Reflective Essay

For this course I need to write a final “Reflective Essay” and post it on this blog. A part of me wants to rebel against the notion. A part of me always wants to rebel, but this time the urge is stronger. Perhaps it is the lazy bone in me, but I’ve always been against the “he has to do it, so do you” mentality. Please, allow me to explain. 

In my English 328 class, the “Language, Literature and Writing for Teachers” majors need to write an extended reflective essay for the course for their teaching accreditation and, because there are so many of those students in the class, I have to write it as well. I think my need to dissent may stem from my time in the military where we lived or died as a team. In basic training, if someone in my platoon was goofing off we all had to do push-ups. It made sense, really. In Iraq, if one person was fooling around we might have all been “punished” with an IED or bullet. However, in a classroom environment, I have a hard time accepting that rationale. 

Fortunately for my grade in ENG 328, we also learned another important lesson in the Army: quit bitching and just do it. You see, in the time I’ve been complaining about having to do the essay I could have already completed it, or at least powered through half of it. So, without further ado, here is my reflective essay:

Often writing an essay may seem like a chore while other times a writer cannot wait to begin the process. The essays written in the course “Writing, Style, and Technology” are prime examples of this as they ran the gamut. While I have always loved writing, as did the majority of the students in the course, the writing I did for Cheryl Cassidy seemed to change with each passing week. My style had to be adaptable to a wide range of audiences and I needed to write for varying specific purposes.

An example can be drawn in comparing my writing from the “Analyzing a Text” assignment to the aptly named “YouTube Project.” At first glance, the assignments seemed similar. In both we were required to determine the intended audience and purpose of the pieces we chose as well as note any stylistic and rhetorical devices we read, saw, or heard. Where the assignments differed, aside from the sources, was the delivery of our analyses.

In the “Analyzing a Text” assignment I chose to examine a recent article in GQ Magazine examining the rise of radical right wing conservatism. The four page essay looked specifically at how the writer of the article tried to convince his audience in subtle ways to see his point of view. I pointed out the imagery the writer used as well as the arguments he made for his cause. The analytical essay was intended to show examples of literary forms found within the article and how effective they were. While the essay I wrote had its dry moments, it certainly was informative for my intended audience: my professor.

The “YouTube Project” had a different goal: I needed to keep my audience’s attention for up to ten minutes with a verbal and visual presentation. The intended audience for this project was my fellow classmates, not solely the professor. While there needed to be an accompanying three page essay to present my thesis and analysis, I needed to deliver that analysis to a classroom with the help of a partner. For the presentation, I could not just write a three page paper and recite it to the class. Instead, we chose to show a YouTube clip in its entirety, approximately 90 seconds, and then discuss the oppositional framework we noticed occurring throughout the video. We noted the choice for music, the imagery used, and the lines spoken.

In preparing for both assignments, an outline was instrumental. For the first assignment it was used as a framework to support an entire essay, but in the YouTube assignment I relied almost solely on my outline while in front of my peers. While the outline used in analyzing a text could be sparse, as I would fill in the gaps in my essay, the outline I used for the presentation had to be “fleshed out,” so to speak. If the outline had been as meager as some of my other outlines I am afraid I would have missed key points in my presentation.

With these two assignments, as well as others in the course, I learned two primary lessons: know your audience and write for that audience. It is easier to write what I want to write but more difficult to write what others want me to write. The point that writers need to write for others, not themselves, was brought up time and time again throughout the course. It is a message well heeded as my other writings in other classes are no longer approached in a manner I would find appealing but in a way my audience (usually a professor) will find pleasing.

 

Too young for YouTube?

Recently, the use of young children on sites like YouTube has raised concerns of appropriateness. It seems that where parents used to post videos of their children merely for family members on YouTube, now parents are exploiting their children for instant internet fame.
 While television programs like "Kids Say the Darndest Things" and "America's Funniest Home Videos" have been a part of the American entertainment culture for decades, it is only recently that parents have had direct access to making their children international stars.

Even if the threat of online predatory pedophilia could be ignored (it can't), what happens when these kids reach puberty? Or High School?

