No more homework: graphic organizer

1: What is the authors purpose?
    Expository/informative

2:what is the author's main idea within this article?
To inform us how Maryland school is taking away homework and is replacing it with reading for 30 minutes.

3: Provide evidence to support his/her main idea.
The title and the first sentence

4: With what ideas do you agree?
Mostly just reading more.

5: With what ideas do you disagree?
The no homework- The kids will not be ready for high school or college.

6: what connections can you make with the text?
world

7:how can i become more participant in my learning? How can i take responsibility for my learning?
Pay attention more and not get syracted

technology!

 The article is deffinently informative.. now i agree with more technology to some extent. For me i still think its better to take your own notes then to text them with a phone or something... I think it is alot to go back and make changes when need to be then backspacing alot.. just my opinion though. Also what if they lose power in the middle of taking notes? The tutor is a really really good idea.. but i dont really know about the rest. Who knows maybe i will use it somewhere down the line.. but for now i will stick with a pencil/pen and paper. old fashioned but oh well.

books I want to read before i kick the bucket

1: matched - ally condie
2: crossed - ally condie
3: A thousand splendid suns - khaled hosseini
4: the book thief - markus zusak
5: the hunger games (all)
6: all the harry potter books - j.k rowling
7: the list -
8: delerium,pandemonium,requiem - Lauren Oliver
9: leaving paradise - Simone elkeles
10: return to paradise - Simone elkeles

Time Goes By Fast: JR/SR

Here we are the last week of school but it doesnt seem like it should be here already! Time has went by so fast it's unbelievable, next thing we know it will be next year and we are graduating!


My junior year was so much fun, I feel like this year i have talked to more people and have gotten over being really shy. I have also learned who my real friends are, which is a big thing. Prom was a lot of fun. Being a junior and dealing with teachers who give you a lot of work and excpect a lot of you was stressful but it taught me a lot of things like managing my time and to be more organized and to also pay more attention in class ecspecially in algebra 2, and english.


I am hoping that my senior year will be fun and I just want to make the best out of it, because it may be the last time we ever see our classmates again.. thats kinda sad. I have taken a lot of important and hard classes so I know I will be studying alot. but I think next year will be a lot of fun!(:

CLASS OF 2013

Knock out Discrimination

You need a job, you go to the local grocery store to apply... but when you get there the manager says “I’m sorry we are not hiring right now, but the next day they hire someone on the spot but of a different ethnicity. What do you do? You ignore it and move on, but it doesn’t always have to be like that.

            In this essay I will be telling you three ways you can survive discrimination starting with the first way. Ignoring discrimination is the first thing most people do. When you are faced in a situation where you are lost on what to do you normally ignore it at  first right? If leaving the situation does not help you can also tell them to go away, that you are not bothering them. Although you can walk away, unfortunately that does not always work. This means there are more things you can do. Let them talk; just let them say whatever they have to say. As long as you do not respond they will most likely get tired of talking and just stop. Leigh Keller Spanish teacher at BHS says as long as the one who is being discriminated against and the discriminator both speak their minds everything should go pretty smooth, hopefully. Walking away and letting them talk may sound hard to do but it can be pretty easy. Do not worry there are more you can do and I will explain to you what they are.

            To respond against discrimination can be scary and difficult to do but anyone can do it as long as you do it the right way. You have to be careful when you respond to make sure you do not start a physical fight. You can always start by telling the discriminator how it is wrong. Always try to stay calm, staying calm is good  because when you’re dealing with someone who probably doesn’t like differences it is easy to make an argument if the discriminator does not like what you are saying. So be sure to make no kind of argument, if the discriminator still does not understand you can do the switch effect on them. The switch effect works by basically switching the roles. Show your discriminator how it feels. Ask him how he would like to be called names or to not be accepted because of his race. This can either go one of two ways. 1: he can realize that what he is doing is wrong and stop and if they do understand, be sure to ask how they would feel, deeper thinking can change a lot.  2: the discriminator witll get more mad and just keep arguing. Jennifer a student from California says that it is morally wrong to judge someone by their skin color and that you should judge them on their personality only.  In the “Call of the Wild” buck and the other dogs were kind of discriminated against because some of their owners just treated them like nothing they did not care how they felt or if they were getting the right treatment and they did not care that they had feelings as well at them.

