Clay Burell's Library tagged students →  View Popular

Umm yeah, so I'm the valedictorian. Number one. But, what separates me from
number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, or 120? Nothing but meaningless numbers. What really
is the difference between 3.8, 2.9, and 1.5? All these randomly assigned numbers
reflect nothing about the true character of an individual. They say nothing
about personality. Nothing about desire or will. Nothing about values or morals.
Nothing about intelligence. Nothing about creativity. Nothing about heart.
Numbers cannot and will not ever be able to tell you who a person really is. Yet
in today's society we are sadly becoming more and more number oriented. Schools
today are being forced to teach to the numbers. Children are no longer learning
because it is interesting and fun; they are learning to pass the test so that
the school will continue to be funded. New mandates across the country and in
our own state incorrectly correlate test scores with the worth of teachers and
schools. Not once do these new mandates take into account that schools in low
income areas will never have as many books, long term students, parent
volunteers, or state of the art facilities. How can anyone call these tests fair? Just as class rank and
SAT scores say nothing about
the true worth of a person, a child's or school's score on a test says nothing about the worth of the school or teachers. 

It is disturbing enough that throughout high school, GPA and grades are pushed as the most important things, while learning, the real reason we
are in school, falls by the wayside. The MCAS serve as just another set of meaningless numbers that add one more reason to focus on scores and
forget learning. 

The already teetering learning process, made difficult by the social dynamics of school cliques, disrupted by a constant lack of funding and
misplaced values, has been further torn apart by a few meddling politicians and yuppies who were bored and felt the need to create what
they call a standard.

More freshmen today say they frequently discuss politics than at any time since Lyndon Johnson announced that he wouldn't run for re-election. Just since 2000, that slice of young people -- 35.6 percent -- has more than doubled, and it even exceeds by a couple of points the previous high-water mark, when Richard Nixon was elected president. When you add in the number of today's freshmen who say they occasionally discuss politics, you're talking about nearly 86 percent of them, another record.

Today, the proportion of freshmen calling themselves liberal has hit 31 percent, the highest it's been in 35 years. At the same time, the number of students calling their political views middle-of-the-road has hit an all-time low, just over 43 percent, territory it hasn't been in since 1970. Only one out of five students today describes him or herself as conservative, an erosion of more than two points since the year before.

This class has taught me that a student can be a public writer who is capable of getting just as many feedbacks as the adults in the networking world. Especially in the beginning of the year, I didn’t know that writing with a simple language could be more effective than using hard SAT vocabulary. Adding silly jokes and catchy metaphors/smilies were also necessary for the world to see. The major thing was different about this class compared to other classes was the fact that we can enjoy writing without having to think about the complexity of the text. Editing was still essential, but no particular format was needed. We were given with an opportunity to write whatever we wanted to.

The thought of me being a good writer has never come up to my head - not that I’m a “good” writer - but after getting feedbacks from real people out there, I gained more confidence. Diane Cordell, whom I interviewed about 2 weeks ago told me that she could see a personality in my writing which didn’t hesitate her to keep scrolling down. Also, Heather, from Mr. Sharesky showed interest in my blog posts which did amaze me. As a writer, I think I’ve learned to put personality in it, but still have a bit more to go with holding the readers’ attention.

Numerous topics went through my head this semester, such as designing restaurants, online recipe book, comfort foods. I don’t think that I was able to make any of these “super effective” at all. Only if I figured out this system of networking with everyone in the world I could have moved on faster, but there have been many bumps on the way.

First of all, the bar design group did not work so well because we had no idea how we could incorporate other people’s idea when we wanted to design our own bar. It was way too complicated. Then I went off by myself thinking that it’d be easier. Well, I was wrong. All the responsibilities and pressures were on me, but at least I could control everything that I do. It was May when I set up my first interview. After spending so much time in this class, I finally got the purpose after 4 months. In a way, it sounds like a waste of time, but I still accomplished something before the semester ended.

I realized that talking to other people weren’t as hard as I thought. As I’ve written in my other posts, confidence was all it took. No one would want to come and find me unless I go and search them. It’s too bad the semester ended when I just started to get the hang of it, but I can still continue on my own.

Bumpy roads, narrow path, and freeway. I’ve gone through numerous roads during this experience. Perhaps now is the time to go my way instead of following the made paths. Hopefully I’ll continue to do more networking and set-up interviews to post on my project blog and/or my own english blog.

we as humans are afraid of failures. We come to dread the feeling of defeat, knowing you couldn’t succeed in goals you set for yourself. Failing, in a sense, is the new ‘F-word’. But in reality if we choose to wake up, and only if, we will begin to realize through failure comes greater success.

