Money Does Not Equal Success

I pretty much learned 3 things from the readings:

1. Don't become a franchisee, especially not for Subway.
Well it seems that this form of opening your own business may prove successful, the amount of royalties and other deductibles like that ruin most chances for many franchisees to succeed. After all, as Schlosser said, money isn't true success. The only question that remains is, what does success mean to you?
2. Americans' greatest fear is losing their jobs.
I fully agree with this statement and how it effects modern society. Money runs the world and, without a job, it becomes hard to survive. People look at their success based on how much money they have but this shouldn't be the case. In the future, you won't be remembered by what job you had or how much money you made, but by the effect you had on the people around you.
3. Corporate abuse can't fully change until the law of corporate governance changes.
One quote summarizes Hinkley's entire article: "Corporations should have more than one purpose. they also owe something to their workers and the communities in which they operate, and they should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities."

What affects our success?

I feel as if I can relate to the writer Sanders. Why? I grew up in a family where my father was as Sanders puts it the "toiler" and my mother was the "warrior". My father was a coal miner and he did work very hard. He is only 45 years old andover the years he has been in the hospital for numerous oberations due to his job. He also currently has a broken back and an infection in his lungs. My mother was the soilder, well not a soilder persay, but she was in the military. Although I can relate to Sanders in this way, I can not relate to his belief that he would grow up to be nothing more than a toiler or a warrior.

I always knew that I would go to college. I always knew that I would never work in a factory or join the military as a last resort. I knew this becuase I knew I didnt want to be like my mother or father, not that I'm ashamed of them in any way, I just felt that they worked to hard all becuase they had never gone to college. My parents indeed always stressed the idea of college because they knew the impact it would have on our futures. So though I agree with the idea that our future decissions and goals are influenced by the adults in our lives, I do not beleive that it means we will grow up to be mirror images of them.

Losing: An American Tradition

Charles Young states that "Calling someone a loser is probably the worst insult in the United States today. " This is understandable because, well, nobody wants to be called a loser. However, if you don't win, you are a loser. Many are offended by being called a loser and take it as a personal blow. Lighten up. It doesn't mean that you suck at life and should be ashamed. It just means that in this case you did not come out on top, you didnt win. It is nothing to be offended by, tomorrow you may win and be a winner. This status will change continuously. I personally do not agree with the statement that calling someone a loser is the worst insult in the United States, because I can think of many other things that being called a loser would be preferable too. Many would probably agree with me that being called a loser is not the worst insult they have ever received.

The Men We Carry In Our Minds

This article, The Men We Carry In Our Minds, written by Sanders I believe is very true. Most people are influenced by their parents and take jobs similar to the jobs their parents have. Like the article stated, we are influenced by our environment. The jobs we grow up around are the jobs we tend to pursue because we think that other jobs are not in our league. Either these jobs require more education than we can afford or are to menial for our social class. The adult figures we grow up around determine the stereotypes we set for each gender. Growing up as a little kid, I wanted to be just like my mom, so I guess I fall into this category.

Harvest Gypsies

Reading Steinbeck's essay, I was greatly intrigued. I don't know much about the frontier era and certainly never painted the picture of it quite like he did. Sure, I played The Oregon Trail as a kid. Remember that game? You had to try to get your wagon to Oregon without anyone dying... I never grasped the reality of it. I was young and naive, what did I know? But reading these stories sheds light on an era that is not familiar to our generation, one of great mystique. I thought that the way they set up their own governments was ingenious. We should all be inspired with what they did. The campers had very little yet shared everything they did have with those even more less fortunate. Look at what our country has become? People are unwilling to share their resources and even their time with those less fortunate. I found this essay humbling, there is so much that our country has taken for granted and yet we do not often reach out to those in need in our own country, let alone throughout the world. Now, I'm not speaking about everyone, there are people who are very generous in America, and I commend those people. But as a whole, our country is pretty selfish. But it does comfort me the our country was not always like this. Maybe we should study this era of history more often. Maybe then we could turn this country around...

