PlanetUSF

The two articles that I’m doing my project on are both about uniforms in all schools. In one article it gives all the pros for uniforms, and the second one gives all the cons of uniforms. In both articles they use real people to get their point across. Meaning that they want the readers to relate to fellow people; for example in the first article the author uses different Principles of schools, teachers, and parents to say how they see improvements in the students. In the second article the author revolves the article around this mother that does not approve of uniforms and gets a lot of other parents to fight back against the school. So in both cases they get people like you and me to get their ideas across.
Overall, both article use different tactics to get the audience to agree with them. The way they do it is quite affective, it is interesting to read both of the articles because they both have very good points that would be hard choosing a side in this case. The reason why both of these articles are good is because they make the reader agree and see the argument on both sides. So, that is why I choose those articles for my project and also that is how both authors get their side across to the public.

I read the article; U.S. report says Iraq war has fueled terror threat. Classified intelligence report shows that terror strikes have risen since the takeover of Iraq. Democrats have also come out once again on their view of the war in an effort to gain support for their candidate for the upcoming election. I agree with the democrats on this subject and believe the war was unnecessary. While we sit at home here in the U.S. with President Bush there are hundreds of American soldiers dying along with thousands of Iraqis. I believe if Saddam Hussein was a real threat we could have just sent in a single military unit to execute Saddam. I think there are more people becoming terrorist and going against the U.S. because their own families have died in the war and are looking for revenge, instead of fighting for Saddam.
Another paragraph in the article reports that the U.S. military in Iraq say the Iraq army is one of the worst it has ever seen. I believe this is true because the Iraq people feel they are being used. They believe they will end up fighting for the U.S. whenever the U.S feels they are needed. Most of the people in Iraqi’s sense of pride is so demoralized at this point, that trying to put together a decent army would be extremely hard. So far they don’t have the people, technology and especially pride soldiers from the U.S. have. I don’t think this army will be able to be put together until a few Iraqis stands up and inspires the rest to start getting better.

A new law passed by the state legislature aims to curb the state’s shamefully high cyclist death rate by criminalizing the practice of “buzzing.”

“If a car is going slower than you want to go, you can’t just blow your horn, yell and cuss at them and expect them to move off the road so you can pass,” said George Martin, executive director of the Safe Bicycling Coalition of Palm Beach County. “Why should someone expect that of a bicyclist?”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Now all that’s required is to have police officers willing to enforce such a law. Who’s up for a ride to celebrate?

Education Secretary talks about the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings talks about the plans to implement the Commission’s recommendations

Yale University to post courses on Web for free
Yale U. will post videos and some course materials of seven courses. The pilot project will start Fall 2007.

Some historically black colleges see declining enrollment
Of the 103 historically black colleges and universities, twenty-six recorded enrollment declines in the 1995-2004 period. This included a couple of elite black schools: Fisk and Tuskegee.

For this blog, I just want to show anyone and everyone who reads it, that great people still exists. I recently found this video, which I hope you will see, about a father named Dick Hoyt and his disabled son. The story is about a father who has pushed his disabled son through 212 triathlons just because his son feels like he can walk again when his dad pushes him in the chair. When I first saw the video, I’ll be honest, I might have shed a tear or two, but I can almost guarantee, male or female, that who ever watches the video that they will too. It makes me happy to see videos like these because in this current society the world is revolved around a lot of negativity. If you turn on the news all you see hear is “this person died today”, “this many soldiers died yesterday”, you get my point. Seeing the video reminds me that I myself have a great father, and just like Dick, my father would do anything for me. So I’ll leave you here with the link to the video and I have copy pasted the story of this amazing father down below. So please, take 10 minutes out of your life and watch this video and read the story because it makes the video that much better. I promise you it won’t be a waste.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=D52rJd9GX10

Strongest Dad in the World

[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay
for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in
marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a
wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and
pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same
day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back
mountain climbing. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame,
right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick
was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him
brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'’ Dick says doctors told
him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an
institution.'’

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes
followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the
engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was
anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,'’ Dick says he was
told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.'’

