HW 18 - Health & Illness & Feasting

So my Thanksgiving experience Health wise was honestly just as unhealthy as just as everybody else's. An excess amount of carbohydrates from the biscuits and mash potatoes and stuffing. The massive amounts of tryptophan from the turkey that knocks you out into the biggest food coma all year round. So my family pretty much loves to embrace the holiday spirit of unhealthy eating habits of the traditional Thanksgiving rituals. But besides the feasting the immediate health of my was overall good because everyone seems to have lost weight and just overall seemed in a better mood. As well I feel the good mood was attributed to my little nephew whom had his first Thanksgiving at only a the first few months of his life. I believe that because of Leo my family got along a lot better then they use to have, specifically the in law side of my family through my sisters husband, he brings our families together in a better way for us to get along.

Illness during my Thanksgiving Experience really didn't have a threshold at all on my family. The only person whom is really sick in my family is my aunt whom had a small form of cancer but is successfully beating it and my grand father on my mothers side whom is fighting breathing problems and a bad knee from complications of smoking and old age. But since my grand mother and grand father don't get along well they go to separate parts of my families Thanksgivings. This year my grandfather went to my other aunts Thanks giving feast rather than ours and my grand mother went to ours. Of course we love our sick family members but we know now that at the moment they are in good conditions so we really don't stress heavily over their possibility of dying because it is highly unlikely.

XC-Quarter 4 -Babies

Response to question #1:

I believe that all of the cultures presented in the documentary "Babies" show great examples of the different types of parenting different cultures give their young. I feel that there was none the less a best type of parenting of the types that were shown in the film but that doesn't mean that any of them are bad in anyway. At the least they could possibly be described as not as fortunate as other cultures. What I'm talking about is the comparison between the Japanese care giving which I believe was the best, and I'm comparing it to the Namibia care giving. In the documentary I saw the Japanese care giving as the best because It was the most modern, I saw both parents handling the child, and the parents used the Ferber method of letting the baby cry to let them soothe themselves. Now for the Namibia type of care giving I thought it was too much of an type "Old World" of care giving and very unsafe. When the mother wipes her babies bottom with her knee to basically clean him to me I just feel that now a days we have so many new techniques and resources available to us that nobody should not be using. It really hit me when the child was just playing with what seemed to be his brothers and they were trying to eat rocks and just play in the dirt, it just seems primitive to me. And as well for the Mongolian and America(San Francisco) types of care giving I thought really didn't come to par with the Japanese type of care giving either because the American on was modern as well but there didn't seem to be much discipline which I feel is needed when teaching a child how to grow up. And the Mongolian care giving I feel could of also had more care in the care giving I barely saw even the mother with the child at times it was usually just him and his brother just messing with him and making him cry al of the time.

Response to question #3:

What was universal between all of the parents care giving to their children was the love and the teaching that they brought into their children. For example trying to teach them to speak to them, trying to teach them to walk, feeding them, bathing them, and having fun with them by letting them explore. I feel that all of these things are hard wired into every human being from birth. I feel this because every human before us just as you can see as a modern example that still hasn't changed much from it's past the Namibian type of care giving I believe is inside of all of us. Where and what we grow up with determines how we also use the things around us to take care of our children. If you grow up in a modern environment you would alter your form of care giving such as the Japanese and American forms of care giving. But overall what is with us forever as humans is our primitive instincts to take care of our young and nurture them to grow into adulthood and be with them every step of the way. I believe that is our primitive calling as humans to continue to breed and care for our young, die and then the cycle starts all over again with your children and their children.

Knowing this is very significant because it is our primitive calling in life and you can't not comprehend that because if you are part of a family it's obvious enough to see that it's already in you and your family's mind that you and they were cared for that's how your hear now. In the documentary through out all of the four families you see this primitive care giving some less than other's. The Namibian care giving is the most still being connected to the primitive type then comes the Mongolian, then the Japanese and then the American. Almost in every scene of the film you can see this primitive care giving being demonstrated by all of the families as they are teaching the children, going through their daily lives with them, playing with them, and even just watching them the primitive type of care giving is still there in slightly stronger and weaker tones but its still there naturally in all of the parents.

Hw 52-Initial Theories of Human Relationships.

