Junior Theme #2

So I have not blogged in a while, but this is just to tell you where I am going with Junior Theme. It took me a while, but I finally got a question. It started out as Why are there so many laws about the rights of and the responsibilities to people with special needs? I discovered that this is not exactly what I was looking for, so it changed to Why should society pay for autism therapy? Finally, my real question that I am most likely going to stick with is Why is there such an increase in the demand for special education?

Since there is such a wide range of disabilities, I plan to focus mainly on autism. I have looked on CQ Researcher, and I found a report that I will use. I have looked at a couple different books on autism, such as The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, and I have finally landed on Without Reason by Charles Hart. This book is about a man who copes with having both an older brother and a son diagnosed with autism. It is a little long, but I feel that it will be a very interesting book to read. One other thing that I am looking forward to doing is finding a movie that I can watch relating to this subject. So far I think I will watch Rain Man or Forrest Gump.

Junior Theme

Just warning you that this post is extremely random.
So we started talking about Junior Theme on Thursday, and since then I have been struck with the difficulty of thinking of what exactly the outcome will be. We have not gotten an exact outline of the paper or all that it entails yet, but isn't it just another research paper? My sister just turned hers in after countless hours of editing and re-editing. Talk about stressful I plan to just go into it thinking of it as another paper, but on something that I am actually interested in, and I feel like that will not put as much stress on myself.
The theme that I am choosing to do is on education. More specifically, my favorite topic that I have chosen is on students with disabilities, and how they are viewed in society, or even by regular ed students. This is a topic that is very important to me, and I can't wait to start learning more about it, which seems weird that I am really excited to start writing a paper.
The words "Junior Theme" to me have a very negative connotation. It is something that we have been hearing about from older siblings or have been daunted by since freshman year. Should it really be viewed as something so stressful and unnecessary? Yes, I am supporting writing a paper right now because I for one am a person who likes to research a topic that I am interested in, and I think that I will have a really good outcome of this paper. Anyone else?

Barbie Turns 49

I was looking on the NPR site today and I came across the latest talk, which was how Barbie, the doll that every girl grew up with, turned 49 on Sunday. It came as quite a shock to me, because I thought these dolls were much more recent than that. As I kept listening to the talk show, I was astonished to hear all of the political aspects and issues that surrounded a piece of plastic since their worldwide fame does not show any of this.
One of the issues was the tilt in her head. Don't remember that? That is because the shape of Barbie's face became upright because the head tilt connoted something towards the feminist movement. Also, initially, Sears, the first place to sell Barbie, would not sell the doll because if she would be a real person, her body would not be "proportional" if you know what I mean.
An interesting fact that I learned though, was the background of the doll. She had an entire history that got shafted to the background out of her fame. The original face was taken from that of a 40 year old to look like a 17 year old, which I find both weird and confusing.
I am relating this back to our women and children theme from before because, through this doll that seemed to change every 3 year olds life, the more important issues seem to parallel those of the ones we discussed in class. The picture above is of the first ever Barbie. Who knew Barbie had so many issues?

Child Study Center

After last week's discussion on Child Development: then and now, I was very interested in different ways Self Regulation has inevitably changed in the past years. After searching online, I came across the Child Study Center, a center whose work revolves around the developmental growth of infants in Virginia. I found it very interesting to see what interests children more than anything, which is animals, and how reading books either has huge or not so huge effects on their learning environment. It might just be me who finds this interesting, because I take such a liking to psychology and understanding what is going on in the minds of those who can not communicate to such an ability. It really surprises me, though, to read from this website that the picture books that we clung to so much in our childhood could possibly have no effect on us the first one hundred times that we read it. So how has Self Regulation changed? I believe that in the past two or three decades, children have been spoiled so much as children, that in the study we learned about in class, it disables their ability to pay attention for more than five minutes at a time. Through this, I think that we are really teaching our parents more than our parents are teaching us at these young ages because no one wants to make the same error twice. So are we really teaching our parents what to do, and will we make these same mistakes as parents?

What has our youth really come to?

World Clock

I was just looking around at Bolos' tags when I came across this WORLD CLOCK. It immediately caught my attention from the rapid pace of numbers increasing every single second. There are a lot of different elements to this site, counting a numerous variety of statistics.
I have to say that the one that is most interesting to me is the one that counts the abortions. It is very frightening for me to see that the number of abortions is almost the same as the number of marriages this year so far. It seems like every minute there is an average of 88 abortions and 82 marriages. I really think that this relates to our theme of Women and Children, because the women are not getting married once they are pregnant, so they decide to have an abortion. To me, this is kind of SCARY to think of, but I am not going to get in to the whole Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice debate right now.
Looking at the biological side of this site, I see that there are about 70 species extinct per day. Being a biology student myself, and know there are millions of species in the world, it still surprises me when that many species are becoming extinct each day. Another thing I pay attention to is the number of births and the number of deaths happening each minute. Each minute, there are about 250 births and 100 deaths in the world. I think this is kind of weird to think about because to me its weird to think about something bigger than what you know.
What do you guys think about this site? I overall think it is interesting, but at the same time gives me a perspective of the world that I may not wish to see a whole lot.

Hillary Clinton and Alicia Keys - Superwoman

This video was posted as a response to the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" video on YouTube. In my opinion, I do not think it is as strong of a video because it is not an entire speech like Obama's was. Here are the lyrics to the song "Superwoman" by Alicia Keys:

Everywhere I'm turning
Nothing seems complete
I stand up and I'm searching
For the better part of me
I hang my head from sorrow
Slave to humanity
I wear it on my shoulders
Gotta find the strength in me

Chorus:

Cause I am a Superwoman
Yes I am
Yes she is
Even when I'm a mess
I still put on a vest
With an S on my chest
Oh yes
I'm a Superwoman

For all the mothers fighting
For better days to come
And all my women, all my women sitting here trying
To come home before the sun
And all my sisters
Coming together
Say yes I will
Yes I can

Chorus

When I'm breaking down
And I can't be found
And I start to get weak
Cause no one knows
Me underneath these clothes
But I can fly
We can fly, Oooohh

Clinton: "Too many have been invisible for too long. Well, you aren't invisible to me."

Cause I am a Superwoman
Yes I am
Yes she is
Even when I'm a mess
I still put on a vest
With an S on my chest
Oh yes
I'm a Superwoman

Propaganda

So we have recently been talking about propaganda and the different types. Propaganda, as we defined in class, means "one sided information that 'sells' you to the maker's viewpoint." I really enjoyed that lecture on Tuesday because it was both surprising and interesting to see different people characterize the big figures of WWII in different ways. For example, one of my favorite pictures in that power point was the one paralleling the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For me, it was my first time hearing this term, but I was surprised to see the parallel the cartoonist made with the Bible in that way. Basically, all of the ones under the "enemy" headline really struck me how as very interesting, because I loved seeing how different people portray the enemy. For example, one of the drawings showed Hitler with a huge body and a tiny head, and right away, we could tell that the artist had the idea that the enemy had the "do not think, just do" persona, or that they are small minded.
On Wednesday we looked at the McCain video. Mr. O'Connor kept bringing up the word "parody." During class that day, I just thought it meant "satirical" or "funny," but the actual dictionary definition is "a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing." Now i understand why he was calling it a parody: because everyone took the Obama video so seriously, and this one was just like an imitation.<--my "blond" moment. We discussed if this video is propaganda or not. I believe that it is not propaganda, because it was meant as something satirical.
To me, propaganda is something that has to be sold, not needs to be sold because it is so often that you see on tv something that has the power to be propaganda...if that sentence does not make sense to anyone but me I am very sorry...it happens a lot.