“Tell him a joke,'’ Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out
a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed
him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his
head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!'’
And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the
school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want
to do that.'’

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker'’ who never ran
more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still,
he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,'’ Dick says. “I was sore for
two weeks.'’

That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,'’ he typed, “when we were
running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!'’

And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving
Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly
shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
“No way,'’ Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite
a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a
few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then
they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran
another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the
following year.

Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?'’

How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since
he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still,
Dick tried.

Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour
Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud
getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you
think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,'’ he says.
Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling'’ he gets seeing Rick
with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston
Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their
best time’? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world
record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens
to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at
the time.

“No question about it,'’ Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.'’

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had
a mild heart attack arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in
such great shape,'’ one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15
years ago.'’

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in
Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass.,
always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and
compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this
Father’s Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really
wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. `The thing I’d most like,'’
Rick types, “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.'’

I am going to be straight up honest here, I think the war in Iraq is by far the stupidest decision the government has made in the last couple years. The CNN article just helps me prove that. The article shows that a recent report shows that the war increased terrorist threats to the United States. The only thing that the U.S. has really accomplished and did well on was the capturing of Saddam Hussein. Other than that I don’t think the amount of lives lost in this war was worth for what we have accomplished. Everyday innocent people, both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens, die because of this war. I don’t even know why the U.S. even went into Iraq in the first place. From what I remember, I don’t think the U.S. had any strong reasons to go into Iraq and invade their land. I understand that capturing Saddam was important, and believe me, as an Israeli I am really happy that they captured that waste of a life, but I think we should have left right after that. The war is only pissing terrorists of even more, giving them more reasons to send us threats. What we need to do is focus on capturing that other man the government seems to have kind of forgotten about, you might know his name, Osama bin Laden. We need to put all of our efforts in getting him, and not in killing innocent civilians for what, I don’t know.

For our Project 1 assignment we had to choose two articles arguing any topic. I decided to do the legalization of drugs. The first article was called “Legalization is a terrible idea what’s worse is that it won’t solve the problem.” In this article the author argues that the legalization of drugs is a bad idea. In the article he proposes three ways to help win this war with drugs. Some ways were for stronger law enforcement, awareness campaigns, and higher education in drug education. The author states that just because people steal doesn’t mean that they should legalize stealing, same goes with drinking and driving, speeding, and drugs. The other article argues a completely different position. The title of the other article is Drug laws don’t work; it’s time to try legalizing them.” This author argues that we have been loosing the war on drugs, and its time to try and legalize them. He claims that there are many deaths happening because of drug deals. He states that with legalizing drugs, we can put tax charges on it and help create a revenue to help those addicted to drugs. The author also says that with legalizing drugs, it will put distribution in the government’s hands and there will be a lot less killings from drug deals gone bad. Personally, I don’t know if legalizing ALL drugs is the way to go but it’s time to change the way we tackle this “war on drugs” because we have lost the war, and drug use is pretty high.

I will absent from the campus Friday, September 29th. I will be back on Monday October 2nd.

If you need immediate assistance, you can contact the USF Tampa’s Ask-A-Librarian services or, for a short, factual question, use the PCC/USF Library.

One student of mine came to me and gushed she was not concerned about her accent any more after accomplishing some assignments in the course I am teaching. She explained that she now realized her accent was part of her identity and she should be proud of her culture and identity, which make her unique.

Given the overarching goal of preparing mainstream pre-service teachers to deliver ESOL-sensitive pedagogy, the ESOL endorsement program seldom addresses how to help minority pre-service teachers get prepared to face mainstream as well as minority K-12 students (some of them share the same cultural background with the minority teacher) although it has been widely advocated that more minority teachers are needed in today’s K-12 schools because of increasingly diversified student population. In other words, as teacher trainers, we are striving to prepare our teachers to accommodate the needs of diversified students, but fail to accommodate the needs of our teachers with non-mainstream cultural background. These minority teachers are struggling to mainstream themselves to be accepted as qualified school teachers, sometimes sacrificing losing their own cultural and linguistic identities. Despite the fact that they are assumed to be ELL students’ role models, many of them are not even comfortable with their own minority backgrounds. How can we trust them to help ELL students in K-12 to confidently live through their school ife?

