extra credit paper

From generation to generation the earth has changed through various ways from how its inhabitants treat their surroundings. Year after year we see news reports on certain critical environmental crises that remind us how our actions can affect the planet that we live on. The recent California drought crisis has given me a wakeup call on how fragile we humans are and how much we depend on the earth to live. By this time next year, California will be out of water. The precious water which every human need to survive on, without water we won’t even be able to accomplish our basic necessities in our daily lives. Things such as water conservation should have been in place before this crisis will devastate us. Even now when residents of California should be conserving water to the maximum, still water is wasted through major water parks being open pumping hundreds of gallons of water every day just for profit. This environmental issue can be spread throughout the globe with pollution and water contamination. Recently, the oil spill in Santa Barbara has even further impacted our water situation with the coast now polluted with the oil and its dangerous chemicals. Various marine and animal lives have been impacted because of the oil spill, a man made accident.  Not only have we made living on earth harder for us, but we have made it even harder for the eco system to survive. We constantly destroy animal’s habitats for human profit without any concern to how our actions will impact the animal kingdom.  It is because of our colonization and modernization that has destroyed the earth’s natural and livable environmental state.

I am truly concerned with what kind of earth we are leaving for the new generation to live in. In what state will we leave the earth for them to live out their lives? From each generation to the next, we further degrade the state of earth to only leave the new generation with a more devastated form of earth to deal with. We are so selfish in the way we think about the consideration of other’s well beings that when we choose to make the decision of polluting the earth’s atmosphere or its water system, we have no thought of how these decisions will impact the lives of the future generations. To put it simply, we are just making a mess of earth and leaving the next generation to clean up our mistakes. If we are no considered with how the new generation lives out their lives then I believe we should stop having children. By not producing the newer generation then we save them the trouble of living in a worsen state of the earth we grew up in.  If we continue down our selfish path then we eliminate the opportunities that the newer generation will be able to have, imagine a future earth where the air so polluted that everyone will have to wear air masks on an everyday basis because the atmosphere is so toxic. By doing so, we take away the ability for the newer generation to actually be able to breathe fresh air. Earth’s resources are not infinite; they are continuously depleting everyday with the human race’s appetite of consumption ever so growing.  Everyone should take into account on how their every action when using a resource can impact the earth’s biological system, because without the earth supplying the human race it’s necessities we as a species will most certainly die off.

To counteract this tragedy we are inflicting on our mother earth, everyone should be conserving and doing their part to lessen the amount of resources they are consuming so that the same opportunities that were given during their generation will be available to the new generation. Only then can we insure the prosperity of our earth, the planet we call our home. 

How do we keep each other down?

In society there always seems to be competition and segregation of the social classes with various differences that we compare with one another that leaves a group of individuals being mistreated and looked down upon by people who are seen as the superior elite. For example,this is seemed most commonly in the uneducated and poverty stricken communities that have been the victims of abuse from major corporations that dump their product waste in their water and environment. The poor neighborhoods cannot possibly be able to fight lawsuits with the major companies as opposed to cities where the financial capable citizens reside in. Thus such residents are forced to coup with the harsh and destructive pollution and toxicity being a part of their daily lives. These obscurities also include their communities being poorly funded due to lack of assistance and neglect from the exploitations these helpless individuals that are forced to receive.  It is by this way that the richer individuals can continue to exploit such individuals who do not have the power to fight back. Thus these obstructions lead to the exploited individuals to lose hope and gradually come to accept the conditions around them and be forever trapped in the continuous   lifestyle they have inhabited since they were born. By doing so, it allows the people with more power over the less fortunate to accomplish what would benefit them by continuation to deprive their fellow citizens of their equal rights as a human being.  They then instill into the public eye that these bad neighborhoods are a direct result of the resident’s laziness and reluctant to want a more beneficiary life for themselves. By pushing all the blame and the fault onto the poverty stricken individuals they avoid having the public blame such major corporations and lawsuits so they can continue their harmful profit making ways. It is only when society becomes a active group that fights back against the destructive activities being done to their fellow citizens, can they assure there will be equal treatment of everyone's rights. It is such a hard concept and task to complete due to the obstacles in the way such as the government and the corrupt companies of the wealthy class who use their money to influence the government into their favor; that such a task is difficult to be successful. 

What is our obligation to other people's children?

