#33 School Influence

What exactly is the right amount of school influence on student’s life? What is the responsibility of the school on students? This is the very question that school have to ask themselves when they set up school curriculum. In many religious schools, school basically dominates student’s daily life. Students have to follow strict religious rules of the school and attend church ceremonies and follow the teachings of the bible, quran or whatever religion one believes in. In this type of school, people are told to obey their teachers respectfully and no one can ever question the authority. Besides teaching the students on academics, the school is also responsible in teaching students proper manners. However, in a more liberal school, students are merely taught with academics. Behavior problem is usually not the school’s problem but the parents. Outside of classroom, students are able to have their own social life without school interference. People are allowed to have intimate relationship between one another and couples are allowed in school. The amount of school influence on student’s life varies greatly on the curriculum, its background, and the social-culture norm the school institutes in. For example, in most Asian school, the school focuses on pure academic subjects such as math, science, literatures or history. However, in most school with western education, extracurricular activities such as team sports or volunteer plays a big part that the school provide for their students. It seriously depends on what type of school we are talking about.

# 32 The Earth is full

Paul Gliding’s speech “The Earth is Full” on TEDX is certainly inspiring that seek to raise awareness of the effect of Global warming and over consumptions in the world today. For me, Paul Gliding speech mainly uses metaphors and deeply describes how the world would end up if we continue our destructive behaviors to the environment. Unlike many speeches about Global Warming, Gliding decides to not provide any scientific data or statistical analysis to illustrate his point. Instead, he simply want the audience to imagine the future when our earth begins to die and unable to sustain overwhelming human activities. Despite how he decide to just make the speech fill with flowery, descriptive and philosophical languages, I believe he is just trying to use some emotional appeal to awaken some of the public who, even with so much scientific evidences provided, decides to believe that global warming is not real. I certainly agree with Gliding that this is a serious issue that if we don’t do something about it, nature will come back and destroy us. However, I believe simply talk about the effects is not enough. Gliding fails to make any suggestion of how to solve this urgent issue or at least talk about some of the programs that aware people tried to do to save the environment which are beginning to bring some positive effects in solving the issue. For me, Paul Gliding is inflating his speech with some fancy language and metaphors without solid content that seek to solve the issue at hand.

#31 SUPER TUESDAY

So what exactly is Super Tuesday? Well, basically, it’s a primary election to select delegates/ nominees to get to a national convention to select the final party’s presidential cnadinate for the presidential election. The 2012 Super Tuesday, held on March 6 2012, will be extremely important for Republican to select their potential presidential delegate against the incumbent Democrat President Barak Obama. The States that hold the primaries on Super Tuesday varied from year to year. The States that hold the primaries in 2012 are Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and Alaska, a total of 10 states participating. It will hold a total of 419 delegates (18.3% of the total number of delegates). To win the final Republican National Convention, the candidate must accumulate 1,144 delegate votes to win. The result of the Super Tuesday is as follow. Mitt Romney came out first in the election with 385 secured delegates, with a popular vote of 40.5 and wining 6 states. The second came with Rick Santorum, wining 130 secured delegates, a 24.9% popular vote and wining 3 states. Newt Gingrich came out third, with a 110 secured delegates, 23.2% of the popular votes and wining Georgia State, his home state. Ron Paul came out last with 23 secured delegates, 11.4% of popular votes and wining 0 states. The result doesn’t conclude that Mitt Romney will eventually come out to be the 2012 presidential election candidate for the Republican. However, he has a high chance to become one. This primary election is important in helping the Republican to assess who has the most potential to become the next US president.

#30 Poltically incorrect on word "chink"

After seeing the video and the article “ABC’s Poltically Incorrect Tackles Comedian’s Chink joke”, I strongly agree with Guy Aoki and deeply appreciate his effort in trying to raise awareness to racism against Asian Americans. In the video, Sarah Silverman tried to justify her action that in her joke to include “I love Chink” is just for satire and humorous purposes. She believed that she shouldn’t be asked to apologize for such joke. However, in most Asian and Asian American, such joke shouldn’t be said because it is offensive and rude. For me, it isn’t a joke, instead an insult to people. It’s the same as making fun of someone’s appearance and bully people to treat it as a mere joke without thinking of the consequences. In my opinion, such kind of joke played on race is just dangerous. Despite how Silverman argue that there should be freedom of speech for people to say whatever they want, I strongly agree with Aoki that these kind of freedom of speech are just exercising ignorant speech that they seek to ‘educate’ the public with bad influences. For me, saying the world ‘chink’ is worse than an African American being called a N world. The N word is mainly referring to people’s skin color. However, the world ‘chink’ is associating all Asian, despite being Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian or Pilipino, is being associated with Chinese (PRC’s people). For me, this is just insulting. Anyway, this kind of word shouldn’t be used to justify a joke. A bad insult is an insult, not something people should laugh at.

#29 Discussion Reflection (Gender issue)

After such crazy, heated argument/discussion in our English class yesterday on gender issue, I feel like there are too much stereotypes being put on what defines a men or women. According to the dictionary, we define men as male human beings that reproduce by producing gametes in the form of sperm and have XY chromosomes. On the other hand, women are defined as female human beings who reproduce by producing gametes in the form of egg and have XX chromosome. Such biological definition defines what female and male are. However, this does not define what exactly people mean when they say “real man or real woman”. In our discussion, we listed out several stereotypical definitions for man and woman. However for the girls, they define man and woman with 2 simple idea, biologically defined vs Self-defined. Based on their arguments, they believed that if a man who is physically male believes he should be a woman and dress or act like one, he can called himself “woman”. With this said, this meant that our self-identity should be define more based on our mental state than biological component. For me, I agree with this that the term man and woman should be defined based on our mental state that if we want to be accurate, we would instead call each other male or female to be accurate. Every different culture has different norms about what defines a real man or woman. The term man and woman are just man-made to categorize people. We should be free to call whatever we want, either man or woman, as long as one agrees with the term being called.