The Harvest Gypsies

The Western American culture is a frontier of American culture that is still left in the dark for me. Steinbeck's essay shed some light on the subject. The idea of the government camps was one that was very interesting. I have the (limited) view that government welfare programs are basically just handouts and that the recipients don't have any responsibility to work for it. This concept of a self governing sort of camp was very interesting. Especially since it did so much more than restore their finical situation it restored their sense of dignity. Which was the one thing that seemed to destroy them the most. I felt like the ever valued American spirit was revived in those camps. However I must pose the question, would those camps thrive today? Is hard work still up held by the American spirit? Are people willing to work for the betterment of the whole and for the dignity of the whole rather than for the individual?

Also something I want to mention was that I really liked Steinbeck's writing style. It helped me to connect the dots with some of the TSIS concepts.

It's not all bad

Young makes a good point that everyone who doesn't win is a loser, no matter the competition. After all, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there can only be one winner. Our society raises us to independent, and above all else, successful. No wonder we have such a negative view of ourselves if we don't win. However, what if, for just a moment, most of us weren't losers? What if Steinbeck's harvest gypsies weren't losers? Young points out that in his time, there was Bill Gates and 260 million losers. The superlative here is obviously the richest American. However, if there is a richest, there is a poorest. As sorry the shape Steinbeck's farmers’ was, there was always someone in worse condition than they. It could be the impoverished farmer still stuck in the dustbowl. It could be the farmer's son who had mere days to live. Either way, there was always someone to point at and go, "At least I'm not that guy." How awesome a feeling is that? Provided, you’ve faced your status as a loser at this point, but the duality is beautiful. I’m not the best writer in the world, but I can sure write better than a 3rd grader at my old elementary school. From that perspective, I’m a winner. The only difference between me and Bill Gates is he’s got more people to look down on. In fact, he lost the contest to be America's poorest! Bill Gates - what a loser. Not like those harvest gypsies, having reason to rejoice in their encampments and servitude. They knew they had escaped the poverty still suffered by others. They toiled with the security of a place to live. They had become winners.

What a loser is

While Young makes the point that losing is something that must take place in any competition, I think his best conclusion is that most of the time winning is not based on being good but by beating someone else. From an early age you always hear the saying Never give up. It is a good thing to do, but I think not giving up is what makes someone a winner. They may not be beating someone else, but they are beating their personal best. That is how you can seperate an athlete from a sports player. An athlete loves the game, but a sports player just plays. I think that the reason Young takes such a positive stance on losers is that he really has never loved playing a competitive sport. His practice of zen meditation and loving the butthole surfers should be a clear indication of this. He does hit on something interesting when he says that up to 90 percent of children drop out of organized competitive sports by the age of 15. I think that a small percent of that is due to his point that kids do not want to be stigmatized as a 'loser', but i think a larger part is due to the fact that around the age of 15, most kids can finally grasp the concept that they really are not good at what they are doing. That may be harsh but it still doesnt classify them as a loser until they quit.

Harvest Gypsies

So I have to say that the second and third articles seemed to focuse more on the everyday knowledge that we all have. The first story, however, is one we've heard before too but I guess it's more of even though we're always told places like the squatters' camps exist, there's still that part of me that never fully understands how bad it is until reading something like this. Honestly, (since I don't like reading the intro blogs first) the first few sentences made me think of a war bunker or fictional story. The family stories that it presented were horrible, all I could think of is "why does no body help them? what would I do if something like this happened to my family?" I'm glad the government started to help but you can't help wish there was still better.

Our Essays

Hey everybody, I'm 70% sure I won't be coming to class today (I think I caught a stomach bug, I heard something was going around), so I wanted to discuss my essays with the class and I figure this is probably the best way to do so.

My first essay, after reading it a few days after writing it, is wordy and goes into likely unnecessary details about the works I picked to write about. It does come to some points, but it's not perfect. Cutting just above 2 pages, the paragraphs are long and unorganized. I am proud of myself for using quotes, though, because that is something I have trouble doing in my writing. Although unorganized, I did find it difficult to make my writing more brief. I tend to ramble and feel as though every point should be explained and stressed in its own way. Hopefully with this class and "TSIS" I'll be able to make my said points more narrow and less wordy, per se.

