Disconnected

 When I look at the world I feel disconnected. I’m more concerned about what directly affects me and I forget about how almost everything I do as well as what everyone else does indirectly affects the world in some way, whether for good or for bad. It irritates me when the weather isn’t perfect and sometimes I just wish it would never rain again and if I could turn it off I would. Most of the time though it doesn’t even cross my mind how important the rain is to nature and also how important it is for me even if it is indirectly. The world needs the rain to flourish, the rain provides the water that plants need to survive which is what keeps all the great forests in the world and all the rain forests that are home to thousands of animal species alive and healthy and the forests are what provide the Earth with oxygen that keeps us and all the other living species on Earth alive. If I were to just turn off the rain I would be killing the Earth.

I feel that our whole society is disconnected from the world. Humans our ruining the Earth. We pollute the water that provides homes to millions of fish and supplies tons and tons of plants and animals with the water they need to survive and us polluting it is causing tons of fish to die or have serious health problems which happens to pretty much any of the plants or animals that drink the polluted water too. Humans also cut down acres and acres of forest land each year in order to urbanize and collect timber and to provide area for large scale cash crops, not even caring about the animal families that they are running out of their homes. About 18 million acres are mowed down from deforestation every year and half of the worlds tropical forests have already been cleared. Its getting out of hand.

We as a society need to know our role on this planet and realize that the things we do to it are ruining it. We need to appreciate what we have and not take it lightly. We need to be more conservative and try and save paper when we can, run less water when its not needed, appreciate the the beauty in nature, and maybe learn to enjoy the rain a little and go out for a stroll on a rainy day just for the hell of it.

Blind Poetry

The joy of family is exhilarating, like body building children living on a ship full-filling dreams of freedom flying to the inventor of sports cars gaining service of a fitness model lion.

English 1A Draft Essay

Picture this! Somewhere in the United States there is a child who is intelligent, creative, caring, and aspires to become something great in his lifetime. Only this child goes to school in one of the poorest neighborhoods around, he doesn't have a book of his own or materials to use in class because the school cannot afford it for everyone. By the time he reaches high school he will most likely read at only a third grade level and he will likely drop out of high school before he reaches his junior year. Well, at this point you may be asking yourself, "Why should I care?", "This happens to children all the time, what does it matter to me that it will likely happen to another kid?" Well... You should care, because this kid, is your kid. Only unfortunately for your kid, you died, and now without you he lives in a group home with a very low income, and is receiving a mediocre education. If only you hadn't died, you could have made sure that your child got the best education possible and became the great man he aspired to be. Isn't it a shame that there isn't a possibility for all children to have an equal opportunity in education, regardless of their families income, or whether they have their parents or not? I think that it is a terrible shame. It is not the child's fault whether his or her parents have the money to provide them with the best education possible or not, or whether they even have any parents at all to do such things for them. I believe that every single child should have an equal opportunity, from the moment they are born into this world, to get the same great education as every other child regardless of ethnicity, poverty, and parental income, because there are tons of children failing miserably in school, whose parents I'm sure wished that they could have done better for them. In this essay, i will be citing some quotes from Johnathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities Children in Americas Schools to back up some of my beliefs. Savage Inequalities is a great work by Kozol, it describes the disgusting inequalities between urban and suburban schools and is an awesome piece of literature for anyone who is interested in education. The beginning of this paper was only a prologue to the bigger picture, that equality from birth is the only way to a fair educational system. This is incredibly important to our educational system because as it stands, the children of those who are stuck in poverty stricken neighborhoods will grow up to be just as uneducated and as unsuccessful as their parents were before them, forming a family tree, that is forever rooted into poverty.

Waiting for Super Man Response

Waiting for Super Man was quite the touching movie for me, it was so sad to see all these gifted young children and to see how their school system was letting them down. I was surprised to see how much school meant to these kids, they really enjoyed learning and all had mutual goals to get out of their poverty-struck schools and move on to nicer schools in nicer areas so they could get the best education possible, one little girl already knew what college she wanted to go to and said that one day she wanted to become a surgeon or a veterinarian. Unfortunately all the schools that these children go to have a combination of problems with under-staffing, too many students, intense drop-out rates, money problems, and shortage on materials. One mother, when asked what you see walking into the school said, "Walking into the school you see a security guard sitting at a desk, and that is as far as the parents are allowed to go.", this school is the 3rd most overcrowded school in the Bronx. In January 2002, the bill was signed for No Child Left Behind. It was expected that in 12 years all schools would be at 100% proficiency standards in English and math, though most states are only around 20-30% proficient. There are over 2000 schools in America with dropout rates that are above 40%, Lockheart is one of the worst of these schools. Most students Who begin attending this High School begin at 2nd to 3rd grade reading level due to the poor middle schools in the area. Studies show that the cause of failing neighborhoods is failing schools, not the other way around. Due to tenure, it is almost impossible to fire a teacher. Tenure was made to protect teachers from losing their jobs, but due to this, no matter how bad a teacher is, he cannot be fired. A bad teacher on average can only cover about 50% of the curriculum for the year, but a good teacher can cover up to 150% of the curriculum in that years time, and both cost the same to the school. Even when a teacher sexually assaults a student, he just gets put in the refinement center with a group of other bad teachers, and they all still receive 100% of their pay.