I believe that in our human relationships we tend to do things based on the way each us act to words each other. All instinces are based on what we do and what we say to one another during the interactions that we have in every day life. I believe that we as humans tend to always have a longing for human contact and we need this to stay sane, thats just a need that is set into stone for us. But to further break things down is very complex when you come to think of it. We have so many tendencies to do things some subconsciously and consciously and we have these things that are done by us in these ways because as we start out from birth and grow into adults our families teach us values and morals that we are basically brainwashed to follow.

What I exactly saying is that from babies we are taught certain things in certain ways and we usually chose to follow these things in the way we do because thats the things that we look up to when were young. Just think about when you were a child didn't you follow what your mother and father told you and think that it was the right way. I'm sure you wanted to be just like your mother or just like your father when you were younger and ever still for some people now a days when they are older. Im saying that the first things that are taught to you and dictated to you when you are a child are the things that you will most likely follow for the rest of your life. Yes of course your way of thinking and perceiving different things will change and mold into a more advanced sense but your basic morals and values will stay unchanged or similar to what we were made after a few years after our birth to think.

Some people are taught at a young age to hate and not accept any other type of person, this process effects the individual in the future to have the values of a racist and not except these certain types of cultures of people whom aren't their own. And these values stay with you through out the persons entire life, so basically my point here is that your family is the biggest factor that decides your morals and values from birth. So it's usually never the child's choice whom decides what he will actually turn out to think and act in the future unless the child can learn different when he or she grows up and sees that what they grew up with was socially acceptable and logical in the child's standards. Usually in the future when the child grows up he or she will usually either be extremely brainwashed or realize that what he grew with was wrong and independently change his values and morals because his perspective on what he learned in from his childhood has confirmed as wrong, if it was indeed bad.

As well I feel that there some human values that I believe are naturally worked into our heads that aren't even taught to us through our lives, its just learned naturally. I feel that the value of preserving human life is a value that we naturally learn form birth as well for the value of caring for other humans. But with me saying this there are some people out of all of us whom decided to not follow these rules, naturally they know the rules but just chose not to obey them for certain reasons. Maybe it's because they just chose not to care or just enjoy the idea of hurting others and seeing others being hurt. These type of people are in my opinion the lost people in our society. These people whom have no care for human life are the fail sorts of people whom either feel the need to hurt others because they were never taught to care or were never cared for themselves when they were children. In my opinion these people should either be annihilated from society or be treated so our society can be safer in the future.

HW 50- Notes on Finishing Our School Unit.

The only text that truly interests me is the text written by John Taylor Gatto on "How

public education cripples our kids, and why". Even before i read this text as i read the title I

was immediately interested to hear what this author had to say about how the public cripples

our students in todays education system and his reasoning behind it. So as I started to read

the the text what i noticed was his first argument, an example of this is: "Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?" -Gatto.

I thought that this part of the text really had some kick to it because in my opinion you would never ever hear or see an any adult or author talk about the how teachers are obviously bored while teaching students. As well I'm surprised that Gatto connects these teachers to the same level of boredom that our students of today are experiencing now a days in our so called "compulsory" schooling system. I'll tell Gatto that the whole reason about why we are trapped in this flawed system of schooling that causes mass boredom amongst teachers and students. The reason is us, and i agree with Gatto when he says this in the second paragraph of his text because its my reason one the topic as well. If we make use of our teachers and I'm not saying we don't but what I mean is to actually sit them down and talk to them about the curriculum that they should teach us. What is taught in school should consist of what is interesting to the students on and individual level, this so called "working process" of schooling doesn't give any chance for our students today to actually be interested in school. What it does is make our students exactly feel a way that nobody should ever feel when they are in the process of educating them selves and being educated by others, and the same should go for the teachers in todays schools. Until we can find a way to accomplish this we will continue to lack the true learning abilities of education and we will forever be attempting to learn in a failing system.