For my second essay, I took my first essay and edited it using "TSIS" templates as instructed. It did get shorter, and I feel as though it comes to better points that I wanted to stress. I deleted anything I felt that did not belong, and ultimately I think it strengthened my paper. Revising is a smart move for essay-writers because you never know when you might come across something that sounds awkward or even unnecessary, or confusing to the audience. I would totally recommend "TSIS" to any college student in a writing class or who finds themselves writing anything period, especially if it argues a point.

I hope everybody did well on their essays! Mahoney - I emailed you both of mine if you would like to take a look at them. See you guys Thursday hopefully.

Confusion over 10/9 Assignment

OK...several of you have emailed me a bit confused over the assignment for 10/9. I think I understand the confusion when looking at the syllabus. The missing piece, I hope, I what we would have discussed in class on Thursday.

Here's what it says on the syllabus for 10/9:

"Assignment: TSIS, pp. 101-122. Complete Exercise #1 on p. 113 and Exercise #1 on p. 122.

Assignment: Write a two (2) page, pointed "They Say/I Say" brief that demonstrates the "conversation model" of academic discourse and indicates your position on some of the issues raised in the readings. Utilize some of the templates presented in TSIS."

It's true, this looks suspiciously like the assignment for 10/4. There is a reason for that. What I wanted you to bring in on Thursday was a 2-3 page initial response, summarizing some issues you pulled out of the readings. The assignment for Tuesday,10/9 is to "formalize" this a little more by "trying on" some of the templates in TSIS.

The whole idea of a "pointed brief" is that you will be unable to flesh out the arguments extensively (you only have 2-3 pages)...so you have to write "pointedly" in a "brief" format. For example, a legal brief does not lay out ALL of the arguments. It provides a sketch of the key points and supporting precedents. That's the metaphor I was using on the syllabus.

So, on Tuesday you should have two papers--an intial 2-3 page draft, and a second, 2-3 page "pointed brief" using some of the templates from TSIS.

I hope that helps.

Kevin

Earning the Grade

I am a lazy procrastinator. It's true. I never do anything on time. This is the perfect example its 10: 30 and i'm doing an assignment for a class at 12:00. Although I hate to admit it, I will.
Just yesterday one of my professors exclaimed how even she was a procrastinator and that she had only ever met one person in her life who wasnt. When you look at things such as grades and the amount of success someone has obatained you would n ever think of them as being procrastinators, but as people who prepare for the future. Why, then do we have so many successful procrastinators? My answer comes from the text about Harvard. I believe that we are lowering our standards and letting people slide through just because they "need" to. Although it is unfair to say that no one works for anything anymore, I believe that many of us dont.

This is a big problem. Many people are doing only what they have to in order to succeed and "make money". I believe that when your not working hard for what you get then you really dont deserve it. My senior year at highschool the grading scale was changed. An "A" was no longer anything between a 90-100, but was now between a 94-100. therefore in order to keep up my grade point average. I found that working for and recieving the 94 was a lot more rewarding than working for and recieving the 90. In my opinion the professor from Harvard is right. It is important that the grades we earn are the grades we trully deserve.

Education at last?

So what is the final set of factors to determine a succeed in education quality?

(I know that I would not post a blog this way, but it actually composes all my doubts at the moment. More explanation and discussion in class will help me clarify it out, I hope so.)

"Education is..."

"Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get." This quote by William Love Bryan really caught my attention. I thought it was an interesting statement and once I thought about it I saw how it was true. College is not cheap, in fact it is the most expensive form of education. Still, many college students do not take full advantage of it. It seems that many college students pay that high price just to sleep through class and show up only to do mediocre on tests. I think its a shame that students are willing to pay such a high price to come and learn and not take full advantage of all the opportunities given to them. Would you buy a sandwich and not eat it? Probably not. So why pay for an education, but not show up to learn? It is sad that this quote is true, but you see it happening everyday and I do not see it changing anytime soon.

As I read Douthat's essay on Harvard....