Most of our time is focused on us and our families, very few occurrences do we part take in other people’s problems.  We make it known to ourselves that it is best to just take care of our own problems and not to meddle with other people’s problems. Thus, we are structured to make sure we do not involve ourselves in situations that don’t include us. But is this is correct way of acting? In a community there are interconnected neighbors that have families of their own with their own needs. Yet when we face the needy or the less fortunate that ourselves we don’t ignore so easily, most of the time we think about if we should intervene or try to help them but the majority of passer byers just tend to walk past with no courage to stand up for someone else or help them. Education is a fundamental part of each of us; we all have learned and have been taught by someone to then teach those lessons to another person. America is widely known where freedom is, where equality is given to everyone in the nation. However, that is not the case due to the difference of financial income and living stability each family has. So there will be a disadvantage to the families who have no choice but to send their children to an institution that is known to have poor quality education, versus better off families who can afford to send their children to a school of higher quality. Education in America is slowly declining for decades to the point that revising or trying to fix the problem is now extremely difficult to accomplish. Instead, we as a nation should take it upon ourselves to provide a universal education system that will bring high quality education to every student regardless of income, social status, race, gender, etc. It is such a disservice we are doing to the children of our country by allowing them to be deprived of the proper education they should receive just because of monetary issues. 

Savage Inequalities ch 2 &3

I can really relate to how individuals react towards sending their children to schools based on their reputations of their success with their students and the quality of their teachers. After I had finished the sixth grade in elementary, I was supposed to  move on to the middle school in my school district; however, my mother felt that the middle school and high school in my area were not adequate enough based on the reputation it was given from the media and parents who have sent their children there. So my mother had to fill out paperwork for every school year I had gone at a neighboring school district in order for me to avoid attending the schools in my neighborhood. Even through the hassle of the documents every year, the longer car commutes, and money they had to spend for me to attend school in a different district my parents decided it was worth the troubles and did this process for both me and my brother’s school years from seventh to twelfth grade.  Looking back I do feel that their actions of putting me into a more diverse and reputable school was worth the inconveniences because the schools that I attended gave me such a variety of opportunities in courses and academic curriculum. I do not know what my life would have been like had I went to the school set by my school district, but I do feel like it would not have been such a positive influence in my growth as a student. My parents had the ability to go through this process of getting me and my brother into schools that were known to be better than the schools in my district, but not everyone is as fortunate to have the capability to do such a thing. The children in St. Louis are not blessed with such extravagance such as the option to attend a higher quality academic establishment. They are forced to go through the endless and never-ending process of transferring into drop out establishments were school are filled with failed teachers that will not provide their students with the necessities to succeed in the next grade level. So as a result, a good percentage of a high school’s population will drop out in the beginning years due to the lack of quality in instructors and instruction. It is a great disservice we as a nation are doing to such children of these schools that cannot allow them to receive the finer education others are being allowed to experience. However, this is known as a huge problem but there are such difficulties in how we can fix or approach the situation based on teacher contracts and how we can provide quality teachers to the students. 

Why do allow children to be exposed to the toxicity?

Children are the future of our nation and they are responsible for what our nation will become. Yet with such large corporations pumping their toxic waste from their products into neighborhoods and environments where children live is such a mistreatment to their rights as human beings.  Such pollution and destruction being added into to their environments places them at an enormous risk of birth defects and crucial child development. However, all these issues are not seen to be more important than a company’s profit or wealth. Most of such pollutions are placed in rural cities where there is a majority of the population is in poverty, because without the money to hire expensive lawyers to fight the toxic waste being dumped in their neighborhoods companies can get away with such activities and continue to earn money. Although the news of such toxic is being thrown away in some individual's backyards, most people in America are in denial or in ignorance of such events. When they cant see such disturbing things about their fellow citizens, they live on with their lives without any guilt or responsibility. It is an absolute dishonest act of equality that companies are doing to the young generation by disregarding the consequences of their actions and choose to continue on with their money making ways. 