Another part of Gatto's text that intrigued me was when he talked about the actually needing an education in the first place. To be specific what made me think this was the text here: "Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated." -Gatto. Now first off what really got me was when he said that there's 2 million happy home schooled students which i think he's talking about are in the US. This surprised me very much because I didn't know that so many students chose to be home schooled instead going to public or private school. As well another thing that caught my attention is a fact that i didn't realize, that our fore fathers like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln didn't go to school at all. I really could not believe that I didn't realize this and use it in a conversation as an argument, but now that I actually have been informed about this controversial information I plan to use this as evidence in future arguments and maybe in future papers. I mean just look at them they became the founders of our Nation the United States of America and then just look how we turn out 234 years later to be teaching our our students in a failing education system obviously they had it down packed back then in the years right before and after 1776. Also another thing that kinda made me feel a little inadequate was when Gatto talked about Ariel Durant whom co-wrote "The Story of Civilization" and was in a happy marriage at the age of 15. This make me feel unequivocally out classes by this young woman at such a young age being so morally and mentally secure. It just shocks me that when she was this young and she was at such a level of prestige that early in life i feel like I'm doing something wrong in my life currently.

This leads me into another example which i would like to share my feeling about. Later in Gatto's text he write about the how the structure of our schooling system today came to be and I always pondered on this fact especially when Andy gave on of his many interesting classes and he taught us that our schooling system started to come into affect during the nineteenth century. As well he said that we adopted it from the education system of the east side of germany during its occupation by the former United Soviet Social Republic when it was being used as soviet satellite state but he didn't really elaborate enough on the specific details as much as I wanted him to. But besides the fact the part of the text where these thought came into my head was: "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best." -Gatto I was also as you should think not too surprised but interested in what Gatto had to say here because I thought that we adopted our type of schooling during the years after World War Two,(1945 and so on) but now I understand that we adopted in between the years of 1905 and 1915 and were constantly elaborating on the process and attempting to make it work better. But i understand now and I'm sure that many other people feel the same way as me that it was a change for the worst because our system is failing and not giving our students what they really need to succeed and better themselves through their own personal interest. And as soon as our society can comprehend the fact that this should be our top priority, our schooling system will continue to breed uninterested, compassionless students with on drive or want to actually learn what they truly want to learn.

HW 49-Notes on Finishing Our School Unit.

Well what my personal contribution to the class film was being a "class goon". What i basically took part in was being a member of a certain group of kids that you see in every high school, the punks. These kids who are pretty much just plain out disrespectful don't get their work done and don't care what the teachers tells them to do or say, they just think they know it all,they think their too cool for school. Well so I played one of these kids and I feel I played it pretty well in the film our class made. When we were shooting the team of goons was Evan, Omar, Quinn, and me who were causing trouble in the class room in the two scenes. When Will who was playing the main character Mr. C the alcoholic teacher who lost his wife was attempting to teach the class this was when we would act up and cause problems in the classroom. But this would be halted for a brief minute every time when he would actually stop teaching and try to bring some realization into our lives. He would do this by talking about the way we use electronic devices to constantly stay in touch with our friends and for numerous other things. He would try to make us realize what would happen to us in our lives if we would continue to do what we do in school now by scaring us by basically depicting a prediction our futures to be the lives of criminals, low lives, who are most likely to end up in jail. What i believe is the message of our film is that what you do in your school life is going to reflect on your future of what you do in life, its gunna mold you into what you will become in the future.

This film partly has connections to all of our past Savior Teacher films that we watched. For instance one aspect that our film had was that during the film was the classic trope of the classroom full of the disruptive out of control students whom don't seem to care or even acknowledge the teacher when he or she is trying to acquire the classes attention. As seen in pretty much every movie clip we watched for instance Black Board Jungle, Dead Poets Society, Freedom Writers, etc... But although our film connected to these other Savior films that I have said what I fell that it didn't connect to was the extent of the extremely troubled teacher like Mr. C in our film who was a drunk and had both relationship and family problems. In spite of this connection I believe that salvation can only be found in teaching and schooling if the teacher or student truly wants to open up their mind and learn and/or teach what they honestly want to. But sadly I have to say that this is hardly possible with the schooling and teaching system that we have currently in our lives, it's based too much on what the Board of Education wants to dictate to us and what they think that we need to know to be successful in our lives. As well the society in our time is too dead bent on the straight schooling agenda that the Board of Education has in place to us which is the reason we can never have a chance to accomplish an actual true and honest learning experience that interests us. Until our society stops depending our basic marshal law of schooling that the government has for us we will not be able to change our system to further better our ways of truly learning what we are honestly interested in.

HW 47-Class Film Preparation 1.

