To Beat Cancer

This week I read an aricle by Tim Reuters titled Obesity Causes 100,00 U.S Cancer Cases a Year, which was what it sounds like, talking about how obesity causes a lot of cancer cases that occur. If we, as America could lose weight, we could decrease the amount of cancer cases a year. Over 30% of Americans are overweight, and that number is expected to increase significantly along with the number of people diagnosed with cancer.

Even though this is not a cure, its an aid. An aid to help rid cancer. Of course, not all cancer is related to weight, but a lot of it can be prevented. Some doctors figured the percentages of cancers that could be prevented if Americans stayed slender and this is what they found...

Esophogeal: 35% or 5,800 people

Pancreatic: 28% or 11,900 people

Gallbladder: 21% or 2,000 people

Colon: 9% or 13,200 people

Breast: 17% or 33,00 people

Endometrium: 49% or 20,700 people

Kidney: 24% or 13,900 people

This is how many lives we can save each year if we can decrease our obesity. It's so much for so little. Think about how many people can be saved if we can just eat better and exersise more. Sometimes though, its not our fault as consumers, but more of the venders. Everything we buy and consume has been processed and containd addatives and sugar. This does not help our current situation at all. When 30% of Americans needs to lose weight, the things they are given don't help them, their health or our country. We are known as fat and lazy, but together we can change that, and we can save lives.

The 7 Things

After reading "Rigor Redefined" by Tony Wagner, many thoughts came to my mind. When Wagner states that there are seven skills our students need to master to thrive in this world, I thought to myself, "Really? Only seven? Life seems so much more complicated then to only have seven skills." However, as I read through the list of these skills, it appeared to me that he is absolutely right. Even though life and careers are extremely complicated, the solutions don't have to be.

When he mentioned "Yesterday's answers won't solve today's problems." It really made me think. My generation is going to have problems that we haven't even heard of today, so we won't have that guidance to help us through these problems. We will have to think for ourselves what to do. Are our schools teaching us the skills we need in order to do that? I think that they are. Even though there is always room for improvement, I think our schools, Arapahoe in particular, are doing what they need to do in order to prepare us for what's ahead.

Collaboration and leadership in my opinion is one of the most important skills we can have. Along with that I think goes agility and adaptability. When we are working with others, it is so important to be able to collaborate peacefully with the people we are working with. We also need to be able to keep others needs and ideas in mind as well as our own.

When he says that the person needs to have effective oral and written communicational skills, this made me think back to much of our earlier conversations this year. Could the grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes that a lot of people (especially the younger generation) make have anything to do with our current forms of communication. I think it does. Texting and emailing affects us more then we think it does. We abbreviate and say things without even realizing. When we text its easier to type things like u, luv, cuz, etc... I could go on forever with text talk, but we don't realize is that text talk is becoming part of our regular talk. This is affecting our ability to speak and write, and could potentially change the standards of what is good. As our teachers develope our ability to think for ourselves, are these standards changing along with our lessons, our technology, our education, and the rest of our world?

Micro-Change

This week for my blog, I read an article from National Geographic called Best Micro-Photos of 2009. The photos really struck me. They were all of these tiny little things on our Earth, that honestly, you had no idea what they were or what they looked like. This article really opened my eyes to everything around me. We all get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of the world, we don't have any time to stop and smell the roses as they say.
This one picture really hit me. It was of some microscopic plants found in the ocean in which each plant depends on the other for survival. This plant contributes to maintaining homeostosis within our planet's climate, and they're smaller then the tip of a pen. They're called carbon sinks, and are actually really pretty neat to look at. It just struck me that something so tiny can have such a big impact on something so much bigger. Like one little human and the entire world. Look at what just one ten year old girl can do when she decides she wants to make a difference. She changed the world, one blog at a time. We can too. Maybe not the entire world, but just a group of friends, one spark is all it takes before you're entire cause takes off. Maybe it's just making the right choice, but every little thing we do counts for something, and can change the mind of one person. Sort of like Disney Channel's friends for change. (Yes I occasionally whatch Disney Channel :) ) Shine a light and send it on. It's so true. You alone can make a difference in the lives of many, just like the microscopic carbon sinkers. Maintaning the entire Earth is just one way to make a difference. How will you shine your light into our world?

