Post #12

Child's Play

It is mind-numbing to believe the widespread negative ramifications caused by a simple legislative act. The public school system in the United States(US) has been reeling since 2001, when President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act(NCLB) into effect. I believe the act to be counterproductive because a premium has been placed on standardized testing, upon which the results determine a school's budget. NCLB has reeked havoc on teachers' curriculum by monopolizing the priority list and jeopardizing time slots normally devoted to lesser activities, such as physical education. These types of time budget manipulations are all but forced  compensations in order to adequately prepare for test taking. Most importantly NCLB has exposed the American public, and its symbiotic public school system! Why exactly are students unprepared for standardized tests? From my experience, the cycle begins with the students and the parents, not the teachers, nor the standardized tests. Unfortunately too many Americans live in a bubble. In 2010, the United States ranked 48th out 133 developed nations in math and science standardized testing. Unfortunately, the situation will have to get much worse in order for it to improve. Multiple social factors actively contribute to the continual renewing of this disingenuous and distorted reality. Fixing the situation will not be as easy as child's play!

Post #11

 Election Results

The presidential election that took place on Tuesday, November 6, 2012 was a landslide. President Obama won seven out of eight swing states, those being: FL, OH, VA, CO, NV, IA, NH and amassed a total of 332 electoral college votes to his opponent's 206 votes. He also won the popular vote by more than 3 million votes. One particular statistician, Nate Silver , a neutral and well respected analyst, made an early prediction based on polling, and was practically 100% accurate. Also, TYT host and founder Cenk Uygur, made a prediction in September 2012 that practically mirrored the election outcome. To me, the most entertaining part of the election is not that President Obama was re-elected, for which I am thankful and commend him for, but the continual internal bickering and seemingly eternal finger pointing of the Grand Old Party (GOP). Bill O'Reilly and Dick Morris of the Fox News Channel say that conservatives have lost the country.Carl Rove, the Grand Poobah the GOP, and perhaps the person suffering most from bubble vision ,was the most distraught over the election results.The GOP is spiraling out of control, and are out of touch on issues most important to their constituents. I sincerely hope they remain entrenched in their bubble, and continue to adhere to 19th century conservatism.

Free Play

Unfortunately, many people think of play as a luxury, not a necessity, so it often falls to the bottom. Schools make do with outdated equipment or none at all. The thinking is that kids are resilient, so they'll be fine in the end. This raises some key questions: Is play really necessary? And if so, what purpose does it serve for kids?

-Darell Hammond

Paper Prompt:

 In the end, are we actually fine? With the obesity epidemic ballooning out of control, is it fair to extrapolate the assertion that it all comes out in the wash? For this research paper, you are charged with the task of analyzing the child obesity epidemic. What influential role does play, or a lack thereof, have on the increasing of waist sizes of youth in the U.S.A. Analyze the causation of obesity, and the direction it is headed towards.Create an argument based on your posturing towards the relationship between play and obesity.  

 

Up, Up & Away

                                                                                                                                   

Recess at l' École Saint-Rémi was always a much anticipated event. The school yard was expansive in landscape, and contained a wide variety of activities: a baseball diamond, tractor tires, dodge ball courts, basketball courts, champ courts, butts-up courts, a soccer field, a sand box, industrial sized swings and slides, a wooden bridge, and an a man made hill. The crème de la crème was a white box containing hockey sticks, that was rolled out at lunch time! My most found memory however, occurred on the kindergarten playground, a section quarantined by row of skinny trees. I suppose my older friends Matthieu and Karen regarded me as cannon fodder, because one day, while at after school day care, they had the wise idea of bending one of the trees backwards, mounting me and then launching! That was the idea, thankfully it didn't quite go as planned! I got snagged on the trunk, and was effectively dropped to the ground. The only serious damage was to the backside of my shorts...and underwear, that were almost completely torn off! A lot was learned that day, most importantly; just because someone is older than you, does not make them right! 

Oops, had the silly thing in reverse!

Blog #8

   The McCroak Special                                                    

Where does personal responsibility stop and corporate responsibility begin? Should an individual have the ability to sue a restaurant chain for the decline of  personal health based on the consumption of their product? These are some of the central points of contention Morgan Spurlock tackles in Supersize Me. With a quasi scientific method approach,this documentary sheds light on the negative side effects of ingesting a diet of fast food over a period of 30 days. Spurlock's hyper fast food diet included eating his three principle daily meal at McDonald's. The end result was dramatic, and the documentary convincingly proved that "you are what you eat". The philosophical question is: what is the role of the government? How involved should the government be in implementing regulations and brokering leverage to enforce them? Another important question is who's interest does the government protect above all else? In my opinion,better health regulations would benefit society. According to current obesity statistics, the situation is spiraling out of control. The government's responsibility is to protect it's citizens, and given the current acceleration of the obesity epidemic, not enough has been done. It is not my responsibility to lecture every overweight individual! Personal responsibility is irrelevant because the problem is too forgone! When I get a speeding ticket, law enforcement issues it, not a random civilian. Paradoxically, I do not find that fast food restaurants are the source of the problem, they are only emblematic. Their behavior is not more predatory than their competition.  The FDA has had a super sized failure. More smart government please!

Crisis aborted?

                                                          Meltdown

 Part 1 of four FRONTLINE documentary exposés chronologically unveils the causes and effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. A litany of finite research consistently points to the coagulation of negligence and deregulatory actions of government, culminated by greed and corruption on Wall Street, nearly spelling a depression. The origin of the world wide credit boom in the 1990's is examined by defining what credit derivatives and synthetic collateralized debt obligations are. Members of the JP Morgan Bank team responsible for inventing the first credit default swap in 1994 are interviewed. Gillian Tett, the first journalist to uncover this scheme explains “they began to look for ways to enable financial institutions to pass risk between them[…]another way though, was to separate out the risk of a loan going bad from the loan itself, and out that came this drive to develop credit default swaps". This documentary sheds light of the attempts and vocalizations of regulators and select government employees prophetically warning the public of the possible calamity if no regulations are implemented. In a linear steadfast, the ire then focuses on Alan Greenspan, then chairmen of the Federal Reserve, advising President Clinton to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. This directly lead to the inception of mortgage credit risk and predatory mortgages; causing the housing bubble. In 2008 the bubble burst and as Roy Barnes, the former (D.)Governor of Georgia proclaims "The greed of Wall Street broke Main Street."

Onward and Upward

                                                         To Infinity And Beyond

Is Google making us stupid? To me, this is equivalent to asking whether dictionaries make us stupid! The answer is a resounding no. What Nicholas Carr, an Atlantic Magazine journalist attempts to convey in his long winded article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What The Internet Is Doing To OurBrains” the notion that the internet is causing irreversible change to a person’s attention span, and ability to focus. Consequently, deep, comprehensive reading is yielding to the quicker skimming approach, similar to that of an internet browser. Accordingly, the internet is the culprit, just the same as the first clock, the first written transcriptions of ancient Greek philosophy, and the typewriter. Whether you realize it or not, computers already have an invaluable footprint on you daily life. All road vehicles are managed by a power control module (PCM). Traffic lights are controlled with an automated system. The magnetic strip and microchip on your credit card enable them to be accessed by computers. All cell phones are computers. Life as we know it has been irreversibly changed by computers. A person’s bad habits, developed by surfing the net, that perhaps have unintentionally permeated into other psychological realms, are not a justifiable reason to step backwards on the progression of computers or any technologies.