I would rather not compose 5 to 10 ideas because i have a great idea in which i would like to elaborate on here a little. Ok, my idea as I said in class two weeks ago before break is to have a story base around a teacher that in a way has personal problems in his life that effect his ability to do his job as a teacher. And as the result of this the teacher is an alcoholic and this affects his influence on his class of high school students that he teaches. But as he's going through his problems he is in such a constant depressing state that his students actually start to notice his depression in his life and try to make him feel better by sharing their own problems in their lives. As they are doing this they persuade him share his own problems and in the end of the film I decided to make then confide in each other, the problem ridden teacher and his class of troubled students and they both actually figure out solutions to their own problems and sit down and start a normal class together. I don't know why i decided to use the classic troupe, but it seemed good at the moment when i thought of the idea and wrote it out on paper.

-Brendan S.

HW 40-School Interviews x 3 & Synthesis (Part A & B)

Part A:

Question #1: If you had the power to change your school in any way possible for the better in what way would you change it?

Person being asked this question: "Katy" who was a college girl from Texas but lives in Idaho whom I met on my vacation to Los Cabos, Mexico.

She answered: "Hmmm. Well first off I would change the whole approach that are teachers have to words us as students, they treat us like assembly line workers in a way. I mean like a every other class at the end of the week we have to hand in our assignments and don't even get to talk to our teachers about the work we've done. So really to answer your question I would change my college in a better way by giving the teachers more time or maybe assigned time to talk and discuss our assignments so that we can maybe get a little pre feed back before we actually need to hand in our work. You know what I mean? So here.... like ok... an example could be like if I don't understand the assignment for my Culinary Arts and I want to be able to talk to my teacher after the class is dismissed I should be able to, because I would make a change for all teachers to have a sort of short clarification period after each of their classes. Did that answer you question?"

Question #2: How has your experience of being a student changed over the years as you go on through the last remaining years of High school?

Person being asked this question: "Myself"

I answered: "My experience probably for the most part has changed not so dramatically in referance to my last 4 to 5 years of schooling. What I'm here is that since like 7th grade my entire social atmosphere and experiences changed from a sort of kid mode to a young adult mode. All of my interactions to words academic work, my social status and social experiences began pretty much after the start of that specific grade. But as for the years that began and finished after that the experiences and academic work only increased to a greater extent. So I guess I would say that as you schooling increases everything else that becomes a new to you in your early middle schooling period of life and then on to high school and most likely college. As well once again just to clarify the things I'm referring to increase over these years of our lives are a broader social status, personal experiences increasing with the opposite sex, and academic work increasing in the level of difficulty as you go on through school."

Question #3: In your own opinion do you believe that school is a sort of sorting machine that sets in stone students own future's?

Person being asked this question: "Ariella" My ex-girlfriend.

She answered: "Umm, okay well I kinda, I think that a schools reputation creates it's atmosphere. Like... If the school is considered one of the bests the students that go there know what's expected of them, so they work harder, so then the schools graduates all have similar futures. There are always exceptions but the majority of the kids that go to like an upper class/private school will have relatively similar future's. Does that make sense? I mean thats pretty much it... most people act the way others around them do, it's just how we are. And so if your put in a place where people are successful most likely your gonna mimic that and work harder. (Then I asked a secondary question:So as well your saying the same thing goes for the students in an unsuccessful atmospheres in low income schools?), Yea it's just like they are put in an enviorment with the kids that don't give a shit and the school doesn't either. So yea of course there will be exceptions, that tolken kid that gets out of the ghetto and that rich kid that screws up. But mostly thay are going to have they are going to have the futures that those around them have. In a low income situation the schools don't put the same importance on things that schools that cost 30 thousand a year do."

Part B:

Since I could only get internet on my vacation by the end of it I was only able to get one persons reaction from my time in mexico and then i decided talk to my ex girlfriend and ask myself a question to give me a total of three interviews. Through out all of my interviews I noticed that my questions gave back good responses that for the most part broke down all of the important aspects of the questions that I created and asked. Being that Katy is in college and done with high school I believe she gave a more experienced response because of her college as well. I say this because during the interview she gave suggestions on how to make better schooling comparing how the teachers treat the students through out school for her. And El and I gave sort of less experienced responses to words our questions by discussing the sorting machine and developing experiences that students go through. Now I'm not saying that our responses were worse its just that Katy is going through the next level of schooling and there fore has a better comprehension and can pin point flaws in our schooling system better than we can.