Category: Passion

So with the corona virus outbreak, everyone is practicing self-quarantining. That includes all people:poor, middle class, and even the rich.

If you have any common sense whatsoever, you know that the group that the coronavirus is affecting the most is definitely the poor. As with any type of tragedy, they are hurting the worst as many of them are out of their jobs and do not have enough money to pay rent or keep up with the mortgage payment. This is why the stimulus checks exist in order to keep these people afloat amidst the global pandemic and economic depression.

Despite all this, the people who seem to be complaining the most about just how hard their lives are rich people. It’s absolutely unbelievable how ignorant and idiotic these people are. I saw a video of Cardi B crying about how she was eating cereal. She was upset because she had to eat cereal instead of being out at a sushi restaurant. She is in her 6 million dollar home and can’t stand it. Also Sam Smith was posting pictures of them crying because he couldn’t spend a week in his 12 million dollar house.

Another thing that was super cringey is the Imagine video that Gal Gadot and several other celebrities put out of them singing the famous John Lennon song. It was supposed to be uplifting, but it came off as very dumb since they are singing about not having any possessions yet they all have millions of dollars.

Eric Andre and several other celebrities poked fun at this video by making their own video where they sing lines of the song Slob on My Knob. Its super funny and pokes out just how stupid the Imagine video is.

I’m not trying to knock all rich people here since there are some who are using their widespread influence in order to spread the word on how serious the coronavirus is and how we should all take it as such.

I just think in general we idolize celebrities too much and its kind of crazy to see them complaining when they have millions and millions of dollars.

I know that the only thing that everyone is talking about is the coronavirus but that’s because it’s only that seems to matter at the moment. I think that I am in the same boat as everyone else in that this is crazy.

One of the biggest things that has been concerning in America is the lack of testing available to the citizens. China, South Korea, and Italy have all performed hundreds of thousands of tests yet the United States has less than 50,000 performed so far.

Its also very interesting that over half of the NBA players have been tested. Lots of them needed testing because of the recent exposure of many of their players such as Rudy Gobert, Donovan Mitchell, Kevin Durant, etc.

Also many of the other people that have been revealed to positive have been celebrities. This makes sense because many people are going to get it, celebrities included, but its kinda weird that there are so few people are getting tested yet all these move stars and NBA players are getting tests yet most of the general public don’t have access to it.

Like 50% of NBA players have been tested but almost none of their staff has been reported to be tested even though they’ve been in direct contact with the players who have it.

I guess it makes sense that these rich companies and rich people are getting the tests because they can pay for it but its just kind of messed up that there are lots of people who have symptoms and haven’t been able to receive tests. And there are lots of workers in the healthcare industry who need tests as well.

Another thing that is interesting is that the United States has performed some of the least amount of test per capita and per million people. We need to step it up if we are going to get ahead of this outbreak and prevent the deaths of millions of our citizens.

I was about to write my 5th passion blog and my peer evaluations, then I realized that I hadn’t written my fourth passion blog yet.

Whoopsie.

I guess I was too focused on the deliberation nation assignment that I forgot we had other assignments happening at the same time. Not sure if this will be worth any points, but might as well write it right.

 

I’m going to use this passion blog to talk about award shows. I know I’m pretty late since awards season has passed, but I was thinking a lot about it today. Mostly how little awards matter yet they still do.

 

I was looking mostly at the Grammy’s as their credibility is extremely low. I was listening to music on the way to class and a throwback appeared: Macklemore’s Thrift Shop. Undoubtedly a bop, this song radiated through the radio when I was 12. Everyone loved it. The accompanying album, The Heist, was pretty good too. But then I remembered, and got mad, that it won best rap album of the year beating out Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye West, and most notably, Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece Good Kid MAAD City. That album is an instant classic, masterpiece, and one of the greatest albums, not just rap albums, of all time. And it lost to Macklemore. That is incredible to me.

I remember too that at the time the general public and music industry realized how incredibly wrong this choice was saying that Kendrick got robbed. And he really did.  Kendrick has shaped himself into one of the greatest rappers of all time with an outstanding discography consisting of Section 80, GKMC, TPAB,  and DAMN. All of which are absolutely incredible and all of which are better than The Heist. Yes, even Section 80. I’m not trying to take anything away from The Heist either which I do believe is a great album. In fact, I just listened to The Heist in its entirety while playing Madden. And now, I’m halfway into listening to GKMC for the millioneth time.