The term failure has always been a associated as a dirty, filthy, god-forsaken, foul, and sometimes, a murderous word. The Oxford Dictionary defines failure as this:

” Lack of success“

That is complete and utter bullcrap. Failing is not a lack of success, as those brainiacs from Oxford say it to be, it is the road to success. The greatest success stories in life are built straight-up from failures. That’s what I learned from this class. To be truly successful we have to learn from our failures. That’s what differentiates the success stories from the so called failed ones. So what is my definition of a failure? For me, a failure is somebody who failed yes, but somebody who failed and didn’t learn from it - they merely sat there scratching their heads wondering what went haywire. Looking back on my past blog posts (which I exported all to my normal one The Sushi Bar) I succeed as a writer because I learned. I learned sentence patterns, beautification, and the little things that held me back from fully achieving my potential. Here’s a snippet from what I wrote on my first blog post: Comedy and the Web.

“Boredom always seems to get the best of everyone, even when they’re on the web - it’s an inevitable feeling in life. To somehow get rid of such boredom, one usually goes to youtube (if you haven’t heard of it get informed!!!). There’s basically everything on youtube, funny videos, useless videos, and even the occasional weird videos. To be famous on youtube is another story. To stand out between the millions of videos that are uploaded each day is a task easier said than done. Guess what? I’m gonna be one of them.

I’ve always loved comedy - the amount of jokes that can me made and done has always fascinated me.“

The first thing that popped into my head when I read this was “I wrote that piece of crap?!“. The sad reality is I did and the happy reality is I improved. Based on first impressions, the writing absolutely sucks, sucks like a baby licking on one of those big-assed lollipops. The second impression (actually my first) was that the title is lame, really lame. But I looked at this writing and I felt good. It shouldn’t have been the sensation I should have been having but I was genuinely happy I got this far as a writer in a span of five months. This class taught me writing is not a tool for getting ‘A’s’ its a skill to be used for everyday life - it’s an art. I walked into this class having writing as a mere footnote of my abilities and I walk out knowing I know wield a more defined sense of purpose with my keyboard.

I like to think of myself not just as a thinker, but a critical thinker. I have always thought this and I walked into this class with that status as well. Mr. Burell put more things in my head.

Black and White to Color

I’m not very productive. I know that. Even though I try hard, what my brain lacks is not my fault, it is my mother’s. As a producer, I realized that this is the part I need to work on. Trying is good, but it also needs to have an effect on my performance. What I’m saying is that I should do better than what I did in English Seminar.

I didn’t understand the word social being/networker at first, but now I guess I do. I wrote things in my blog, and I got only one comment from an international movie blog. I tries comment back, but it didn’t work, so I gave up. I am an active networker, I can’t live without a computer for a day, because I watch Korean cartoons, and chat. I found at that as a social being/networker, I suck. I don’t talk to people I don’t know, and I don’t expect them to talk to me. I need to improve to talk more freely towards unknown people.

Me as a problem solver? That’s funny. I can’t even solve my own problems, as shown by my lack of ability to arrange a time to shoot the video. That is why I never thought of becoming a counselor. I need to think more to improve my problem solving skills, not just for math, but more importantly, for the outside world.

I’ve done it. I’ve accomplished my goal. But this is just a start.

Just a couple days ago, I recorded my first interview with Diane Cordell, a librarian from New York. It made me realize that organizing interviews weren’t as hard as I thought. All it took was confidence, but I guess it took me a while to find it.

The conversation flowed very smoothly and everything went great. Diane answered my questions with gentle and kind tone which got rid of my nervousness at once. Since I met her through Twitter, I asked her opinions of network learning opposed to the old-fashioned learning method of listening to teachers the whole time. Her replies showed positiveness towards that idea. Learning and interacting through different people from different backgrounds sounded very educational to Diane.

Then I raised up a concern about encountering unknown people through online. One of my biggest fears was to contact people without knowing what kind of people they were. Diane suggested that the environment that I’m involved in - with a teacher’s supervision - should be pretty safe. The project that I’m working on deals with education which means that I’m mostly interacting with people who are willing to learn. Learners love new ideas.

Through this interview, I learned that Diane is not only a learner, but also a learner who loves to share her knowledge. It was a great start of interacting with more people in the future.

“Who knows, you might be talking to weirdos and psychos?”

My Mom raised a concern of networking learning during the interview. She’s very fond of the idea of sharing and exchanging thoughts with other people in the world, but she’s worried about that unknown person’s identity.

Listen to our talk here

Interviewing someone who doesn’t know a lot about network was interesting to hear in comparison to someone who does know a lot about it.  My Mom tended to show worries about this topic whereas the “pros” talked about what a good system this is.

I thought that it’d be important to find out the two opposite sides of this topic.  Getting in touch with others around the world wasn’t as hard as I thought.  But when in desperate needs, someone near you may be the one you need.