(Pictures on Link)

Coffe Crashers

This week I read a blog by David Warlick titled, "Is StarBucks Killing Community?" It talks about a book he found called Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America fromStarbucks. David brings up an interesting point about how we can't learn anything from Starbucks because no one talks. Think about it the next time you walk into a Starbucks, there is very little noise. Sure there are some groups of people quietly chattering, but the majority of the people are there sipping their coffee while surfing the, you know exactly what I'm going to say next...internet. Of course they are. In all the StarBucks there is WiFi and people using it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a great example of our world today.
Every where we look there is technology. Not even jus that, but iternet too. People carry the internet with them in their pockets! It's insane how much the world has changed. The way we learn, the way we live, the way we communicate, it's all new. people hardly ever talk anymore. It's all text. Emailing, texting, blogging, FaceBooking (I don't know if this is a word, but it should be), and all the other stuff out there that doesn't require any personal voice or connection. Our community and interaction really is being killed, maybe not by StarBucks, but by a lot of stuff found in StarBucks and everywhere else.
We are so dependent on the internet for everything we do. If for one day the entire internet crashed, I seriously think the world would come to an end. One night my internet was down, so I had to go to my neighbor's house to do all my homework because about 90% of it required the internet. The internet is basically running our Nation, if not the entire world. It's crazy how it's just become an everyday normality when less then 20 years ago, it was something so futuristic and alienatic. So, the next time you walk into StarBucks, count how many people are on their laptops or cell phones with internet ability, and think about just how much it has transformed all that we know and live for.

Life lessons from a digital watch

David Warlick's blog called "Reasoning Our Way In..." brings up an interesting point in our education. He begins by explaining the relevance between a digital watch and life. How he has a regular watch that does the one thing it's supposed to, and it does it well. However, digital watches have a ton of buttons that in different combinations cause a whole bunch of stuff happen that maybe you didn't really need or want to happen. He compares this to life because sometimes we don't know what to do, and we have to try different things and reason our way through it. Life doesn't come with instructions, we have to figure it out for ourselves. Are students learning those skills nowadays?

We are sort of just told what we need to do, and how we need to do it. A lot of the teachers are realising this predicament, and have sent us off on our own a little bit. In a way we are sort of teaching ourselves. We are learning from our mistakes and taking control of how and when we learn, if we want to learn. In elementary school the teacher would tell us how to do everything, and it was even so in middle school. Now we are in charge of our education. If we don't get something, it is our responsibility to get help so that we can. The teachers aren't going to hold our hand through our entire learning career, we have to learn how to walk on our own. I think the teachers at Arapahoe are doing a great job of teaching us that skill that will be so important throughout our entire lives.

He also mentions that we as youth are always ready to work through problems, but not remember how to do it. Is this a basic skill that we will need to learn? If so, then how should it be taught? Is it enough to just get through the problem? Or to learn how to do it for next time incase it should come up again? I think that it's up to us. Clearly this skill can't really be taught in school, so it's up to us to decide for ourselves. We need to ask ourselves, do I want to learn from this experience, or figure my way through it again? Is this a skill that we need in our lives? Maybe so. But it's up to us to change the way we think through problems, because our schools aren't going to.