I found myself wondering why I retained little shocka nd wonder at the treatement of Humanties studies at Harvard University. The lack therein of genral liberal art edication leaves for a steady one-track intellect for a student, constrained by a economic, business curriculum. I personally find that with such an emphasis, Harvard's conservative majority to seems normal. There is a line I find most interesting; "All this is merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results." At my high school, arts and my gifted class, which acted as a generalized liberal arts course, were put down by taxpayers and some administrative members, even going to such extremes as stating a false price on a gas kiln my art department recieved several years back, in a local newspaper. My art teacher, furious at the libel committed, gave a half hour long speech to my art class. In it he said that all schools want to push in math and science, among other ramblings. This point sunk deep with me. Why do we need peolpe good at math: calculations for sciences and numbercrunching? The biggest way numbercrunching comes into play into the job market is statistics and accounting. Money and Ratios. ratios give us information on people and who needs what, and how many out of ten will have terrible allergies during the spring or lack a proper hair care product. Then with science, you have numerous fileds, from chemicals to technonologic developements, physicists travel to weapons. At this point I, too, am rambling but all in all, arts fall short because they don't do anything to help Joe Businesspants make a buck and invest it well. Questioning one's rolein the universe and posessing a thrist for knowledge and how one can gain it, can only be of any good to a conservattive Harvard professors if it stimulates the economy, hopefully in the form of a self-help motivation book from Simon &Schuster publishing.

Beautiful thread stuck to a dull tip

While I can agree with Dacia Charlesworth's general theme of contributing to a society of learned citizens, I have to say I do not like the techniques she uses to make her point. She poses a question to her audience, asking whether they will be voters or non-voters, volunteers or non-volunteers. She quotes statistics to dehumanize the members of her audience, assuming that peoples' merits and potential can be stripped down to numbers. The students' options are a simple "yes" or "no", good or bad, right or wrong. Never mind that 50,999,897 of the 106 million voters chose Gore, that 50,456,002 selected Bush, or the fact that almost 1,000,000 people voted "none of the above." 106 million people voted and the rest were bad people. What of the 100 million who chose to not vote? How many of them knew the superficial issues, crappy candidates, in addition to the futility of voting for a third-party individual who reflected their personal views? Charlesworth ultimately fails to accomplish her goal of empowering students when she starts with belittling their individuality.
Her discussion of the importance of a liberal arts education and the evolution of education is somewhat effective. It demonstrates her personal of the subject matter, thus qualifying her to speak about it. However, she doesn’t elaborate on her link between education and civil rights. She attempts to appeal to emotions by conjuring images of escorted students, but then quickly moves on to her personal frustration.
Personally, I wanted to strangle somebody throughout the last third of this piece. The length of the statements associated with her acronym destroys any possibility of remembering the whole message. On top of that, she manages to quote a principle figure in history for each of the four tenets. Here, I can only think she’s trying to use their words as endorsement for her own. Again, she makes an emotional appeal with Anna Howard Shaw with little explanation. She throws in a biblical quote (it seems just because she could). Finally, she throws in the opening factoids to bring every full (however misshapen) circle.
Dr. Charlesworth status as an expert on communications puzzles me, given her inability to relay her ideas in a coherent, relevant fashion. As a reader who sees her point, it’s frustrating to see it made in such a poor way.

Which NUMBER? I don't think so.

I'd like to respond to the first passage I read for Oct. 2nd's assignment: Dacia Charlesworth's Which Number Will You Be? First, I'm not a number, nor will I ever become a number. Second, she definitely twisted around an Einstein quote and made it her own; he wasn't talking about "breaking illusions" about beliefs, he was talking about physics in a literal sense. At least, that's how I interpret it. How does she know that he was leaning towards an insight about educational beliefs? I'll tell you how; she doesn't!

As for the theme of the passage, I would like to say that I do agree with her speech about a decline in positive interest in higher education. The idea that you can make more money doing something you like by going to school for a few years is one of the most appealing ideas for any teenager graduating high school. I'd say I was one of them, but elementary school teachers don't make an extraordinary amount of salary. Anyway, naive (I apologize, I can't do the crazy double-dotted i) college students need to realize that they're going to these classes for the real thing. It's not just "get a good grade and get out" deal; this is what's setting you up for your life and your career. I think it would be best if college students applied that sort of attitude to their studies, as Charlesworth said in the passage as well. I do not agree on placing all the blame on teachers, however, because I have come across teachers who preach this belief. The students should realize that there is no "real world", there is only the world you see before you, and every bit of it makes it "real", even television in ways (hey, it's there, so it's real).

