Piggy Back

A sentence starts out like the first note sung in a song.
On stage, and in front of many.
The vocalist has been waiting to start her song, but could not have
her water onstage with her.
It is time to sing her first note,
and make an impression.
Will her audience think she is wonderful?
She chooses to take one last swallow instead of clearing her throat.
Takes a deep, supported breath
and sings the A she has practiced for months.
The introduction is complete.
So far, so good.
Although the beginning is not the part of the song she is most concerned about,
It is another successful start that gives her confidence for the rest of the piece.
She anticipates the most difficult parts of the bridge and finale,
And realizes she must just relax and go for it.
It is an adrenaline rush that she can't imagine topping, and although she feels her knees shaking,
She lives for this.

Free Write: Cell Phones

The cellular telephone was named for it's obvious purpose of purveying sound.  It's original and sole purpose is to send the sounds of one person's voice to the ear of another and vice versa.  However, now cell phones are programed to send actual text, pictures, and other media not dealing with sound.  This change occurred because text is convenient, more private, and less of an event.  In order to talk on the phone you need an appropriate setting and time.  Today, if you find yourself at a loud and busy concert, getting held late at work, or on the move and too busy to talk, you can send the message you are trying to convey silently with text.  It is less personal and more direct.  My dad always laughs about how easy boys have it today, when they can just ask a girl out over a text.  It is much easier to say anything over a text.  It is almost like people develop a certain personality (sometimes different from their real-life one) over their texting.

Moved and Unmoved by G and H

Sample G:
Moved
1. There is an abundance of supporting examples.
2. There is a strong thesis statement.
3. There are references to different fact sources from sports to science.
4. It has a specific voice about it that makes you believe what is being presented.
5. Mentions things like the fast pace of our society, thirst for energy, and instant gratification, which all define our culture.
6. There is a strong conclusion.

Unmoved
1. There is no mentioning of the negatives of the energy drink.
2. The diet version isn't specified in the diet section.
3. Calories and nutrition facts are not included.
4. No specific people are mentioned.
5. There aren't direct quotations linked to a speaker.
6. The addiction and socially inappropriate nature of the drink isn't highlighted.

Sample H:
Moved
1. There is an abundance of statistics.
2. Numbers are featured in the opening paragraph, which attracts the attention of the reader.
3. This paper in concise, but fairly thorough.
4. Great detail is used in the points set forth.
5. Focuses on trend of iPods.
6. Branches and highlights Podcasts (different from my iPod essay).

Unmoved
1. This essay lacks a stress on music and it's importance and cultural connection.
2. It fails to feature any personal experience.
3. It does not touch on applications much.
4. It does not give information about the origin and invention of the iPod.
5. It gives little sense of personal interest.
6. There are not many links to current society and American culture.

3 Minute Free Write

   It is 48 degrees today, and despite my new cough, I feel wonderful.  It is gorgeous outside, and I just found out that I am going home tomorrow. Being that home is 8 hours away, I wasn't expecting to leave for the long weekend.  My mom just had surgery though, and I am going home to help out since I can.  My sister is a busy Junior in high school right now, and she has MORP this weekend (It's a dance that the girls ask the guys to).  My dad will be working at night, and I would really appreciate some time at home.  I need to catch up on sleep.  Weather like this doesn't make you want to curl up inside though.  I love being outside, and I feel like the pleasant feeling of the weather brings that same feeling into the creatures enjoying it.  I'm looking forward to my trip home alone.  I'll get to do a lot of good people watching, studying, writing, and much much needed sleep in.

Twelve Questions About My Object

1. Are you from the sea?
2. Are you currently the way you have always been?
3. Are you made up from pastel blue, cream, orange, and brown colors?
4. Do you have rings of color?
5. Could water be sipped from you?
6. Do you have a cone-like shape on the innermost part of you?
7. Can I see inside of you?
8. Are you of a medium size compared to other class shells?
9. Are your color lines fairly distinct?
10. Could you be a home to a creature?
11. Do you make a porcelain glassy sound when you fall on the table or floor?
12. Are you fancy or dull?

Shell Activity!

3:22

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON

Dir. by Dean Fleischer-Camp Marcel is voiced (untreated & unenhanced) by a genius named Jenny Slate Written by Jenny + Dean More coming soon! www ...

by MARCELTHESHELL
4 months ago
6,837,366 views

• HD

A Note About Complex Errors

In thinking about a certain idea, many sentences and ideas can be drawn by using detailed words within this idea.

  This kind of sentence is confusing to me. At first glance I thought it said and meant something completely different, and there was a comma error in a list. When I realized that the word 'In' was not supposed to be 'I'm,' the first thing I noticed was the over-usage of the word idea.  This sentence is so vague, that I don't really know what it is explaining.  The punctuation of this is also confusing to me.  In thinking about a certain idea, many sentences and ideas can be drawn, by using detailed word, and within this date are all confusing combinations of words to put together.  Is there need for another comma? Where does that second one go?  If I were to write this sentence, I would probably add a comma before within, just to be safe.  Also, is this person talking about sentences he/she could write or specific examples from some text?  I feel that I could better correct this sentence if I knew what it was about. 

