Blog Post 9

I saw a very interesting picture on Facebook the other day that said some interesting things about the young people of the working class. The left side showed American soldiers going into battle and it said "20 year olds in 1944, giving everything” and the right side showed Occupy Wall Street protesters and it said "20 year olds in 2011, wanting everything." It just shows how drastically the mentality of young people has changed in the past 60 years. During World War II, so many young, working class people were willing to give their time, and some even their lives to serve and protect their country. According to the picture, young people today are the exact opposite. They want their country to provide everything for them without having to fight or work for it. They feel like everyone is entitled to the same things, regardless of their financial status. I’m not saying that everyone should join the military, but they should at least work for what they want instead of expecting everything to be handed to them. If all the people participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement would get jobs and go to work and earn money, they could afford some of the things that they are begging for and earn them on their own. Also, I think the Occupy Wall Street movement is very poorly organized. Many people don’t even know everything they’re protesting for, and for every person that believes in the movement, there’s another person participating because it’s the “cool” thing to do.

Blog Post 8

My Commonplace essay will be similar to my analytical research paper. It will focus on the social exclusion of immigrants in America, using examples from Outcasts United and the secondary sources from my paper. I will discuss the ways in which immigrants are unfairly treated and why they are often stuck in the working class because they don't speak good English and are unfamiliar with American customs. The essay will persuade readers that diversity is a good thing, and people should be more accepting of immigrants and help them assimilate into American society. America is supposed to be a melting pot of different cultures, so people of every culture should have an equal chance to succeed. The hardest part of this essay will be making it compelling, immigration is not the most interesting topic for many readers, so I will have to be creative in making it interesting.

Blog 8

My commonplace will probably be the similar topic with my ARP. As my audience is my class made of students coming from different countries, there are many different education styles in different countries. My ARP talks about the Chinese education and American education. I think most students in our class do not know exactly about the current situation about Chinese education, even the Chinese students, some of them do not know the truth. It seems like the Chinese education is nothing to do with the students from other countries. Actually, I think the unreasonable situation exists in almost every society. I hope everyone will think more about the real situation in his society including the education, the medical service or job opportunity.Also, to the phenomenon that the government gives pressure to those who dare to speak out the reality, we should pay attention. To the Chinese students, only when you know the truth will know what to do in the future. To the foreign students, I hope some of them will have the ability to help those developing countries solve these unreasonable problems. And they may find the similar situation is in their country. Besides, we know there are many poor people who can not afford the tuition all over the world. One day, If we have enough money we should donate it to the charity of education.

Blog #8

My Commonplace essay will probably be about how colorblindness affects our actual school system. I think it definitely speaks to my audience (my English class) because the students in my class are from everywhere around the world. So, they might have experiences with any kind of racism or they probably have an opinion on racism. That is how I am going to make my audience curious about my essay. I am thinking about starting with a little story about that topic. Maybe I will try and use Scruggs’ (an author of one my source in my ARP) story at the beginning of my text. She tells a story about a black child who went to school and was treated slightly differently than the white students. Additionally, the teacher did not talk about the African culture at all. He started right away with the Greek culture. This inequality made his mother really mad about the school system and she started to speak with the head master of the school and the teacher. This story will created curiosity on the one hand side and on the other hand side it will create pathos (emotions). Particularly pathos catches interest. Then I will try to develop my thesis that we have to change our curriculum to solve that problem. Another point might be that our old system of colorblindness is wrong even though it has been a good first step out of the racism in the 50ies and the 60ies but the idea has to develop.

Blog Post 7

My writing has improved quite a bit this quarter. I am now a lot better at writing with an analytical focus, asking questions and making arguments about the thoughts presented, instead of just presenting them. I am also better at organizing my ideas into well-thought out paragraphs, which form a high quality, structured paper. I still need to work on expanding my ideas to make my papers longer. I have always been a very concise writer, and I need to expand on my thoughts and make them more interesting. That is the main thing I need to do when writing my ARP. Expanding my paper from 3 and a half pages to 7 or 8 will be very difficult for me. I need to further expand on my existing thoughts and maybe even find and implement one or two more secondary sources. I also need to write a solid, complex thesis statement that encapsulates the views of the entire paper, and strengthen the topic sentences in each paragraph