Who woulda Thunk it..

Chapter 6 seems to talk all about research, how to do it, what type of sources to use, how it can be used in everyday life not just in formal papers. This chapter just like all the other ones seems to be pretty long, but I found that it was not as repetitive as the others. I think the information given here will be really useful for our up coming papers. Though I found the whole chapter interesting and useful there was one area that stood out to me. That area was the one that explains how to use resources other than the internet and library. The chapter says that you can use local organizations, the library, the internet, and even neighborhoods. The most surprising one of these was the neighborhood. I would have never thought that people in a neighborhood could help out with a research topic. I also think that researching in a neighborhood would be a good idea for my topic since I am thinking about writing about the budget cuts and how that is affecting education in Santa Clara County. I think that this would be helpful because just like it is stated in the book, “People who have lived in a community for a long time can tell you about the history of the community or about their perspective on the effects of present events”. So I think I would be able to get valuable opinions from people going through the hard time like students and parents living in that area as well as older people who have seen things change. I think a good way to get these opinion would be to set up a poll(too bad I don’t know how) and see what people think, as well as interviewing some people that live in Santa Clara County.

Pay to Play

Being a high school athlete all of my four years of high school, sports are very important to me. I think that they help build character, teach responsibility, and teamwork. And apparently so do many kids and parents from the East Side Union High School District. After wanting to cut all sports in general because of the budget cuts that the California school system is undergoing the district has come up with ideas to help save the sports. The article "San Jose's East Side high schools consider plans to save sports" talks all about the plans.Some of the proposals that have been made are, that they are going to charge the students 100 dollars to play, reducing the number of athletic directors, and getting rid of the transportation to the games. The district also wants to cut all water sports because shutting down the pools will save the district 1.3 million dollars. The district has also proposed to have the students fund raise to get the money needed. Some of the fundraisers proposed are, selling coupon books, sport memorabilia, and tickets to the San Jose Earthquakes and Oakland Raiders games. The district hopes that these fundraisers will raise the 1.7 Million needed to keep the sports programs. Although these proposals don’t seem too bad the parents and coaches do have some concerns. One of the main concerns that the parents have is the affordability of the sports now. The coaches said that, there are many parents who can’t afford to buy their children sports shoes and practice gear, let alone afford to pay 100 dollars for their child to play a sport. Although the coaches say that they won’t turn down any athlete that can’t afford to pay, some teens might not want to play because they don’t want to waste their parent’s money. The coaches and parents also have a concern with transportation. Since there will no longer be buses to take the athletes to and from the games, the coaches are concerned that their teams will not get to where they need to be on time or might not be complete. Having been part of a school district where students had to pay 50 dollars for every sport they played, meaning that if your child played 3 sports you’d pay 150 dollars, and a district where there was no transportation to any games. I don’t think that it is that bad of an idea to charge the kids for playing and cutting the buses. Although I feel hat 100 dollars is a little too much, if it helps to keep the sports programs it is worth it. As for the transportation, it is not so bad to carpool with your teammates. It can be done and the team will get to where they need to be on time. It all depends on the commitment of the athletes and parents to get where they need to be.

Who said you could only help in one way.

While reading Ch. 5 I learned a lot about what advocacy actually was and how it worked. I learned that advocacy can be a short term thing or it can be a long term commitment. I also learned that there is more than one way to provide advocacy. This was easily seen with the two articles that we had to read, the AVODAH website and “After Seattle: Anarchists get Organized”. One of the key differences between Beck’s advocacy and those of the AVODAH alumni is that the people in AVODAH concentrated more on the people in a small community with out protest or anything like that. While Beck on the other hand went around the country protesting trying to get her point across, kind of, by using force. It also seems like Beck is more interested in changing big things that have to do with businesses and “the man”, while AVODAH was more concentrated in the small Jewish communities. The relationship between Beck and people she works with is also different from the relationship that the people in AVODAH have. To me it seems like the relationships that Beck and her people have is more on the business level, that they are only concentrated on what they have to do. They also seem more like a bunch of educated hippies trying to make a difference. AVODAH on the other hand seems like a tight nit group that have many things in common and that are trying to help out a group of people that they can relate to. That to me is also a big difference between the two groups of advocates, the people they are trying to help. Beck and her people seem more interested in helping people in third world countries that they really don’t have a personal connection with and will probably never actually meet. While AVODAH seems to believe that they are helping people in the U.S. that are in the Jewish community. They believe they are helping a group of people that they can actually meet and build a bond with. The organization of the two organizations is different in the way that the AVODAH is more organized and focused on a specific goal. They have the exact number of people that they want working and they know who they want to help. Beck’s organization on the other hand seems to just go around the country trying to get their voice heard and their point across. They don’t really seem to have a goal other than that they want to help out poorer counties.

Miss school...parents may go to jail..

