9. What do you see yourself doing 10 years from now?
I honestly am not really sure. I can remember that my earliest thoughts dealt with trying to tell what would happen in the future, but I'm still not sure as to what will happen or what I will be. I suppose if the question was what I want to accomplish in ten years, I'd have to say graduating from high school and college, getting a fairly good, high paying job, settling down (family optional) and basically just being happy with who I am and what I'm doing with my life.
12. If you could do one thing in high school differently, what would it be?
I would be more social, and less concerned with what people thought about me. The social anxiety that clouded my freshmen year and most of my sophomore year left me without a lot of friends, low grades, and almost no self-esteem. I would like to change how I felt about meeting new people, and definitely how I felt about myself.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Friday, June 4, 2010
Spelling Bee Protestors
WASHINGTON – The nation's capital always draws its share of protesters, picketing for causes ranging from health care reform to immigration policy.
But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.
Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.
Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.
The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."
According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."
Meanwhile, inside the hotel's Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.
While the protesters could make headway with cell phone texters who routinely swap "u" for "you" and "gr8" for "great," their message may be a harder sell for the Scripps crowd.
Mahoney had trouble gaining traction with at least one bee attendee. New Mexico resident Matthew Evans, 15, a former speller whose sister is participating in the bee this year, reasoned with her that if English spellings were changed, spelling bees would cease to exist.
"If a dictionary lists 'enough' as 'enuf,' the spelling bee goes by the dictionary, therefore all the spelling words are easier to spell, so the spelling bee is gone," Evans said.
"Well," Mahoney replied, "they could pick their own dictionary."
When I was told about this article by my English teacher, my first instinct was to laugh it off. People protesting the English language? In this day and age, protests don't have the weight that they used to have, especially considering protests such as those made by the Tea Party of America that don't really have more of a purpose than getting a bunch of angry people together and screaming. But as I read this article, I was mildly surprised to learn that my pessimistic instincts had failed me, and that this wasn't quite as ridiculous as I thought. Well, it was, just in a more logical way than I thought.
The protest was lead by an 81 year old teacher who was convinced that words in the English language could be spelled illogically, and thus people should not be held to those impossible standards. This confused me. Why should a teacher, of all the people in the world, be so against teaching things about the English language because it was "too confusing"? How was 40% (which is a made-up number if I have ever seen one) be held down by getting confused by silent letters?
Personally, I blame the world we live in today. Our culture's obsession with saying that it's okay to be close, and doing whatever it can to convince people that they're not stupid for not knowing how to spell "enough" is very nice, and really should be perfect, but it's not. It seems to be creating a certain sense of complacency, that people are now fighting to make the official way things in the United States are done.
And what of other confusing subjects? Can we simplify math, too? Chemistry? History? Why can't we simplify all subjects? The truth of the matter is, despite the good will shown at this protest, it simply does not work with how the world we live in works. People can complain all they want about how the world works, but some things are just not going to change because a very small group of people complained about it.
But spelling bee protesters? They're out here, too.
Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.
Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
"Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways," Mahoney said.
The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."
According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for "fruit" to be spelled as "froot," "slow" should be "slo," and "heifer" — a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta — should be "hefer."
Meanwhile, inside the hotel's Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.
While the protesters could make headway with cell phone texters who routinely swap "u" for "you" and "gr8" for "great," their message may be a harder sell for the Scripps crowd.
Mahoney had trouble gaining traction with at least one bee attendee. New Mexico resident Matthew Evans, 15, a former speller whose sister is participating in the bee this year, reasoned with her that if English spellings were changed, spelling bees would cease to exist.
"If a dictionary lists 'enough' as 'enuf,' the spelling bee goes by the dictionary, therefore all the spelling words are easier to spell, so the spelling bee is gone," Evans said.
"Well," Mahoney replied, "they could pick their own dictionary."
When I was told about this article by my English teacher, my first instinct was to laugh it off. People protesting the English language? In this day and age, protests don't have the weight that they used to have, especially considering protests such as those made by the Tea Party of America that don't really have more of a purpose than getting a bunch of angry people together and screaming. But as I read this article, I was mildly surprised to learn that my pessimistic instincts had failed me, and that this wasn't quite as ridiculous as I thought. Well, it was, just in a more logical way than I thought.