What kind of a reader are you? in class assignment

Carolyn:  “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!”
“I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” 

Carolyn's Mother: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would have waited."

Craig:  “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.”

“I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

Mischel:  “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” 

“There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.”

 “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ”
 “That’s when I realized I had to do this seriously,” he says.

Craig:  “Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person,” Craig says. “Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me make better career choices and stuff.”

Mischel: “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
“If you want to know why some kids can wait and others can’t, then you’ve got to think like they think,” Mischel says.

 “At the time, it seemed like a mental X-ray machine,” he says. “You could solve a person by showing them a picture.”
 “The East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive hedonists, who were always living for the moment and never thought about the future,” he says. “The Africans, meanwhile, would say that the East Indians didn’t know how to live and would stuff money in their mattress and never enjoy themselves.”
 “It went against the way we’d been thinking about personality since the four humors and the ancient Greeks,” he says.
 “I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at,” he says. “We just have to look in the right way.”
 “Young kids are pure id,” Mischel says. “They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marvelled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

Winters:  “We recently tried to do a version of it, and the kids were very excited about having food in the game room,” she says. “There are so many allergies and peculiar diets today that we don’t do many things with food.”

Mischel:  “When you’re investigating will power in a four-year-old, little things make a big difference,” he says. “How big should the marshmallows be? What kind of cookies work best?”
“I knew we’d designed it well when a few kids wanted to quit as soon as we explained the conditions to them,” he says. “They knew this was going to be very difficult.”

“If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

“What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

“If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”
“In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.”

“When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.”

“All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Berman:  “We can’t give these people marshmallows,” Berman

Jonides:  “These tasks have been studied so many times that we pretty much know where to look and what we’re going to find,” Jonides says. 

“These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar,” Jonides says. “The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.”

Shoda:  “We’re incredibly complicated creatures,” Shoda says. “Even the simplest aspects of personality are driven by dozens and dozens of different genes.”

Carolyn:  “They turned my kitchen into a lab,” Carolyn told me. “They set up a little tent where they tested my oldest daughter on the delay task with some cookies. I remember thinking, I really hope she can wait.”

Mischel:  "I’m not interested in looking at the brain just so we can use a fancy machine,” he says. “The real question is what can we do with this fMRI data that we couldn’t do before?”
“This is the group I’m most interested in,” he says. “They have substantially improved their lives.”

 

Duhkworth:   “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.”

She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control."

Levin:  “The core feature of the KIPP approach is that character matters for success,” Levin says. “Educators like to talk about character skills when kids are in kindergarten—we send young kids home with a report card about ‘working well with others’ or ‘not talking out of turn.’ But then, just when these skills start to matter, we stop trying to improve them. We just throw up our hands and complain.”

“We know how to teach math skills, but it’s harder to measure character strengths,”

Duhkworth: “When you do these large-scale educational studies, there are ninety-nine uninteresting reasons the study could fail,” Duckworth says. “Maybe a teacher doesn’t show the video, or maybe there’s a field trip on the day of the testing. This is what keeps me up at night.”

Mischel: “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?”
“We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ”

Flight of the Kuaka Rhetorical Analysis

     After reading this article from Don Stap, I took a moment to break down his rhetorical approach into the specific appeals: Pathos and Ethos.  Pathos describes a quality in his writing that focuses more on pity or emotion from the reader.  The introduction paragraph sets the article in an uncomfortable and sad muddy place, and right away readers are emotionally invested in some way.  Ethos, on the other hand, is a more factual, cultural, and presentational kind of approach.  This style provides the facts and statistics that open the readers eyes to the reality of the situation in black and white.  For example, the first full paragraph on page 110 provides frightening numbers and specific illustrations of the hunting and loss of grass that are affecting wildlife.  Godwits become the leading characters for the reader to identify with, and the issues described in this article relate more directly to them than other species.
     Stap is careful to utilize the five canons of rhetoric, as well.  These include: invention/discovery, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. His discovery lies in the examples and statistic of endangered birds and the lack of wetlands. He shares personal experience and quotes others with knowledge on the subject. The arrangement of this article has a persuasive arch, beginning with painting a picture of the muddy location in New Zealand. Next, the specific facts and supporting links fill up the body of the essay, and he ends with more lyrical writing that leaves the reader with a more optimistic feeling about the future of the birds.  This arch can be linked to his style, for the sections of numbers and diversions about other birds are written more scientifically and informatively than those creating an image for the reader.  Stap does a good job at not letting his writing get stale.  Memory is sort of a sneaky canon that makes a big impact of the reader.  If a reader can realise a connection to something previously read in the same piece, that information is solidified for them and they recognize the importance of it.  Making connections is fulfilling as a reader, so when Stap touches back to Yalu Jiang, readers remember it's relevance from the previous page.  The delivery of this information is unique to other rhetorical articles.  I felt that the rhetoric wasn't shoved in my face and, instead, more politely presented to me in a mature manner.  I appreciated the calmness of Staps writing.  A lot was covered in eight pages, but Stap has managed to increase my knowledge of migrating birds, locations for recovery, population of birds, and concern for their survival.