This is just one example of dozens, if not hundreds of times, that the Grammy’s got something wrong. And its not just the Grammy’s. The Golden Globes, Oscars, and all of the other ones always get certain things wrong. This is because it is all just the opinions of a bunch of rich people which means that it probably doesn’t reflect the view of the general population or industry.

Still, I pay attention to who wins Best Picture. I don’t know what that says about me but I do.

 

For this last passion blog I want to write about something other than education. For this passion blog, I want to write about the welfare system in America.

This is another topic that I feel very strongly about and it was almost my choice for the passion blog, but ultimately education prevailed. I admittedly don’t know enough about the topic and need to research and reflect more on it before I can actually formulate a proper opinion on the issue. However, I can share the perspective of someone who is on welfare.

To provide some context, last year I went to Atlanta with my mock trial team to compete in an international competition. Part of that competition is that one of the days before competition starts is spent helping out at a homeless shelter in downtown Atlanta. Now this seemed like kind of a waste of time to me at first since I thought we could’ve used that time to practice more and the day happened to fall on my birthday. That coupled with my previous experiences of service made me less than enthusiastic about the idea of spending our day off at the homeless shelter. I know I kinda sound like an asshole because I definitely was being one. In my high school we were required to do service hours and we had gone on a few service trips but none of them felt genuine. They all felt like an obligation that I did only to check off a box. None of them elicited any real emotional connection from me. Until this one that is.

Right away, from the moment I entered the shelter, I could tell that this was going to be different. The leader of the shelter was a very good speaker and he told us that the most important thing that we could do for the people we were helping to serve was not giving them the food, but treating them with respect and showing them that they matter. He said that they get passed by everyone on the streets everyday, so if we only completed one thing that day, we should have a conversation with someone. From there, we set out to the downtown streets of Atlanta going to the not so pleasant parts. We went around and approached several different homeless people engaging in pleasant conversation and inviting them to come to the shelter for lunch later.

At lunch, I met Angela. She was the person who altered my perspective and forced me to think about her problems from a point of view other than my own. She told me her life story. I won’t get into it all here, but it involved drug abuse, prison, etc. She then brought up the topic of welfare and she had a very negative opinion on it. She told me that the government doesn’t care about her or any other poor people for that matter. She told me that she was a recovering crack addict and that when the government throws cash at her that she would just spend it on crack. She said that she doesn’t need money, she needs a job. She needs a home. She told me that she lacks the knowledge and experience to turn that small welfare check into more than just cash which essentially traps those who are less fortunate in a cycle of poverty. She suggested that there be more programs that teach those less fortunate how to manage their money, how to hold a job, how to stay off drugs, etc. It really is a thought-provoking idea. One that I definitely need to research more to gain a better understanding of the full issue.

For this passion blog, I want to discuss an issue in education that is very controversial and there has been a lot of media attention dedicated to it in the past year or so. Since the dramatic increase of violence in schools, more specifically the increase of the number of school shootings, there have been many different and sometimes radical ideas as to what policies should be put in place in order to combat this problem that plagues our society today. One of the ways proposed to deal with this is to arm teachers. Some states have already done this and some are in complete opposition to the idea. Overall, it has polarized educators in America. It begs the question is arming teachers a good idea?

First, we have to examine the culture around violence in school. In the early 1990’s, the Gun Free School Zones Act was passed which was supposed to put an end to all school violence by prohibiting them from all public schools. This may seem like exactly what would solve all gun violence at schools, but that is simply not the case as there are quite a few exceptions to the law. If you have concealed carry or the proper licensing to carry a firearm in a school zone than you are still allowed to do so. Also, if the gun is in a container or your motorized vehicle then it is still allowed. This law does keep a lot of guns away  from school but the problem is that it still allows a lot. Also, most of the guns used during school shootings are either not legally obtained or they belong to a parent of the student. Either way, they are illegally obtained and the Gun Free School Zones Act does nothing in order to stop those guns which actually get into schools.

The number of school shootings has risen dramatically in the last few years to the point where there is at least one per week. Many legislatures think that they should fight fire with fire by arming teachers. I personally believe that this would be a major mistake if teachers continue to be armed in schools. All this would be doing is bringing even more guns into school which is the opposite of what we want. Also, the likelihood of the teacher or a student accidentally harming someone with one of the guns is greater than them actually being able to intervene during a possible school shooter scenario. Additionally, it would not improve the overall safety and culture of schools as the students would know that each classroom has a gun in it. The whole point of the gun laws should be to have students feel and be safe from violence. Arming teachers wouldn’t do either of these things and is not a good idea in my opinion.