Did anybody else have a mother that showed pictures of them in the bathtub to their high school girlfriend? I did, and it was embarrassing. However, it helped me learn what girls to bring home to mom and which ones would not be able to handle her. Mostly, I learned not to bring any girls home to mom when she had access to family photo albums.

But what if any student at my high school had direct access to family videos of me as a kid? How could I ever quash that? I wouldn't be able to, and fortunately my parents never posted flyers of me in the tub around my school.

Parents that share too much of their child's life online are endangering themselves as well. Just ask the balloon boy's parents. The threat becomes parents exploiting their children for their own fame, and then having it blow up in their face.

Or worse, it could create a need within the child to forever feel the love they gained while on YouTube. Maybe we shouldn't be concerned though. I mean, surely these kids are growing up in well-adjusted environments, right? Right?

Idiots or Geniuses?

You should really watch this video.



Seriously, it's the moment you’ve been waiting for... if you're a misanthropic man-child that can't move past the late 90's. The Insane Clown Posse just came out with a new song.

It’s called “Miracles,” and it isn’t just any old cut of the mill rappers with makeup music video; it’s something special. This is an opportunity for the ICP to celebrate all of the mysteries of the universe, like magnets.

You can tell these guys have not had the opportunity to attend so much as a community college with lyrics like these:

Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed

Violent J: Yo, ninja, how dese here magnit's work, yo?

Shaggy 2 Dope: It's easy, yo! It's turtles all da way down!

Violent J: Fo realz?

How does anybody correct that? How could anybody explain to these guys that their "miracles" are not simply lies from men of science. These guys can't be serious, can they? Well, an article on State by Jonah Weiner suggests that ICP may be pulling our leg here. He, and other bloggers, note that the video reeks of Saturday Night Live's Digital Shorts. That is, it's so off-the-wall funny that it may be a satirical look at public education.

I don't know if what ICP accomplished was intentional or not, and part of me hopes not, but I do know one thing: the video has raised awareness of the band and is helping to prevent them from slipping into obscurity. They're even the butt of a meme!

Its possible that the majority of children attending Detroit Public Schools, where members of ICP went, do think that rainbows, waterfalls, pyramids, and pelicans are all magical miracles, but not likely. More likely is that ICP listed a multitude of "miracles" in the same way Alanis Morissette listed ironies in 1996. That is, intentional or not, they can both always claim they knew what they were doing. The joke is on us, the public.

Until then, behold the magic!

Ever Feel Like Someone Was Watching You??

In the battle for proper uses of technology, it seems a certain school district has crossed the line recently. The Lower Merion School District, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has allegedly been spying on its students in their own homes via the student’s webcams. The school district provided their students with free Macbooks and, when the insurance was not paid by the parents, they activated the theft-tracking system secretly lodged in student’s computers. According to lawyers, the school system allegedly had thousands of pictures of hundreds of students. This all begs the question: what the hell was the Lower Merion School District thinking?

The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district.

Back at district offices, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into “a little LMSD soap opera,” a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. “I know, I love it,” she is quoted as having replied.

Except that these computers were not stolen. The school district says it turned on the cameras in these kid’s computers because their families had not paid the $55 insurance fee and the kids were not authorized to take the laptops home.

Well, then why weren't there phone calls to the kids parents saying “we need the laptops back until you can pay for the insurance?”

If this software was solely to track missing computers, once they knew where it was, why keep taking pictures? And those two quotes above make it plain that 'tracking stolen laptops' may have been the excuse, but it's bullshit: they enjoyed peeking in on these kids and kept doing it.

Regardless, it only goes to show that this situation is rapidly unraveling for school district officials. While many parents of students at in the Lower Merion school district are surprisingly supportive of the administration and have urged the Robbins family to drop the lawsuit, I cannot help but wonder if their opinions will change once some are shown photos of their own children in various stages of life–and undress, for that matter–in their own bedrooms within their own homes.

Thousands of images. Multiple students. School district officials gossiping about the access as though it were their own twisted version of “All My Children.” It’s shaping up to be a very interesting summer for the folks in Lower Merion.