"Don't!" Note Card Workshop

"While Mischel was beginning to dismantle the methods of his field, the 

Harvard psychology department was in tumult."

The following sections of colored text are copied as directly as possible from my note cards.  These are answers or embellishments from my fellow students to help explain the quotation above.

Mischel's experimental methods greatly attracted the world of psychology.  Harvard could have been conducting a similar experiment and then have gotten scooped by Mischel, or his findings disproved by a theory someone else in the psychology department had.  Such connections include a theory that a child's tendency to wait has no impact or correlation with their progress as an adult.  This shook the department like an earthquake, but the end result left a new topography and a new disciplinary field to be discovered and investigated.  From this came a new series of questions to which Mischel and his team could respond.  Indeed, such an upset was very productive for his inquiries into the role of delayed gratification as a measure of future academic and career success. The stability of the researchers department can radically influence the outcome of a test: Mischel's findings shook what was previously believed about personalities/psychological disorders, but not all of his colleagues agreed on their cogency. 

Mischel's findings were huge in the field of psychology.  The department had a straight-jacket view of psychology.  When Mischel completed his findings, the department was in disbelief because it was against what was true to them.  The experiment was not just an experiment about patience, but an eventual milestone for psychology. 

It was really interesting to read through these answers after rereading the text and actually identifying the quotation in it's true from.  Jonah Lehrer had just touched on the progression of Mischel's work, and the way he was working through the methods of psychology.  The "tumult" Harvard is said to have been in is referring to the state of the students.  Lehrer follows with, " Mischel remembers graduate students' desks giving way to mattresses, and large packages from Ciba chemicals, in Switzerland, arriving in the mail. Mischel had nothing against hippies, but he wanted modern psychology to be rigorous and empirical. " The confusing quotation is describing the department and how involved people were acting in the 60's.  Mischel was doing some break-through work, but that wasn't why Harvard was in tumult. Although, he did end up moving to Palo Alto to work at Stanford in 1962.

small object, LARGE SUBJECT

            The iPod is one of the most popular music playing devices of all time.  The first iPod model was launched on October 23^rd, 2001 as a first class potable media player.  The five-gigabyte hard drive allowed people to listen to 1,000 songs from their pocket.  The presence of this device brought must-have higher technology into to world of music again.  The success of Apple products skyrocketed and there are now 16 different kinds of iPods.  Many people would probably use Apple as an American icon and it is one of the most popular household brand names.  Eleven percent of Americans own their own iPods, use them daily, explore and share music through them, and are comforted by their portable media playing devise. 

            Apple is currently advertising that with your iPod, “you can take anything anywhere.”  It is miraculous that so much media can fit into such a small devise, but having so much on one electronic makes it easier for people to use, care for, and rely on.  Apple also promotes its items as “the perfect gift for anyone.” I couldn’t agree more.  As previously stated, there are several kinds of iPods to fit the lifestyle of, essentially, anyone.  The technological advancement of this product makes it better for the majority more and more every day.  iPods are linked to iTunes, which helps artists make money from their work, and encourages people not to download illegally.  The quality of iTunes songs and movies are top notch, and there are very often promotional deals and free songs to help spread music of otherwise unrecognized artists who deserve a listen.

            Music is a huge part of my life, and I would go as far as to say that I couldn’t live without it.  My iPod is one of my most important tangible items, and I love that it really has almost everything on it.  I am still a fan of the classic CD, but with an iPod you have so much variety.  It is far more convenient to carry one item with 32 gigabytes of video, music, and pictures than bring a CD case, portable DVD player, and camera or developed film.  As exaggerated as that sounds, all of those important things can fit into the palm of my hand with my iPod.  I use my iPod with my computer, I keep information on it, store days worth of songs, practice with it, run with it, and feel serenity and excitement from it.  It is so important to bring music with you wherever you go in life, and iPods make that possible.

            Producers, like Steve Jobs, know that their product is a hit.  It works, is well advertised, trendy, and well liked by many.  A large percentage of Americans find owning an iPod absolutely necessary and a part of everyday life.  The fact that iPods are so highly valued and desired makes them an extremely successful product and safe investment.  Art is being shared in such a positive way through these electronics and many products and ideas can influence owners and future owners of iPods and other Apple products.  The company is healthy and in constant motion, and those are two things that our culture always wants to be.