            If none of these survivor skills seem to work you can always involve people.  Involving people is the best thing you can do. After you have tried to do it by yourself the only thing you have to do is get help. You can get your friends to help. That way they can help explain everything that has happened and to report it to someone you know and trust. You can also tell your parent to help support your situation. All the people you can get will help in this situation.

            Some might say they are not discriminating just “saying what is right.” For example in Arizona teachers are getting fired if they cannot speak English fluently or even if they do not pronounce certain words right. Ali Bradley/Nimitz from Irving Tx says The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination against anyone in the workplace in regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It is not discrimination to ask a teacher to improve his/her pronunciation skills or grammar; the motivation to speak English well should come with the job. Teachers are expected to teach and sometimes heavy accents or a deficiency in grammar can get in the way. Also, teachers are role models children and teenagers are exposed to every day. The correct use of the English language is already bad enough in today's society (I hear it every day from students and teachers)— if a teacher often makes grammar mistakes in front of a full class, it is likely that some bad habits will wear off. This law says nothing about firing teachers for this problem, but only to “monitor” it, and there is nothing wrong or unlawful about that.

            I don’t agree with that, students are going to be around people all the time with different accents all the time if anything it is making them listen more and be able to understand someone who does not speak exactly like them. Even if one does learn a language fluently they are still going to have an accent it is who they are. Even people from Arkansas speak differently from people who are from New York but does that mean that they do not speak English fluently…?

So judge someone not on the way they talk or where they come from or their ethnicity but who they are on the inside their personality, their ambition in life how far they want to make it in life. Because if you judge someone on how they look you might as judge yourself for all of your flaws. If you think about it when you are older and you have a career you might be working next to someone who is a different ethnicity of you, we live in a generation where it should not matter on what your ethnicity is or where you came from but where you are going. Who knows maybe your boss might be of a different ethnicity of you. So you might want to think on getting used to things that are different cause after all, nobody is the same.

The Call of the Wild: Book Review

Jack Londons "The Call of the Wild" is about a dog named buck who gets takin away from his comfortable yet boring home and sold to a man in gold mining. Buck is constantly put to the test of his mental,physical and emotional strengh. Buck succeeds in all he is put to because he has that ambition of always being at the top.

To be veracious when I first started reading "The Call of the Wild" it did not catch my attention because I do not like books about dogs.. or animals but later on in the book when jack started using Anthropomorphism the book started getting interesting. I also like the way that jack showed the dogs will to survive all the sacrifices and arduous tasks that the dogs went through to survive, was just  incredible. "The Call of the Wild" will probably be the only book about dogs that I will read and actually enjoy. When Jack started to talk about the love between john and buck and the ministrations they gave and recieved it warmed my heart cause buck had went through so much and had been beseted on many times but still abtained pertinacity.

I suggets this book to people who like reading about the wilderness or animals.

Frankenstein vs Robert Walton

Robert Walton and Frankenstein both came from very similar high society and well educated backgrounds. In a way they are both explorers. Robert, who is a failed writer sets out to the North pole in hopes by expanding his scientific knowledge that he will soon find fame. Robert is very responsible for his crew and takes good care of them. When Robert Walton's ship gets trapped in ice there is where they come across Frankenstein almost frozen to death and where they began to hear the story.

Frankenstein is also an "explorer." Frankenstein lived in a very wealthy home/surrounding when he came introduced to science when he seen how lightening knocked  down a tree.. from there Frankenstein went to a college and when he found out that he could shock a dogs heart and bring him back to life he wanted to try it on a human. He did, and that is when he made the "monster" but he was not responsible for the monster like Robert Walton was responsible for his crew. Frankenstein did not teach the monster the correct way to live.. I believe that since the monster was made from a hateful and selfish man he to became hateful.