Peace Brought on By Father

I read the article, Teen Athlete Fled Taliban Stronghold to Pursue Dream. I found that this article, summed up into a few words is: motivating. Inspiring. Emotion- filled. And most of all, Heartfelt. It is about a girl, named Maria Toor Pakay, who is 18. She lived in a small village in South Waziristan. There, suicide attacks are just their way of life, and it happens all the time. So, as you can imagine, it’s very dangerous there. They “punish girls who attend school- let alone play sports.” I can’t even imagine living in a place where bombs are going off- and definitely not being able to go to school, or play sports. “They have no future,” she says. She was not like most of the girls. She had a buzz cut, and played with the boys. “If someone argued with me, I used to beat them up,” she said. Her father knew from a very early age that Maria was different. Someone special. “I didn’t want her talent to go to waste. If I would’ve kept her in the village, all she could do was housekeeping.” In the game of Squash, players hit a ball to the front wall of a court, until one misses. This barely ever happened to Maria. She is an excellent player. Wazir, her father, packed up the family’s bags, and headed off to Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province. Here, Maria won the Under 13 Championship, then the Under 15, then the Under 17 Championship! Today, Maria has gone pro, being the 91st ranked in the world! “her fathers sacrifice… made her success possible.” Maria’s father says, “I sacrificed because I want to promote a message of peace. If the tribal people picked up a racquet instead of a gun, there would be peace.” So, this story is not just about a strong, independent young woman who overcame violence and sexism, but it is also about her miraculous father, who helped her achieve her dream.
As I stated before, this article is captivating, and most definitely motivating… but, there is a serious issue at hand. Maria’s father was not a common one, and not many of the other girls’ fathers would do what he did. Even if the other girls was as great as Maria. What we have here is a serious case of sexism, and violence. What do we do about this? I believe that we should try to help as much as possible. But how do we do it? It’s a VERY dangerous place, and I most definitely would NOT feel safe going there, especially as a young girl. Would it even help to go there? It’s more than likely that violence would come out of us going there. We have to make a choice here. Our safety, or the girls of South Waziristan’s safety?

A Well Deserved A?

From my education feed from Google Reader and through Mr. Fisch’s blog, I found Mr. Krause’s blog, The Possibility of More, Part I. I found this blog to be very interesting, though the topic was very predictable; another new teaching style. There’s no surprise there, as Arapahoe is a very good school, and we must have very good teachers. Mr. Krause thought to use the technique to give all of his students an A from the very beginning of the semester. Now, there is where the interest lies. An A? At the very beginning of the semester? Here’s the catch: at the end of the semester, you have to write a final on why you are an A student. After a while of thinking, I thought, “why not?” It seems that as a student, I would get an easy A. That suits me just fine. I don’t have to do any work, just write down my good qualities at the end of the semester. But then, I thought even more, and came up with the conclusion that this blog is disusing a TEACHER’S teaching methods, so I didn’t think that I liked Mr. Krause’s ways of teaching… but, what if the student didn’t do their homework… that would NOT make them an “A worthy” student, would it? No. An A student should do their work, even if they get an A no matter what. And that, I believe, is the whole point. It’s not about the grade, it’s about your ways of learning. The way that you see things, and how far you are willing to go to not only get a good grade, but a good education. Your good qualities don’t matter, in the end, if you don’t have any desire to learn. This is SCHOOL, after all! It all comes back to what our teacher’s are always telling us… YOU control your learning, and how far it takes you. Not a grade. Even if you don’t get a 100% on every assignment, that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve an A. It all comes down to what you personally took away from the experience. So now, Mr. Krause’s Juniors will decide… Do YOU deserve an A?

Technology: a Whole New Meaning

I read the article Text- to- Speech Technology Reaches an Inflection Point, from the New York Times. I know that in Mrs. Comp’s English class, we talk a lot about technology being a good thing, and how it helps makes things simpler and easier. I agree with that. But my opinion is even stronger, now that I’ve read this article. It said that “people with speech- impairing conditions like A.L.S., autism, Down syndrome, and strokes have started to discover that general- purpose devises… can in many cases help them communicate better and more cheaply than the… speech devices covered by Medicare and private health insurance.” Okay, so not only is technology making life easier for handicapped people, but it is making them have less of a struggle with money? That is even more than I expected from all of the technology that is available to us. Why we think i phones are great is totally different from why people who have speech impairments think that they’re great. This gives my definition of technology a whole new meaning. Technology not only makes life easier for writing, blogging, or just listening to music, but it can help with your speech, too. I’m sure that in a few years technology will do things we think are impossible at the moment.

