize that these are just two examples, but I’ve noticed that it is like that with most everyone I know. Rarely, very rarely, will you find someone who gets a different GPA from what you expected. And in those cases, for me at least, it was just because I judged the person wrong.

“What about those people who aren’t very good at taking tests,” you ask? Who cares? Just kidding. In all seriousness, I don’t think it is that big of a problem. It’s a skill just like everything else. It’s something you need in life. I’m not as good at public speaking as I am at writing. (That’s comical. I’ll bet you think I must be pretty bad at speaking if I’m this bad at writing.) So, should I get special treatment? Heck no!

So what about people who are “street smart” not “school smart?” This is a myth. There is no such thing as “street smarts” in the way that people think of it. If you are “street smart” you will do well in school too.

Maybe grades aren’t a perfect indication of a person’s learning, but they are pretty close. Besides, can you think of a better solution that would actually work? I didn’t think so. That’s why we are still using the grading system we have now--because it works.
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Citings:
Mr. Edmundson, On the Uses of a Liberal Education