Although some assignments in ESOL programs implicitly encourage pre-service teachers to face their own cultures, it in any rate is still an under-the-table topic. I think it deserves the attention of teacher trainers and administrators to explicitly address minority student teachers’ special needs in today’s ESOL endorsement programs.

In project one we were told to choose two articles, both of which pertaining to a similar topic, and compare them to each other in order to come to an understanding about which one was more effective and utilized the rhetorial strategies better. One of the articles came from the opinion editorial section of the michigan daily and was titled: ” From the Daily: The war on Sex. Bush’s focus on abstience is dangerous.” The second article was from a scholarly journal the Journal of Adolescent Health, and it is written by several doctors. The article was titled “Abstinence-only educatino policies and programs: a position paper for the Society for Adolescent Medicine.” The main points that i touched on in my paper was fisrt the most obvious advantage one of the articles had and that was the scholarly journal. This article, being that it was written by several doctors, had an outstanding amount of credibilty because of where it came from and who it was written by. People will hold a scholarly journal with more regard than they would an article written by a columnist in an opinion section. The other things that i touched on were both articles ability to gain the respect of both viewpoints. I think that the authors all demonstrated very well that they were acknowleding the opposing viewpoint and not completly dismissing it. And finally i talked about the use of language. One of the articles was very simple and one used very upper level language, but was able to explain everything they were saying.

From http://www.fsu.edu/~unicomm/pages/
releases/2006_09/FloridaBookAwards.html

******************

FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND ‘FLORIDA BOOK AWARDS’ KICKS OFF WITH CALL FOR
ENTRIES
Contest unites FSU, sponsors statewide in celebration of year’s best
books by Florida authors

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Kick-off is Sept. 25 for the First Annual Florida
Book Awards, the most comprehensive competition of its kind ever
launched in the state and an all-around celebration of the year’s best
books by Sunshine State authors.

Spearheaded by the Florida State University Program in American and
Florida Studies, the first-of-its-kind contest is co-sponsored by more
than a dozen high-profile humanities organizations from around the
state. It seeks submissions penned by new and established authors alike
in seven categories ranging from poetry to popular fiction to young
adult literature. The distinguished judges are scholars and literary
luminaries from FSU and other Florida universities and from co-sponsors
such as the Florida Center for the Book, State Library and Archives of
Florida and Florida Humanities Council.

John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the U.S. Library of
Congress, calls the Florida Book Awards the most comprehensive
initiative of its kind in the country.

“With an early review like that, we hope this project serves as a model
nationwide,” said FSU’s Wayne Wiegand, a professor of library and
information studies and of American studies, who serves as director of
the Florida Book Awards.

“Models matter,” Wiegand said, particularly in the nation’s
fourth-largest state. After all, he resolved to help create the Florida
competition after visiting the Commonwealth Club of California, home to
that state’s annual book awards program for 75 years. In the club’s
permanent display of winning books was John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of
Wrath.”

“Proof positive of the treasure that such initiatives may uncover,”
Wiegand said.

Coordinating the competition with Wiegand is John Fenstermaker,
director of the Program in American and Florida studies at FSU —
through which all entries must pass — and chair of the Book Awards
executive committee. He declares the project “an extraordinary example
of cooperation between our program and the principal organizations in
the humanities in Florida.”

The First Annual Florida Book Awards is calling for entries with an
original publication date between Jan. 1, 2006, and Dec. 31, 2006.
Florida authors, co-authors — all must be full-time residents except
in the non-fiction category — literary agents, publishers or any
member of the public may submit an unlimited number of titles into
competition. Required forms, fees ($50 per title, capped at $250) and
review copies must arrive no later than 5 p.m., Jan. 5, 2007.