The Jackson Legacy

The second article I read this week was about Michael Jackson's kids and how they are coping with the loss of their dad and role model. The article was named "Tidbits:Jackson's Children Learn to Be Kids Again." This may not seem like anything that can improve my learning, however, I think it helped me to think deeper and put myself in there situation, which I think helped my learning strategies. Anyway, Michael Jackson's kids have suddenly been orphaned and are now cared for by Jermaine Jackson. This is a huge change for them, and even though they care for their uncle dearly, of course they miss their dad a ton. Parents are irreplaceable. They are role models, teachers, and they are understanding and loyal. These poor kids have lost all that he was to them. Sure they have plenty of other role models, but none as important as their dad was to them. This makes me think about Michael and his life. He was an amazing person, dancer, and singer, he was a legend, but all that didn't matter his last few years of life. His last years were full of horrid rumors, he couldn't get any privacy from all the press, waiting for him to make a single wrong movement. It's sad that it takes someone to die for the world to remember who they were. Michael was so influential to every artist who ever was, is and will be. That goes back to Mrs. Comp saying that one voice can change the world. Michael was one person who changed our standards of who we are today through his dancing, his music, and his personality. He is a true role model in every one's lives, and will live forever as the Jackson legacy.

High Quality Not So High

This week I read an article by Mr. Fisch called A Low-Fidelity Education. Basically, what the article said was that the standards for everything from consumer products, to education is becoming "good enough." We have lowered our expectations of what we need and have, so that it's almost not even worth it anymore. He mentioned several times that we want what we want when and where we want it. Its easier to go on the internet and pull information rather then wait to ask your teacher about it the next day. Even though they may have a better answer, its easier just to do it this way. Well if we don't seem to need our teachers and the face to face contact, then why should we go to school? Mr. Fisch said that by the year 2019, "over 50% of highschool classes will be taught online." That's sort of scary. Highschool is as much an educational purpose as it is a social purpose. It's not just about learning, but to also get involved in activities, make friends, go to dances and school functions. If we have online highschools, how are we going to do that? Think about it. We would sit at our house all day on the computer, not talking to anyone, just reading. There is no emotional bond between you and your teacher or classmates, and that's pretty sad. That's what makes highschool fun. Being able to walk through the halls and see all your friends, and sit next to that person you never really got to know, and have that oppurtunity. If we went to online highschools, we wouldn't know anyone. We wouldn't have friends, and we lose that social skill that is ever so needed in our life. We wouldn't know how to act or talk around people, and maybe I'm taking this too far, but highschool helps give us that skill, and without it, how would we survive in our own world?

Thoughts of Two

The New Literacy by Clive Thompson and "The Machine is Us/ing Us" by M. Welsch, are two very different points of view on the topic of technology. In The New Literacy, the author looks at technology as a good thing. Some of the points I agree with, and some I do not. There is a part that talks about how texting improves writing because it gets students to write all the time. However, the students don't really write when they text. There are spelling, grammar, structure, and organizational errors. I wouldn't even consider it writing. We have almost created our own language with acronyms and shortened words. Do you honestly think that jk lol ttyl g2g bi... etc. is actually considered writing? If anything, I think that texting is hurting our skills. I will be writing a paper and accidentally incorporate lol, or something like that into it, if you ask me, I don't think that's a good thing. The other thing that struck me about the article was that they used Stanford Law Students as their studies. Of course Stanford students are still going to have wonderful writing. If you're going to Stanford, you are not going to let texting ruin your ability to write. If they had tested other average students, I think there results would have differed greatly.
In the video "The Machine is Us/ing Us," Welsch describes the use of technology in a very different way. Although his video is hard to find what he is trying to say, I think that he would disagree with Thompson's article. In his video, it almost seems as if he's trying to say that machines are becoming too important in human life. That we, us, are becoming like the machines themselves, in a deeper content. Think about it. We run the machines. We organize everything we do on our computers. The computer is being controlled by us, but in a way, us by them. Everyone has a face book, everyone interacts via technology. Like Mrs. Comp says, that when she was in school everyone just used the computer and the internet to extract information, but now, we are using it to interact with other people and create our own information for others to see and think about. Like the video says, the machines are linking web pages, photos, videos, information, and people. We are being linked by technology. That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. Either way you look at it, machines truly are using us.