One of the biggest issues with schools today is the reemergence of segregation in schools. Now, to clarify, it is not the same kind of segregation that was present through American history until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. We reached the most integration in the 90’s and ever since we have been seeing increasing amounts of mostly all black and mostly all white public schools. This kind of new segregation is based on white flight and economic status. It isn’t just racial segregation either as school districts are becoming increasingly divided by economic status with entirely poor and entirely rich schools.

Schools were first desegregated in the mid to late 1960’s even though it was decided in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation and segregation for that matter was unconstitutional all the way back in 1954. The reason why it took so long is because the Supreme Court was too vague in their ruling as they ruled that schools needed to be desegregated with deliberate speed instead of using the word forthwith which was recommended by the NAACP. Lydon B. Johnson offered public schools federal money with the caveat that they could only receive it if they began to desegregate their schools. It took about 10 years for anyone to actually do anything even though the Supreme Court had already ruled it unconstitutional.

After this, the United States public school system made great strides to integrating schools to the point. One of the main reasons that this happened is because of the creation of magnet schools. Magnet schools were schools created with extra money in order to attract people to voluntary send their children to integrated schools.

Funding now is the main reason why schools are becoming more segregated. Schools in richer school districts receive more funding than schools in poorer districts which encourages rich white families to move to better school districts. This leaves the other school district with a much higher minority population and less funding. This causes a cycle as the quality of the poorer school will worsen leading to richer families leaving which will lead to less funding for that school district.

The only was to redesegregate is to give more funding to the poorer school districts instead of the richer ones. This seems like common sense, but its not how the current school system works.

This week when talking about the education in the U.S I want to focus on mental health at school and how it seems like this generation of students hates school more than previous generations, has more work, less sleep, and higher school shooting and suicide rates.

This generation of students has placed much more of an emphasis on higher education. So much so that now school has become extremely stressful and your grades matter at a much earlier age. Parents put added pressure on their children to get good grades in elementary school, so they can get into a good middle school. Then there’s added pressure for students to do well in middle school so that they can get into a good high school. And then the pressure just gets way higher for getting into college and beyond. In today’s society we are told that we cannot do well in life without getting a lot of education and its sad that its mostly true. There aren’t a lot of jobs that you can get without getting at least a bachelor’s degree. This seems kind of messed up as there are a lot of well paying jobs that really shouldn’t require a bachelor’s degree. This over-education ends up hurting people in the long run as many well educated individuals still can’t find jobs and have mountains of student loan debt.

All of this, not to mention social pressures, bullies, social media, sleep deprivation, being overworked, etc. factor into each student’s mental health. This is why we’ve seen a dramatic increase in teen suicides, and school shootings as students feel completely overwhelmed by the pressures and expectations put on them. We put too much pressures on kids these days and expect them to grow up faster than they should. According to the CDC, suicide is the second greatest cause of death among people ages 15-34. The number of suicides among people this young has been steadily increasing over the last century. And schools aren’t doing anything about it.

Another thing that schools don’t respond to well is mental illness. A lot of school don’t have the resources to deal with these kinds of problems and therefore disregard this. Depression rates are also much higher as well as other mental illnesses yet students are not reporting these issues and have no way to deal with them. Recently there has been less of  a social stigma around having mental illness, so hopefully schools will catch up and install ways to help their students who are struggling.

One of the biggest problems in schools today are school shootings. This is something that has never happened in history until the past couple decades. This is also something that has become increasingly normalized to the point where you see one on the news nearly every single day. They happen so often that we are desensitized to them. This is something that is a direct effect of the pressures of school. Not to excuse this type of behavior at all, because it is obviously horrible and they are completely at fault, but this kind of problem wasn’t a thing 30 years ago for a reason.

School is one of if not the most important factor in shaping a person into who they become. Most of us spend at least the first 18 years of our lives as a part of the school system and many more of us spend the first 22 or so when getting a college degree. This is an immense amount of time to be schooled. We need schools to include more resources for students to help deal with their issues in order for them to feel more relaxed and less stressed out.

In the last blog post, I mentioned how the United States’ education scores were improving every year domestically but not in comparison to other nations. One nation in particular that  has been doing exceedingly well with their world renowned education system is Finland. Finland’s education system has been known as one of the best in the world for the last few decades. They were thought of as one of the worst in the 1970’s and they really took it to heart making significant changes to their system. The United States, on the other hand, hasn’t made any real substantial changes in many years. They do a lot of things differently than the United States, and many people think that we should adopt their ideas.