The protest was lead by an 81 year old teacher who was convinced that words in the English language could be spelled illogically, and thus people should not be held to those impossible standards. This confused me. Why should a teacher, of all the people in the world, be so against teaching things about the English language because it was "too confusing"? How was 40% (which is a made-up number if I have ever seen one) be held down by getting confused by silent letters?
Personally, I blame the world we live in today. Our culture's obsession with saying that it's okay to be close, and doing whatever it can to convince people that they're not stupid for not knowing how to spell "enough" is very nice, and really should be perfect, but it's not. It seems to be creating a certain sense of complacency, that people are now fighting to make the official way things in the United States are done.
And what of other confusing subjects? Can we simplify math, too? Chemistry? History? Why can't we simplify all subjects? The truth of the matter is, despite the good will shown at this protest, it simply does not work with how the world we live in works. People can complain all they want about how the world works, but some things are just not going to change because a very small group of people complained about it.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The Internet, Chatrooms, and Writing
With the rise of the Internet as a social tool, the concept of learning how to read and write in order to communicate is becoming far more vital to the social life of the average American citizen. And yet, despite this need to write legibly to get your ideas across, some people that go online to chat with friends, family, or complete strangers have still resisted mastering basic grammatical and spelling skills that should have been necessary for them to learn long ago.
I have been using the Internet as a social tool for many years now. I can still remember going into my first "chatroom," extremely nervous about what others would think of me, resigning myself to talk perfectly so that other people would have a high opinion of me, and then having that idea fall apart as I encountered swarms of people that were perfectly content to talk in some form of writing that was almost entirely made up us mis-spellings, abbreviations, and the substitutions of some letters with numbers. This utter disregard for the ways that the English language is supposed to be used left me shaking my head, and wondering how it could have possibly happened, with most Internet communication demanding that one type correctly in order to be understood.
Unfortunately, although I have been thinking about this conundrum for a long time, I still haven't been able to come up with an answer. But whatever is causing the average online user to shed his or her basic English skills, the trend is spreading. More and more essays for classes, on tests, and even on state exams have been turned in with typical Internet abbreviations such as "LOL" "WTF" "LMAO" and "OMGWTFIDKBBQ" written on them. The sheer disconnect from the poor students that attempt to do such a thing and what is actually expected of them to know as educated persons stuns and kind of dismays me. Of course, this trend does not seem to be fading away; rather, acclaimed young adult publications such as "Going Bovine" have these abbreviations written in the book, furthering popularizing through the author's stupidity these glaring defects upon what proper writing or talking should be. Or maybe I'm just being too stuck up about the idea of online cultures mingling with scholastic cultures. Well, I have to admit that IDK if this is a bad thing, and I still don't know what causes it... I wonder if I will ever know.
I have been using the Internet as a social tool for many years now. I can still remember going into my first "chatroom," extremely nervous about what others would think of me, resigning myself to talk perfectly so that other people would have a high opinion of me, and then having that idea fall apart as I encountered swarms of people that were perfectly content to talk in some form of writing that was almost entirely made up us mis-spellings, abbreviations, and the substitutions of some letters with numbers. This utter disregard for the ways that the English language is supposed to be used left me shaking my head, and wondering how it could have possibly happened, with most Internet communication demanding that one type correctly in order to be understood.
Unfortunately, although I have been thinking about this conundrum for a long time, I still haven't been able to come up with an answer. But whatever is causing the average online user to shed his or her basic English skills, the trend is spreading. More and more essays for classes, on tests, and even on state exams have been turned in with typical Internet abbreviations such as "LOL" "WTF" "LMAO" and "OMGWTFIDKBBQ" written on them. The sheer disconnect from the poor students that attempt to do such a thing and what is actually expected of them to know as educated persons stuns and kind of dismays me. Of course, this trend does not seem to be fading away; rather, acclaimed young adult publications such as "Going Bovine" have these abbreviations written in the book, furthering popularizing through the author's stupidity these glaring defects upon what proper writing or talking should be. Or maybe I'm just being too stuck up about the idea of online cultures mingling with scholastic cultures. Well, I have to admit that IDK if this is a bad thing, and I still don't know what causes it... I wonder if I will ever know.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