Shift; Make It Happen!

I read Mr. Fisch’s blog, “180 Days?” It made me think about different points of view. As a student here at Arapahoe, my mind is always busy thinking about homework, class work, and, yes, even how much time I have to go to Starbucks… but I never put my teacher’s world into perspective. What do they have to do? I never thought about how they manage their time, or what they have to do to get us where we need to be by the end of the year. Although we already know (as they have repeated it several times) that we control our own learning… not the teachers. We are responsible for how far we make our brains stretch to learn the most. But… is it really us who decides WHAT we learn? In my opinion, no. I suppose we can teach ourselves things, but the teachers decide what we learn, and we decide to what extent we learn it to. Is it a bad thing? No. I don’t believe so. There just isn’t enough time in the year to learn everything we need to. Which brings me back to the main point… how do they decide what we learn? Scientists, and historians learn new things all the time, which always changes up what we learn EVERY YEAR! So, regardless of what ourselves and our teachers think is important, they all have to decide on what we should learn together. A lot of things must be taken off that list. Things we never even thought we should be learning about. But, now that technology is getting more involved in our lives, we HAVE to change up our learning. Some teachers are more resistant to this. They don’t want to change or learning or their teaching style. They don’t think we have “enough time.” But I believe we have to MAKE TIME. Everyone’s life is hectic and busy, but we are the future and we want to do this right. “This,” meaning our learning. As I mentioned earlier, our learning is not just in our hands, but our teachers hands, too. They need to make sure we are learning the most essential things, and I believe we need to shift our learning strategies, because as we know it, technology is becoming more and more essential to get jobs, or to get into college. Like Mr. Fisch has pointed out, shift happens. Not only do we have to let it happen, but we have to MAKE it happen.

Michael Wesch and The New Literacy

I read the article The New Literacy. While I was prepared for the fact that I would not agree with all of the opinions stated in that article, I was surprised that I only agreed with a few of the statements. The professor John Sutherland believes that texting has destroyed the “crafty” essays that used to be written. As I don’t know him, I cannot be sure, but he doesn’t seem like a guy who would text, therefore, how would he know that texting is ruining the way teenagers are thinking, or writing? Andrea Lunsford said that we are writing more than any other generation! Isn’t that a good thing? We are writing all of the time! Whether it’s texting, blogging, or just typing on our laptops, we are writing more than ever. In my opinion, it’s more convenient to text, it’s just easier. I can text/ type longer than I can writing. My hands don’t get as sore, and I get more done in a more reasonable amount of time. I believe we are more conscious about what we write if it’s going somewhere else other than the teacher. We actually express ourselves! We talk about what interests us if we are blogging. No matter if it’s what movies are good, or whatever else they are interested in. WE LIKE PEOPLE TO LISTEN TO US!!!!! We can do that with blogs. We need a reason to write… and blogging IS a reason! People might actually care about what you’re thinking, but you’ll never know if you just hand in your essay to your teacher. Lastly, some professors think that we “text write.” I don’t know about anyone else, but I have never used a texting phrase in my writing, nor do I use them while I’m texting! Maybe other teenagers do, but I have never used the phrases “lol, ttyl, etc.” I don’t know of many kids who do. Every now and then, you might shorten a word, but I don’t think it’s a habit of mine. I also watched Michael Wesch's youtube video. I agree with it very much. It shows many of the infinite possibilities of the internet. It also shows how writing contrasts to texting. They're both just... different. Texting is ... simple. Easy. Nothing is holding us back. The whole system of the internet was designed to help us and simplify everything... and it has! Even though I disagree with some of the things in our article, I learned both opinions. I also wasn't too sure whose side I was on at the beginning, but somewhere within reading that first paragraph, my opinion turned from unsure to perfectly sure about who I agreed with.