FSU and other co-sponsors will showcase the books throughout the year
in various ways: permanent, autographed library displays of “Gold
Award” and “Silver Award” recipients, profiles of the winning authors
and books in the prestigious Florida Humanities Council “Forum,” and
readings, book fairs, posters and more. The competition phase concludes
in early March with the announcement of up to five finalists in each
category: general fiction, children’s literature, young adult
literature, Florida non-fiction, poetry, popular fiction and Spanish
language works.

On March 28, 2007, the first annual competition will culminate in
Tallahassee with a ceremony at the State Library and Archives to
recognize formally the works judged tops by jurors (such as acclaimed
poet David Kirby of FSU) drawn from several universities and other
co-sponsoring bodies across Florida.

In addition to FSU’s Program in American and Florida Studies, a
complete list of First Annual Florida Book Awards co-sponsors includes
the Florida Center for the Book; the State Library and Archives of
Florida; Florida Historical Society; Florida Humanities Council;
Florida Library Association; Governor’s Family Literacy Initiative;
Florida Literary Arts Coalition; Florida Association for Media in
Education; Florida Center for the Literary Arts; Friends of the FSU
Libraries; Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America; and “Just
Read, Florida!” The Florida Division of Cultural Affairs will sponsor
the March 28 awards ceremony.

Contest guidelines, entry forms, and lists of sponsors, jury members
and key contacts on the Florida Book Awards, are available through the
FSU Program in American & Florida Studies website,
http://www.fsu.edu/~ams>.

Down the road, Wiegand and Fenstermaker envision winning entries
serving as subjects in academic courses and helping in other ways to
call attention to contemporary Florida book culture and to broader
issues in Florida studies.

“Much hinges on spreading the word about the Awards, especially in
2006, the first year,” Fenstermaker said. “We hope to set a high bar
for winners in each category. Frankly, we are genuinely optimistic. We
don’t expect to be disappointed.”

Banned Books Week is mentioned today in the Tampa Tribune by guest commentator, Nicole Yunger Halpern.

The most recent movie I have seen was “The Black Dahlia” starring Scarlet Johansson, Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckert, and Hilary Swank. The Screenplay is an adaptation of the novel detailing one of the most notorious, unsolved Hollywood murders by James Ellroy. When police discover a young Hollywood hopeful’s body sliced in half with all of the organs missing, they assign a duo of detectives (Eckert and Hartnett) to find the killer and crack the case. Due to one of the detective’s obsession with solving the crime his marriage to Kay (Johansson) suffers and his partner uncovers a disturbing link to the victim and a famous Hollywood socialite, (Swank) and daughter of one key player.
I felt “The Black Dahlia” was very good. It certainly kept your attention as well as kept you guessing. There are mysteries unraveling the entire way and it was fun discovering how everything linked in the end. Johansson was a very convincing lady of the 1920’s-1930’s era and her chemistry with real-life boyfriend Hartnett was obvious. Hartnett was likeable in his investigator, ex-boxer role and it was neat seeing Swank play a different role than anywhere in the realm of normal for her. It was refreshing to see her play a lustful Hollywood socialite and what makes the movie is that it was based on a true story!

So far, I love living on my own in the dorms. I live with one of my good friends from high school and two other girls that I did not formerly know in the apartment style dorms. Living with roommates is fun, but there are definitely downsides to it as well. For example, we have had problems with people not doing to dishes or taking out the trash or cleaning up after themselves, which can be frustrating. Also, each person goes to bed at different times and is not always considerate of the others in the dorm. Today, my friend was napping and another roommate continued to yell into the phone in the living area. However, I feel that since I live in the apartment style dorm, the problems with living with roommates are minimal. Also, living with one of my good friends, we share almost everything and see each other all the time to plan going to lunch or working out. I never feel that I am bored when I am around my roommates! Overall, we enjoy each others company and help each other with homework or guy problems . Having someone else to live with, especially as a freshman, gives lots of opportunities for you to know what is going on, on and off campus.

David Shook compiled a list of books recently banned around the world in the September-October issue of World Literature Today:

Among the banned others are Paul Coehlo and Stanley Parks.

If you have questions or suggestions for the topics to be included in the lesson plan please post your comments!