As I looked around on the San Jose Mercury News website there where a couple of articles that got my attention. One that dealt with grandparents having to raise their grandchildren as their own for various different reasons and the other dealing with two parents having to go to jail because of their 13-year-old daughter’s truancy problems.
I felt that the article titled “San Jose dad in jail — and mom's on the way — for 13-year-old girl's chronic truancy” was more my style. Since most of my blogs have been about education and the effects of the budget cuts you probably have figured that education is important to me. I also find that education in San Jose, having two school districts San Jose Unified and East Side school District, could be a good topic for my research paper.
The article talks about how a father has gone to jail because his daughter has had issues going to school and how the mother will go to jail after he gets out. The couple is facing jail time because they are being held responsible for their daughter missing school more than the average child. The truancy got so bad that she would only go to school three to five days a year. Making her a 13-year-old fifth grade drop out. The article stated that it is the first time in five years that a truancy case has resulted in incarceration and the first time that both parents have had to go to jail. The parents say that the girl, named Vanessa, doesn’t want to go to school because she is teased for being overweight and can’t be around big groups of people with having a panic attack and passing out.
The part of the article that I agree with is that the parents should be blamed for their child’s truancy issues because it is their responsibility. I agree with the school district trying to send to the family polite letters, setting up meeting with the parents, home visits, and interventions all to get the child to go to school. It all shows that the school is putting in the effort to help the family out. Although I do feel that sending both parents to jail is a little extreme it seems to be effective. Vanessa said that she is willing to go to school if it means keeping her mother out of jail. I also agree with the school district trying to set up some sort of counseling for her, and other students with truancy problems. This also shows that the school district understands that there could be some other reason besides the child being bad for them missing school.

SICK...but still did my homework

Being sick this whole weekend and sleeping 15 hours a day, reading was not what I wanted to do. So as I grabbed my book all groggy and angry I started reading. The first thing that ran through my mind was “Why am I reading about ethos, pathos, and logos again? I already read about this last semester.” but I still read since I wanted the grade. As I started reading the first article “Native education boosted by presence of elders” I thought that it was just going to be about how important it is to include elders in education. I had no idea it was going to talk about Hawaii and the programs that they had started down there. The article showed how important it was to include elders in education how it was not always necessary to have a college degree to teach somebody something new. As I read the article I started thinking about Hawaii and how they have there own culture that is very different than ours. This made me want to go to Hawaii and learn about the culture first hand.
The other article that really got my attention was “Walking the Line”. This article got my attention because it was not a conventional way to write an editorial. To me this seemed more like a story about somewhere he had enjoyed going as a child. I would have never known that the article was about the aftermath of September 11 by the first couple of paragraphs. This articles opinion isn’t as straight forward as all the other ones but I think that is what made me like it more. I liked the idea of having to think about the point that the author was trying to make. The description of the cold mountains and snow as well as the pictures made me think of Lake Tahoe. The reason it made me think of Tahoe is because it’s really the only mountain area I’ve been to and because my family is out there and I got stuck at home sick doing homework.

Schools may be able to keep helpful prgrams =]

The article that caught my attention in the San Jose Mercury News was one titled “State legislators propose giving school districts spending flexibility”. This article talks about how the state will give the schools some flexibility with the budget when it comes to important programs in schools. There are programs that will not be changes such as school lunches, class-size reduction, and bi-lingual programs. Then there are programs that will undergo budget cuts but are exempt from the flexibility like student test, AVID, and school for prisoners. The programs that will have flexibility when it comes to being part of the schools budget are GATE, the gifted and talented classes, career and technical classes, and some unprotected programs for English language learners. This article and topic really interest me because I once attended schools in San Jose and was actually part of four of the programs mentioned in the article. I was part of the English learner program when I first started school since I didn’t speak a word of English and as a consequence of that I was also part of the bi-lingual program that my elementary school offered. I was also part of the GATE program in elementary school and once I hit high school I was in the AVID program for a year. So this decision really hits close to home for me. If these programs had not been around when I was in school I might have not made it to college. I think that the chance of some flexibility with the budget for schools is a good idea because it will help keep some important programs in schools that may help kids actually get into college.

Can we become a blogging community?

After reading the essays on the website that was given I found that it was really hard to actually pick one that I can call my favorite. They all seemed pretty uninteresting to me. So I thought I’d do some rereading to see if I found one that caught my attention. After rereading everything I did manage to pick a favorite. The blog that I liked the most was the one titled “I Don’t Really Want to Go into Personal Things in This Blog”: Risking Connection through Blogging, by Carlton Clark. The reason that I find this blog interesting is because instead of just talking about how he uses blogging in his class he gives examples and added a personal tough to it. I like how he included part of the actual blog that he posted for his student and the response that he got from a real student. I find that this makes the blog much more fun to read because it’s more than just the professional blogging that he is doing now. I also enjoyed the blog that was titled “Knit Blogging: Considering an Online Community” by Amy E. Earhart. I enjoyed this blog because it took a different approach on how to get the readers attention. I think that talking about yarn and knitting and how it led to blogging was smart. I also liked how she managed to tie in academic blogging with the knitting, how she wrote about her wishing that the English writing community could be a little less isolated, and how she thought that a blog could help the situation.