Junior Theme #3

After about another week of research, I have found my topic to be even more interesting than I though it would be. I have chosen to interview a special education teacher at a Transition School (18-22 year olds), but I have not been able to contact her as of yet.
I finshed my book last night. The only usuable part for my paper was the first half, or when the narrator was in primary and secondary school, but it was still interesting to read about the full like of an undiagnosed woman with autism. She went through her whole life, or at least until she was 26, before knowing what exactly she had, with people for the first 26 years of her life just calling her "disturbed" or "slow." It is really interesting to see the world through the lens of someone with autism, especially because I spend 2 periods of every school day with students who have the disease. Now, I can actually understand where they are coming from, and exactly why they do not feel emotions or even have that much communication with "our world" versus "their own world."
For my paper, I have only written an introduction, but I am very satisfied with it. I plan to write about a paragraph each night, and the next section of our paper is due Monday.

Illinois and Developmental Disabilities

During advisory today, I was at an ELS (Enriching Lives through Service) meeting. For those who do not know, ELS is a club at our school that allows regular-ed students to interact with special-ed student in a classroom environment. I participate in ELS during all of my free periods, which is about 8 periods each week. At the meeting, the sponsor brought up an article that was sent to him. I just read the article and was very surprised by what it said. It was about how out of the 50 states in the US, Illinois is 51st (when District of Columbia included) out of all of the states to have general funding for people with Developmental Disabilities. Think about it: the 10th most wealthiest state in the nation funds people with disabilities the least? That does not make any sense at all to me. The article said that in order for Illinois to reach average spending would take about $250 million. I think that something needs to be done so that students with disabilities all over Illinois can be taught at the exact level that they need to be taught at. I plan to use this article as evidence in my Junior Theme.

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.