The Underdog by The Coup

After watching the video i picture a single mother in a poverty stricken community with no means to pay the bills or feed her children because of financial difficulties. The underdog is represented by the lower class citizens having to live in dangerous and disastrous neighbors hoods because that is all the housing they could afford to live in. The circumstances and consequences that come with poverty make the families who are poor really hard for them to break free from their situation. Poverty gets carried on generation by generation, it is because the same cycle repeats itself. Education is not placed as a high priority when the hunger drives individuals crazy when they stay awake at night because their stomachs are growling for food. Parents are constantly stressed with making ends meet to try and provide for their children while not showing their emotions so they seem strong to others. The they in the lyrics are the individuals who are free from such poverty problems but choose to ignore helping the lower class citizens with their struggles because they believe that the poor are poor because they are useless. The upper class assume that the poor can easily get out of poverty by getting a job but instead their just a bunch of lazy pot heads that just sit in their homes collecting welfare checks. However, they can’t see the single mother with two children, struggling to pay rent because she didn’t get a degree that would allow her a job with the enough income to support her family. They choose to ignore and not understand the stories of difficulties and struggle that their fellow citizens are facing, so they treat them as someone bellow them so they don’t have to associate with them. What is significant to me and touches me is that there are hungry and poverty stricken people so close to us yet we don’t take the effort to lend a helping hand. We need to put ourselves in their shoes because if one day I end up in poverty I would want someone to come and assist me instead of ignoring me like a plastic bag on the side walk that gets walked passed. 

Essay draft

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Christine Hu

Monique Williams

English 1A

2/20/2015

Education is defined as the process of reviving or giving systematic instruction. Having an education is one of the best and most important things in the world to have in an individual’s skill sets. Being able to read and write is an accomplishment that can allow a person to further their academics and continue their schooling in hopes of having a future occupation that they desire. However, the present education system is more of a factory; processing their students to memorize and not think about the material in order for them to pass the systematic checkups know as tests so that the school can be ensured their government funding and school reputation.  Classes are being overcrowded with students yet are only given fifty five minutes for instruction, teachers are usually outnumbered thirty eight to one. It is impossible for one teacher to each individual child understand their lesson when they can’t even finish their lesson on time before the bell rings for the next period. There is such a disconnect between the students and their instructor that when a minority of the students in class do not understand the subject, the teacher as no choice but to move on in order to keep with the curriculum schedule set but the school and the state. They do not have the time to have a makeup day where they can answer a question or review the material for better understanding. I remember back in High school when I use to take Ap courses, we were always on a schedule based on when the Ap test was going to take place. If we didn’t understand the course lesson that day then we would have to learn on our own with no help but reading the textbook. We were always pressured and reminded of the schedule we had

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to keep up with in order to cover all the material by the test date. This is no way to teach a class, students resorted to memorization and practice tests in order for the material to get stuck in their head. The schooling institutions have the most important job of all, educating the future; their every action and lesson will mold the thinkers of the new generation.

The academic system is constantly undermining their student’s capabilities and free thought process, it is much easier for order when students are only focused on passing a certain test in order for a better chance at their dream college where they repeat the memorization process over and over until graduation. The skill sets of creativity, opinion, and critical thinking is not utilized in the education system  because they don’t matter when it comes to passing an exam that dictates the funding and reputation a school will get. The whole mentality of going to school every day for eight hours, only to sit in a classroom with thirty seven other  individuals  listening to a single instructor going on and on about a subject that comes straight out of their textbook does not stimulate their brain development and thinking.  The student become a copying machine that will only memorize the information from their textbooks and imitating what their instructor is writing on the whiteboard. Students being institutionalized by a systematic schedule that dictates whether they pass their class or not; leaves their minds with only good grades and test points as their goal in the class. When they enter the work force and are faced with a challenging problem that requires critical problem solving; they will shut down. The school system did not provide them with such skills that would allow them to project their opinions and lead to group discussion over the situation at hand.

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 Students are constantly under the pressure to succeed and aim for a high paying occupation by everyone around them. When students try to follow their passion and interest into a field such as the arts or theatre, they are bombarded with criticism and discouragement because of how society views which jobs are beneficial and which job will not provide.  With such negativity how can there be dreams of becoming an artist or a dancer when the support is not there? Most students are unfortunately diseased by the fear of disappointment and embarrassment by the adults in their lives as well as their fellow peers. The fear of disappointing their parents or the people around them forces them to follow the path others dictate them to follow with no enthusiasm and joy. As they reach the end of their path, most likely a desk job at some company that does not provide them with the initiative and inspiration to perform at their best; they will regret having not pursuing their dreams and live out the rest of their lives wondering what would their life been like had they chosen their own path to walk down. This cycle of discouraging passions and interest due to how they are looked upon by society will then result in a never ending cycle of generation after generation dictating on what future their child should peruse and accomplish. The regrets and wonderings will continue only to be foreshadowed by the fear of consequences of taking a stand for an individual’s passion or dream. 

