Susan Bordo Blog

While writing this essay, I used a source from the New York Times I found this article titled "It's a Face-Lifted, Tummy-Tucked Jungle Out There," in order to fit my essay well because this article states exactly what I was trying to get across in this essay. Back in the day having a bad body was a norm for men, and no one ever really paid any attention to the fact that men could look good too. Now men are paying money to go to the gyms, and buying products to make themselves look good. As I have stated, muscles have devalued money, and the market for products and procedures is at $9.5 billion or so a year. After reading this article I knew that I had to included this information in my essay.

Bibliography
Spindler, Amy M. "It's a Face-Lifted, Tummy-Tucked Jungle Out There - New York Times." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 9 June 1996. Web. 27 Oct. 2011. .

Blog 5: DFW, "Address to Kenyon College"

This article was very interesting to read. I found that many of David Foster Wallace's points to be true. I wish that I was able to hear this speech in person. The one thing that I did not get was the in very beginning of the piece, when he talks about the two fish. While reading that I was thinking, what did the fish have to do with anything? Maybe if someone explains this in simpler terms for me I will understand it. There was one part of the article that stuck out to me, when he was talking about the two men in the bar, the religious man and the atheist. When the atheist told his story about him being stuck in the blizzard, and he prayed for the first time, I thought that since he got out of the blizzard alive, the he would start to believe in God. That was not the correct guess, because he said that the only reason that he got out of the blizzard was because of the Eskimos that told him the right way to go. My way of thinking would have been that God sent the Eskimos to help out the atheist, but that was not his interpretation of the whole thing. Like David said, there is always two sides to a story, and you should not be so arrogant when thinking about things. All in all, I thought that this was an interesting article to read and I would love to read more of his speeches, if there are anymore out there.

Blog 4: "The Banking Concept of Education"

While reading the essay "The Banking Concept of Education," by Paulo Friere, I found many things to be pretty interesting and some parts to be quite complicated. The beginning and the end parts were easy to grab a hold of, but the middle part of the essay was not easy to understand. I had to keep rereading things so that I could get a better understanding of what he was talking about. But there was one part of the essay that stuck out to me, and that was when he said "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, the students are the depositories, and the teacher is the depositor. I have been in school for a while and I have never thought of education that way. I agree with this statement because that is how most of my schooling has been. The teacher giving me information, me remembering it for a test then forgetting most of it after the test is over. I do not think that this is the best way for people to learn because if you do not take the time out to learn the information, you will not know anything when it is time to apply the information that you learned in school to work. I do not think that tests are the best way to grade a person on whether they are learning anything. I believe that there should be another way to grade a student of whether they know the information or not.

Research Exploratory Blog II: Research Prospectus

There has always been one problem that we have in the world today that I have always thought about. The problem that I am referring to is obesity. This has always been on my mind because I did not grow up around people who were obese. The people that I always hung out around when I was younger was always into sports and was never home playing on the different types of game systems all night. I chose this topic because obesity has become a real problem in the world today. There are now young children that are obese, and I want to know why there are so many young children are this way.
My thesis statement is has the decline of physical activity in schools increased obesity? In order to support my thesis, I have to find evidence that states many reasons of why and how the decline of physical activity has increased obesity in the world today. In order to do this I would like to find more articles that go through a child’s ordinary day. I would like to take it upon myself and do my own personal researching, going out an interviewing young children in the neighborhood where I live at in Jacksonville to find out how they feel about the schools taking out physical education. I want to know are they happy that they will not have to do any physical activity in school or are some of them mad at the fact that they will not have a chance in school to have fun and exercise while they are in school. I think that this is the main reason why children are obese and unhealthy. I believe that this problem needs to be fixed and physical activity in schools should more important.
I believe that the only counterargument that I will have is that the parents may say that their kids are getting hurt while doing the different activities in physical education. I would say that if their children were in good shape and knew what they were doing while participating in these activities they would not get hurt as easily.
While doing research, I have found many articles that talks about how the decrease in physical activities in schools has caused many young children to become obese. I have looked at articles on the ESPN website, two articles on google scholar, which include, Childhood Obesity: future directions and research priorities, and Childhood Obesity: a new pandemic of the new millennium. While using those sources I will also use my own information from the interviews that I am going to do.
I believe that this is a good research for me to do because I would get to know what the children think about the schools taking out physical education.

Blog 3: "The Achievement of Desire"

While reading the story, "The Achievement of Desire" I could relate to this story a lot. Some parts of it has happened to me personally, and others I have seen it happen to other people. The one thing that happened to me was that I was always reading some type of book. When I was younger I always got picked on by other people because I was always reading in school. One time I went to the toy store and my cousin told me that I could pick out a toy to play with, and instead I picked out a book to read. They still talk about this today and it happened when I was about 8 years old. My family always encouraged me to read but never made me, I think that is why I enjoy it so much. Another thing that I have seen id that some kids do not have the privilege to get help at home with homework like I had. I feel blessed now knowing that whenever I needed help on homework or something to do with school it was always available to me. There are some kids out there who did not have that same privilege because their parents did not know how to do it. There are some kids out there who does all of their homework on their own with no kind of help from anyone in their home.

Blog 2: "The Pain Scale"

While reading "The Pain Scale," by: Eula Biss I found that she is a very interesting author, and her mind wild. This story was very interesting and there were many things that stuck out to me while reading this. She had a very interesting way of pointing out her pain or the ways of choosing how much you were in pain by the numbers on the scale. That one thing that really stuck out to me was the way that she headed each different section. For instance, when she was talking about the level of zero pain she had a zero at the end of the line with an arrow going in the positive number direction, but when she went on to talk about the level of pain 1 she had a number 1 with arrows coming from both directions. I found that to be very interesting because I thought that there was no number under zero when it comes to the pain scale, so that one thing had me thinking a lot.

Blog 1: "Why Bother?"

While reading this article "Why Bother?", I found it to be different from what I thought this article was going to be about. i had no idea that this story was going to be anything about saving energy, basically going green. But once you think about it that is the right question to ask when talking about going green. The author stated what if he turned his life around and started to do everything to conserve energyl, like walking to work, not eating beef, hang his laundry on a line, and go completely local. But then there is someone out else out there who is doing the complete opposite, what sense does that make to change his ways while outher people are not changing their ways. I think that is a good question to ask when it comes to going green and saving energy, "Why Bother?" I got a lot of information out of reading this article and I found it to be very interesting to read and would like to read more about it.