The Economics of Education

All the economic and numeric references strikes a chord with me during this week's readings. The ones that I wish to highlight are: Charlesworth's " student-as-consumer", Leonhardt's "socioecomonic theme", as well as Douthat's views on student's"GPA".
I agree with Charlesworth and her views on how students have shifted from a civic minded education to a consumer mentality. The"consumer" mentality lends itself to all aspects of American culture and to most of her citizens. One of the nation's (if not the world's) most powerful cities is New York City,which from conception has been all about commerce. The settlers bought Manhattan Island for a meager 22 dollars (or so the lengend has it). NYC is one of the few great cities to have no religious or war-related origins. Its simply all about the economics. The reason I bring this up to show that Americans have this consumer mentality embedded into our fiber because we have a commerce based society. We have a strong tendency to distill everything into a game of give and take. College is the norm now a days because it will give us job opportunities and we will take from it the GPA that we need in order to fulfill those said job opportunities.
However things aren't so black and white when you factor in Leonhardt's theme of how socioeconomics play a role in the equation. Socioeconomics turns everything into shades of gray. There are significant contingencies of wether or not one will have a successful collegiate experience based on their economic status. The static that Leonhardt shared that "only 41% of low-income students ...[of] four year colleges manage to graduate within five years...[while] 66% of high-income students did" so in the same amount of time was startling. It concerns me that there is such a discrepancy. Especially when you consider that the factors aren't always GPA related, which is now the leading guidepost for job placement. To which Douthtat indicates by saying, "What you do, in turn hinges in no small part on what is on your resume, including your GPA." Now if the students who are in college were legitimately earning their GPA's 100% of the time we would have a different story with different "citizens" and a different system of education, but since that is not the case we have the tale of grade inflation. Thus far I have no experience with grade inflation at college, but I have a catalogue of such experiences from high school, both personal and observational. This reality of grade inflation lowers the integrity of the educational system yet helps the students obtain a higher position in world. And since I believe one's knowledge base is an ever present shadow I would argue that grade inflation lowers the integrity of the student as well and may even bring damage to the way they are able to position themselves within the world.
I have no clear solutions to offer. Only a belief that if students return to the mentally that their education is apart of a bigger picture which encompasses their country and also the world at large, then Education may find itself on the road towards salvation.

The Truth About Harvard

Douthat made the point that higher grades are being given out more freely in today's universities not because students are becoming more intelligent, but because professors are feeling pressure from students, colleagues, and themselves. They are beginning to realize that grades are much more than numbers or letters in today's world. They are increasingly becoming the keys to better jobs, getting into law school, and any other aspect of a student's careerism. If you asked a group of students if they would rather have a C on a paper rather than a B, I am quite certain that the general consensus would be no. I do not believe that Douthat was complaining when he got an A on his 10 page paper about two artifacts from the great frontier era either. However, is this the correct way to go about things? By in fact giving out higher grades in an attempt to assure their students good jobs, are professors actually selling their students short? To be quite honest I would rather be given the truth about my knowledge on a certain subject. If my paper on World War II is horrible then I need to become more knowledgable on the subject. There is nothing more harmful to a student who will shortly be going into the real world than leading them to believe they know more than they really do.

Which Number Will You Be?

I have to say that I agree with Dacia Charlesworth. Her students response to "Why are you in college?" is completely true. Almost everyone agrees that one goes to college so they can get a good job and make money. College is becoming the norm. Rather than deciding whether or not to go to college, the decision becomes where to go to college. I also completely agree with her statement, "Contemporary US culture, being as individualistic as it is, does not easily lend itself to vita activa." In our society today, most people put their individual needs ahead of their country, other citizens, family and friends. Today, most people follow the opposite order that they did in the Renaissance. Now, people tend to put their needs first, followed by family and friends, and ending with others and the country. I feel that today, people get an education for their own benefits and not to become good citizens. Everything that we do today, is in competition with others. Take for example getting into college or a job promotion. Charlesworth also claimed that her way to link education and citizenry is through the mnemonic device NSCS. I believe that each of these steps/advice is important to getting a meaningful and fulfilling education while becoming a number that makes a difference in society.