Gay marriage

I've wanted to do a blog post about gay rights for a while because I'm a tad bit frustrated with the way the whole issue has worked out that past few years. I feel like gay rights has been protested for an against so many time you think that there would be some progress. On my teacher, Mr. McAlister's blog, He tells a story of how he once was at a gay rights protest and got mixed emotions of positive and negative remarks. Thats cool and all but I want to see some real change. Michael A. Jones a writer for a gay rights and I have similar views. Even though the President has openly admitted his disagreement with federal laws prohibiting same sex marriage he still hasn't changed anything due to his ties with the black and latino community. I just feel like there isn't anyone saying that the debate has gone on for to long. Gay marriage isn't going to kill anyone. Its just kind for ridiculous why people even care but I found ten reasons why gay marriage shouldn't happen and I think some might enjoy them, I got it from democrats.com

1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning. Also apparently those homosexual animals have picked up some unnatural behavier

2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Brittany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Republican Party

I have a tough time with the Republican party because its hard to decipher between the right wing intellectuals who are rarely seen or the tea party members. I really can't stand the tea party members because they are just like the radical left, to violent and stupid to even relate to. I think one of the main problems I have with the Republican party is that they have really strong ties with religion. The huffington post, a conservative blog site, agrees with me as well. The party seems to be breaking to idea of the separation of church and state. Religious views control how the party acts upon social matters. There strengths lie in economics ideas. They take the strong and bold view on economics that I think the democrats lack.

Democratic Party

In my view on the world I find it hard to associate to one particular party because both parties have a wide variation in radicalism and they never seem to be able to help eachother out. Focusing on the Democrats I really don't like the extreme left of the party. For example blogger Brian J. Gladish, who declares himself as a classic liberal labels anything that he doesn't agree with as fascism. At the same time I feel like the fact that the Democrats represent liberalism is the best trait they have. The youth will always associate as with liberal view point which is what will bring in future voters to the democratic parties. They have programs that recruit young voters. One of their other weaknesses is they are stereotyped as being the "hippies" of politics. They appear weak when it comes to defense issues and economic issues as well as the Baltimore Reporter points out.

community service

In the fall of my senior year I started taking the class known as “Econ and Gov”. The class is a very simplified introduction to the basics of American Economy and Government. I personally struggled with the first semester which was Econ due to its lack of flare and generally boringness. Second semester I actually enjoy because it has raised me out of my ignorance. I’d say that once I started taking the government section of the course it was both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I could finally have a conversation about politics without feeling overwhelmed, and curse because I now know that I will never be able to go back and not notice what is wrong with our country and our state.

My first introduction to the flaws of modern American education was from Tom Friedman’s book, “Hot, Flat, and crowded”. The weird thing is, the segments we read didn’t have much to do with education but there was one line that stuck out to me which was “dumb as we want to be”. Now looking back on it, Tom Friedman was defiantly talking about the American populations general appreciation and pride of ignorance, however it still got me to think about our current education problem.

It wasn’t really till we were assigned the community service assignment that I really looked into education as a possible community service project idea. What first got me ended up going into that subject was that I really didn’t want to community service that I thought would be tedious, I wanted to enjoy helping out my community. At the same time, since it is my senior year, I took a bunch of art classes and I spend a lot of time with Mrs. Taylor. Just because we are in such close proximity I hear a lot about how she doesn’t have the funds to get all the canvas and paint that she needs to keep the program running. I found it odd because this is Acalanese, we have tons of money, don’t we? Our education isn’t that bad, is it? Those questions led me to having Education as my primary focus for the senior community service project.

Its really hard to just say what’s wrong with the education in this country, especially what’s wrong with the education in California. I’m going to try to break down the basic problems of our education system but I’d still like to give some facts along with it.
First we have the most obvious of problems which is a funding problem. A well funded school usually is better school because those schools will have the most resources, the better teachers, and the better environments. California schools are getting budget cuts that caused the pink slip affect which was a mass firing of teachers up and down the state in response to the governor’s 4.8 billion dollar tax cut on education in California. Jack O’Connell chief of the state of education said "School districts up and down this state are sending out pink slips to tens of thousands of hard-working, dedicated teachers, administrators, and school staff, not because our state faces a spending problem, but because we face a priorities problem,". My question is, since when did our education not become our priority?

I think that we shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. I know this is going to sound very egotistical but this is California. Don’t we have a reputation to live up to. We are the west coast shouldn’t we be up to the same level of education as New York or Texas, or the other large states. Sadly we are not doing well in our comparison to other states.



















This graph shows the five largest states due to population and the national average and compares them to each other on how much they spend on teachers and on studens. Even though California is the biggest state we spend the least per teacher and per student.
Staff per 1,000 Pupils in 2005–06
New York Texas Illinois U.S. Average Florida California California's Rank % National Average
Total Staff 132.7 137.1 125.4 124.7 117.5 90.0 50 72%
Total District Staff* 8.6 2.9 5.7 5.7 6.6 5.0 35 88%
Officials and Administrators 1.1 1.8 1.8 1.3 0.7 0.4 47 33%
School Staff* 103.8 99.7 96.0 95.2 87.0 70.0 51 74%
Principals/Asst. Principals 3.1 7.0 3.1 3.4 2.7 2.2 49 63%
Teachers 77.8 66.8 63.4 63.9 59.4 48.0 49 75%
Guidance Counselors 2.4 2.3 1.5 2.1 2.1 1.1 51 52%
Librarians 1.2 1.1 1.0 1.1 1.0 0.2 51 17%
Total Certified School Staff 84.5 77.2 69.0 70.5 65.3 51.5 49 73%

