# 5 Characteristic

What is one of my prominent trait or personality? I will definitely say a hasty and impatient personality toward something. As a small kid, I always love to know the easiest method toward a certain goal such as solving a math questions. What I meant by the easiest method doesn’t necessary mean method that will be the most efficient and quickest to the solution, but a method that may take a long process yet each of the step is easier to comprehend and solve. It is sometimes hard for me to fully accept a new idea or method completely without actually fully understand the reasons behind it and how people came up with such ideas. When things become so intricate to comprehend that people will just tell you to accept it as a fact, I will usually reject such idea and stick on to my old beliefs. In a way people can say I am stubborn toward some idea or method. Also, I tend to make a judgment too early that I treat many things like cause and effect relationship. For example, I use to always think that the only reason why people get sick is due to virus infection. However, I tend to forget that many other factors such as bacterial infection, tumor, and other problems in our body may contribute to a common symptom. I tend to think things in a linear fashion without considering it may instead act like a web.

#4 Responses to Ken Robinson's Schools Kills Creativity

According to Ken Robinson, the core of our education system is made on the basis of industrial, mass production assembly line. He described how kids are like producst in factory that we went through stages of acquiring knowledge in school, using standardize test to eliminate the defects and comparing kids according to their age. He argued that with standardize test, it strongly misinterpreted and differntiate the genius among people. People achieve great things with divergent thinking, which is the ability to form multiples idea and act upon at the same time. He suggested that our education system kills people's divergent thinking that people are forced to conform to the standard and disregard any room for creativity. I agree with Ken Robinson that with the increasing number of standardizing test to determine one’s intelligence at the early age is truly unfair. People shouldn’t just be judge on how successful they will be in the future based on test result. However, I do not see any other efficient alternative to differentiate people, for instance, to go into colleges, without standardize test. It is true that in American colleges, besides standardize test and GPA, collage admission staffs also look at applicants extracurricular activities or essay to accept people into their school. However, standardize test will always be the first line to washout people they don’t think will be suitable in their school. If school were to go over each and every applicant’s extracurricular activities, there will be too much biased within the selection process and eventually caused chaos. Our education system is indeed flawed. However, it is impossible to get rid of standardize test that only through these tests can the selection process be fair and unbiased.  

# 3 Tone and Purpose of "Disability"

Disability, by Nancy Mairs, described how Nancy felt about people with disability that she thought there the public should better understand these people and know their stories. The tone of the passage is rather melancholy that she described how people are mistreated or treated differently due to their disability. For example, she narrated an occasion that a local advertiser refused to let disable people advertising commercial product because it would discourage sells. Nancy felt pretty sad yet perplex that the real reason disabled people aren’t in the advertisement is not because people would think products are specially made for disabled but people would associate disability with ordinary life. Yet she was optimistic that everything would turn out right if the public were able to understand and treated disabled naturally into our common scene of daily life. She believed that disabled people were suffering because they felt isolated and discouraged for being different from others. However, through public awareness and integration of disabled into our common scene of daily lives, we would eventually treated disabled equally.

As said earlier in the passage, the main purpose of the passage is to encourage the public or advertiser to integrate the images of disabled into our common scenes of our ordinary lives. By seeing these people daily in our lives, we would eventually get used to them and would no longer seem them as disabled and treated them as a different category of individuals. When people have disabilities, they began to not only feel the sense of isolation but also throw away their any sense of existence that they would lose their self- confidence. People began to self-alienating themselves and draw them into a virtuous cycle of depression that they would just fall deeper into the depth of disparity. She also wanted to make people to accept disability more easily psychologically if they were to get one in the future. If people are used to seeing disabled and realized that one can still live an ordinary life with it, people are able to associate it as normal characteristic, one that complicates people physically but wouldn’t take away our human existence. Therefore, people would be more confidence and optimistic that there are still hopes in the future.

# 2 What is Freedom?

What exactly is freedom? Well, for Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of freedom is the quality or state of being free as the absence of necessity, or constraint in choice or restraint from the power of another. For me, the definition of freedom starts with the principle of sovereignty, or known as self control. Free people are able to make decision for themselves without any restraint from any others or authority. They are protected from many civil liberties and allow to have legal control of themselves. However, I believe that there should always be some limitations to freedom that people should not abuse their rights. It is not people’s freedom to cause and infringe other’s interest by causing destruction to society and impulsively making decision that may cause huge impact to people around them. For example, it is not kid’s freedom at the age of 5 to be smoking and playing with guns. First of all, these things can be live threatening that smoking is bad for health and playing with guns may lead of casualties. Second, kids wouldn’t have the power to make wise decision for them yet that they are easily lured by traps and motivated to do crazy things. Freedom should only be granted when one is mature enough to make decision without abusing the power of it.

#1 Responses to Amy Chua's book

Amy Chua, author of the book Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother, posted a controversial post on the Wall Street Journal titling 'Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior?" After reading the post, i personally felt that there are some certain truth in it that Asian parents tend to treat their kids the same way as that of Amy Chua. When we are small, our parents tend to let force us to learn instruments such as piano. Unlike western parents, Asian parents tend to expect children to get good grades that it is never the school or teachers fault if kids have a bad score. I agree with Amy that only through these kinds of Spartan education can we arm our children with skill and confidence to deal with future adult life. However, I find that the only way to really prepare our children with the future is to balance both western and eastern style of education. We need to prepare kids with both the diligent working habit and passions to find stuff that they will find motivated in the future.