One of the main differences between America and Finland is the structure of schooling. America has always subscribed to the traditional K-12 structure, but Finland does something different. Students don’t start school until they are at least 7 years old. There is a large emphasis on kids being kids and enjoying their childhood without being brought down by the stress of school. They provide a strong emphasis on play and they actually have play time everyday during school. They also only require students to go to school up through freshman year of high school.

These seemingly small changes are actually very significant as many children in America seem to view school as a forced obligation and may even sometimes refer to it as prison. In Finland, school can actually consistently be something that is seen as fun without interfering with student’s social lives. Finland also has significantly shorter school days especially when children are younger. On average, the school day for Finnish children is about 3 hours and 45 minutes including lunch and playtime which means that they outperform the United States in every major educational category while having a little over half of the school that they have.

One of the largest differences between the United States’ education system and Finland’s is that the U.S gives their kids hours of homework every night while Finland’s kids only have around 30-45 minutes of homework each night if that. Their thinking is that student’s shouldn’t have to deal with the stresses of school at home. Finland wants their citizens to be children as long as they can. They also care a lot about the happiness of their citizens and that is thought to be the greatest reason why their students do well in school.

If you think about the culture associated with schools in the United States especially high schools most of the things that come to mind are negative. The number of school shootings has risen drastically in our country to the point where we averaged about one a day. Also, when you think of high school you can see the stereotypes about cliques, bullying, suicide, etc. All of the shows and movies set in high school deal with these themes. If you’ve ever seen Mean Girls or Thirteen Reasons Why or any number of other teen dramas then you know exactly what I mean.

When I researched Finland on the other hand, I could only find records for three school shootings ever. This may not actually be true because I couldn’t find that much information on it, but you get the point. Schools in Finland rarely ever get shot up. They are seen as fun and peaceful places of learning in contrast to American schools where people are sometimes fearful for their lives. If we want to improve the United States’ education system then we need to change the cultural perceptions and stereotypes associated with it.

 

The Education system in the United States does not exactly have the best reputation domestically and internationally. Americans in general are kind of known as fat idiots. There are many problems with our education system here in the United States, but there are also many misconceptions about it as well. This series of passion blogs will explore these ideas and more while also addressing how we can improve the education system here in America.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that Americans are progressively getting worse test scores and becoming dumber every year. This is not true. Our standardized tests show that students’ reading and math scores have been steadily increasing for the last 50 years with math scores being much higher than reading. When comparing average test scores from 2019 with average test scores from 2000 in America we see great improvement. So why do people still think that our education is getting worse?

The answer is quite simple. Starting about 30-40 years ago, the United States and a lot of other countries starting comparing their test scores with each other’s. At first, America’s test scores were very high in comparison to all of the other nation’s. Now, however, our nation’s test scores are about average or a little below average in comparison to other nations. Why have our scores declined in comparison to other countries?

America started at the top with most of the other countries  being below us. As the years have gone by, other countries like Korea, Finland, and Japan have placed a significant emphasis on their education systems in order to catch up with other countries like us. America however hasn’t made and real strides to keep up the pace. We have not made any major changes to our classroom model or educational system since we created it over a century ago.

Studies show that the amount of money that you spend per student has no effect on whether or not the student will perform well. It’s not about how much money you spend, but rather about how you choose to spend your money. Many countries spend far less money per student than the United States yet they outperform us in standardized tests every year. Conversely, many other countries choose to spend more money per student than us but some of them still do extremely poor on their standardized tests.

One thing that is very interesting is that the top 2/3 of students in America score near the top of all students in the world, but the bottom third of American students score very poorly which is why the United States is below average. This shows that there is a lack of educational equity meaning that opportunities are not the same at each school.

A strong misconception is that educational performance and equality of opportunity are exclusive to one or the other but this is simply not the case. In one study, America scored below average in both math scores and equity in educational opportunities. Many other countries however have achieved above average scores in both categories. Korea, Japan, Finland, China, and countless other countries have proved that it is possible to achieve both goals. In a lot of the cases, increasing scores in one of these categories does the same for the other.

The United States education system is a hotly contested issue as there are many different schools of thought as how to fix it. If we only look at the domestic test scores, we wouldn’t see any problems. But, if we compare our scores to other countries we can see that the problem is very real. And we need to do something drastic soon in order to get ourselves back on track before it’s too late.