Educators in the school system need to establish a comfortable and free environment for their students so they no longer have the fear of judgment thus allowing them to express their thoughts and opinions with confidence and relaxed among their peers. Most of a classroom’s schedule consists of the group of students staring either at

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the white board in the front of the room taking notes or listening to their teacher lecture of the lesson. When students are faced with notes about the lecture they automatically go into copy mode and are solely focused on what they put down on their paper that they block out what the teacher is verbally lecturing on. They are so occupied with jotting down every single word that when their instructor tells them to just take down notes in their own words they shut down, all their life they have been trained and drilled on copying notes from the whiteboard or textbook onto their paper. So when they are told to take notes in their own fashion, they are confused and lost on how they can take notes in their personal way. It is because of the endless instruction from the start of their education years that students are only prepared to copy their instructors or the text in their textbooks and not have an inking as to how they are supposed to incorporate their own distinctive way into what note taking skills will more benefit them. In studies, there is such a limited and constrictive way of how students learn and study because every student is individually different, yet the school system treats their students all the same way with the same curriculum and teaching fashion. The school administration does not take into account of how each student operates when being taught a lesson; they need to incorporate different techniques to benefit different students. Educators should find a medium in which they can understand that one teaching technique will not be effective towards students who have a different way of learning the material such as the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. Each student has individual characteristics that are unlike other’s personalities; so in what way can the education system think that a solitary teaching approach be applied towards their student population without any difficulty.

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There are so many contractions in how students can express themselves freely in the school environment and judgment from the adults and student peers that classrooms are not capable of inhabiting a positive community for support and encouragement until they address the issues they have at hand to solve.

We as a society are always pushing for creation and invention to better benefit the daily lives of the population yet the individuals who are capable of doing such a thing are being told to disregard their imagination and thinking because it will not lead them to a bright future. How can society determine the future that each individual wants? They don’t, so instead they pick one mentality to be used as propaganda that will motivate their citizens into dreaming of a better life. The American population is driven by this propaganda, the “American dream”, the dream that says if an individual works hard enough then they can climb up the social ladder, become wealthy, and be recognized. This dream is then reinforced by letting the population see how good it is to be able to live the rich lifestyle when they see the elite such as celebrities and politicians enjoying the extravagant items they can purchase on television. This want for a better life, drives people to work hard so they can have enough money to buy the objects they desire. And when they realize they cannot live up to the American dream, parents will then instill how great it would be for their children to be able to become a doctor or a lawyer and live that lifestyle so they encourage them to get good grades and test scores so that they can have the chance to achieve the dream their parents couldn’t. So this sequence of events leads to endless dreams of people thinking they have the ability to become more than just middle class citizens. 

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It is because of this cycle that in academic institutions, the arts and extracurricular classes are not given importance on like the other mandatory courses a student must take in order for them to be able to receive a diploma. A diploma no longer celebrating their achievements such as the knowledge and understanding of their education; it is only a piece of paper that acknowledges how well they played the game that is the school system. How well they have played the game of text scores, essay grades, and accumulative points earned. The all-powerful game that dictates who fails and who succeeds in life; the piece of paper that controls who will be able to move on to the next level education that will lead them to a degree for their occupation. The degree that is used as a bragging chip when mingling at a dinner party as graduates, a paper stating which university that represents how well your educational level is based on the college’s reputation and prestige. When did a college degree become only a document used to show off to other people on how well your life is going to be just based on the college the individual graduates from; a degree should be a representation of how far an individual as come through the sixteen years of schooling and how has that prepared the individual for the occupation they will take on in their work field. A college degree is there to prove that the individual in possession of the document is a professional that has the right expertise and skill set in their field that will guarantees that they can execute the proper capability and strength into their job profession that they have trained for in the years it took them to get their degree. Yet, we treat this important paper as a representation of how well they played the game of school all these years; how well they were able to memorize the information in their heads so that they scored high enough and had

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obtained the necessary grades in order for them to pass their courses and gain the needed requirements in order for the college they attend to deem them worthy enough to be able to walk across that stage and shake the hands of the game makers to receive the paperwork that insures society that the individual is ready for the work force world; unknowing to the degree holder that they have just simply fallen in to the trap that was set in place for them from the very beginning they entered their first year of school.