Persistenly Low-Achieving Schools in the Bay Area

East St Louis and Chicago are not the only areas burdened by persistently low-achieving schools. Apparently it is happening right in front of our eyes. Schools in Oakland, San Lorenzo, and Hayward, like in East St Louis and in Chicago, are persistently receiving low scores on their reading and math testing. It is a problem that every high school in Hayward is currently trying to deal with.  Also like in East St Louis and Chicago, there are issues to receive the funding they need. If certain standards aren't met, including the replacement of the principal and staff, the schools will not receive the funds they need. In San Lorenzo's Hillside Elementary they have been failing for years to meet the standardized testing scores required, though they have progressed by 48 points, it is still not enough.

Poorly Funded Public Schools Blog

School Resources
Do materials really matter? Why or why not?
The materials used in school obviously matter, otherwise, they wouldn't be required materials. The children are supposed to have all the resources that they need in order to learn. How is a student supposed to learn science when their materials are popcorn poppers or scraps from the recycling? It must really hurt the children's learning spirit once they realize that the materials that they are given are literally garbage when compared to the materials given to the students at the higher-end schools.

"A chemistry teacher at the school reports that he does not have beakers, water, Bunsen burners. He uses a popcorn popper as a substitute for a Bunsen burner, and he cuts down plastic soda bottles to make laboratory dishes." (Savages Inequalities, p. 64)

Bad Teachers
What affects do bad teachers have on a child?
Bad teachers can have a drastic negative effect of their students. If a teacher has little to no interest in his or her class then that will be reflected onto the students. For example, if a teacher seems bored while going over a lesson then the students will not pick up on it and will also be just as bored, if not more, almost like the teacher is simply teacher them how boring this subject can be. Where as, if a teacher shows a lot of interest in the subject and tries to make it seem more fun, the students will immediately pick up on the teachers energy  and will be more interested in the daily lesson.

"'We have teachers,' Mrs Hawkins says, 'who only bother to come in three days a week. One of these teachers comes in usually around nine-thirty. You ask her how she can expect the kids to care about their education if the teacher doesn't even come until nine-thirty. She answers you 'It makes no difference. Kids like these aren't going anywhere.'" (Savage Inequalities, p. 63)

Protecting the Wealthy By Providing a Lesser Education to the Poor
What makes this observation true?
This observation is true because in Chicago a lot of the school systems are already unfair by providing the schools, where children whose parents have lower incomes, with much less resources than are available in the richer areas, and then when there was a new condominium development built in the poor area and more wealthy, mostly white, families moved in they requested that a new school be built, and the city built it for them, though they wouldn't consider building it before the new families moved in. Then after the new school was built the new families in the area had the nerve to say that they did not want the children who had originally lived in that neighborhood to attend the new school so that the poorer kids would not be mixed in with their own children, but the school was, on the other hand, willing to let students from out of the area attend for their fine arts program.

"The parents from Dearborn Park insist that, if the school is attended by the children from the projects - these are the children who have lived there all along - the standards of the school will fall." (Savage Inequalities, p. 74)

2 solutions to todays oppressed educational system

        Today's education system is flawed in many ways, and has even become oppressive to the students. Do to these flaws I have taken the time to come up with a few solutions of my own. For one, we need to increase creativity in the classroom. We need to expand out side the oppressive school system and get to know life a little bit better. We can accomplish this by spending a little more time in the real world through school field trips. A student may have found his calling from a field trip he went on to the art museum where he saw something that touched him to make him become an artist, or maybe something at another museum made a child want to become an archaeologist, or maybe a child would decide to become a marine biologist after a trip to the aquarium. This little bit of increased creativity in schools could end up changing the futures of many children's lives who may not have ever found thier calling in life otherwise.

        My second solution to this education system is to give the students more equal opportunities. It isn't fair that private school students get way better opportunities just because thier parents have more money, it isn't the students fault if their parents don't make enough to put their kids into the best school. So I think the public and private schools should be combined, and all schools should be free. The country shouldn't put a price on thier students education, they should go all out to make sure the next generation is as smart as it can be. Students should also get more one-on-one time with the instructor, so the instructor and student can get to know each other a bit better, and the students can actually talk and express themselves more, rather than continuing to "bank" information and lose sight of life in the real world.