This is a graph from the (NCES) National Center for Education Statistics and ass you can tell how poorly we are ranked in comparison to the rest of the country in total staff. Our highest ranking was thirty five and it was for district staff. We got ranked the fiftieth on total staff which is unbelievable because we have the highest population of students. We got dead last in the total amount in school staff. Am I the only one scared by this at all. How bad we are on a national level despite America’s international decline of education.
Recently however there has been very small steps by the local government and larger steps by the Obama administration to reform the school system. Recently the Parcel tax was introduce to the voters. Basically the parcel tax was a special tax that would go to school and education but it didn’t have a spending limit. Many people were opposed to the parcel tax because they didn’t want to pay the extra money for it to go to the school which is really selfish.
In a more recent development, the Obama administration introduced their education reform to the house. It was based on Bush administrations education reform, which at first I thought was a bad idea just because associating your idea with the Bush administration is bad publicity. Hes planning to keep the no child left behind policy but he is now setting up a program that rewards schools if they achieve higher grades. He is also being aggressive with bad schools, schools that fail to improve will be in federal control or will be shut down all together.

When I thought of doing my community service I really wanted it to be something that I liked to do. I didn’t want my fifteen hours to be tedious work that I wouldn’t enjoy. And as I explained earlier I had been in very close proximity with Mrs. Taylor the art teacher and she had been explaining her lack of supplies for her art class. So I thought maybe I should do an art show and give any of the proceeds to Mrs. Taylor. The proceeds would just go to her account and she can spend it on whatever she wants, but it is not like I’m just giving her cash.

I believe that in order to get people to change things you need to play on their emotions. I’ve noticed this through the documentation of Civil Rights protests they play on peoples anger at the situation and I think that the first step to what we have to do in this place. We have let our educational standards slip to much and now its becoming a normality, none said better than by Michelle Rhee "People in unbelievably crappy school buildings, dealing with terrible conditions, whose classrooms are alive with learning. They are just unbelievable. And then across the hall is a classroom that's just the most depressing thing you've ever seen. The kids know it. The parents know it. The administration knows it. It's no secret."

After making the public know how bad the education has gotten and how it will decline even future if they don’t do something to protect it then I would say that we make sure that education becomes a priority. The problem with education and seeing how to fix it is that there is so many angles of looking at it. There so many parts to the system that are always fighting for dominancy so its almost as if we need a completely new system. In a perfect world I say we should make a compromise between the government and the unions so there won’t be a battle for control of the crisis because both of them are doing a terrible job anyway. Then after stopping that struggle for power, the teachers need to be interested in being teachers. What I mean is, pay the teachers more give them more benefits, current conditions for teachers are driving off potential teachers away from the class rooms and into different fields of work. All of that and continued funding from both the state and federal government and the situation might just improve.

During the writing of all the blogs I defiantly learned a lot about education and politics in general and I have actually, due to this class, leaned how to enjoy politics and talking about them. But what I walked away from this experience is that I’ve learned a lot about people. It took me a really long time to plan the gallery out and organize people and I learned a lot about how to treat friends as business partners. At first I didn’t want to micromanage people and to let them to their own thing make their own art and I would just show it. However I ended up having to kick some ass to get people to finish their work in the end. I learned how to work in a professional setting a bit more, I have had a job previous to this but I was on the opposite side of the counter.

Arne Ducan Praise

As you know I've been looking on the eduction reform that the Obama administration has been doing almost under the cover of the health care plan controversy. We all have been not blinded, but almost, purposely distracted from the reform thats actually causing quite a stir within the teachers unions.

There's no time to waste. He's been handed this portfolio and he's going to make the most of it before anybody catches on to what he's doing and mounts the opposition that in the past has always derailed major change to the status quo. Duncan turned heads when he entered the Ritz-Carlton in Washington early this month in part because he's so tall (6-foot-5), and because he is offering the kind of strong, spirited leadership that the education community doesn't often associate with Washington. He was there to make a presentation about improving student achievement to a meeting of the Strategic Management of Human Capital National Task Force (SMHC). Speaking in rapid-fire fashion and using phrases he surely could utter in his sleep, Duncan talked about our "fundamentally broken system" and the "magnitude of opportunities" that fixing it presents. He urged the assembled conferees, school officials, elected officials, and union leaders, to "move outside our comfort zone," exhorting them that for the first time in recent memory, lack of resources could not hold them back, only the lack of political will.

This is description of Arne Duncan, the secretary of eduction in the Obama administration. In my opinion this is a really positive view on him. Not that his motive is not good its just that there doesn't seem to be any press on how this man is changing our education system.

Giving Credit

Since the gallery is done I feel like I should give some people blogger credit even though they know how appreciative I am already. I'd like to give a shout out to Kyung Chyun for keeping strong through all this and actually completing her art on time, shes the best. Sydney Eaton saved my ass at the last second so I have to give her tons of thanks because she came in at the last second. I'd like to thank Anthony at Fast Frames in Lafayette for letting us have the show

I love Garfunkel and Oats, two hilarious cute girls that play music, can I ask for more?

I HAD THE ART GALLERY

I had the art show this weekend at Fast Frames in Lafayette. There was a lot of stress around the opening of the show because one of the artist pulled out at the last second but my friend Sydney Eaton covered for us and made the show happen which was really cool. We sold one painting! I didn't think that we'd sell anything at all and I was really exited. I learned a lot from this process, mainly that you actually have to micromanage people. I don't want this to come off negative I actually enjoyed learning from this process.

BFD

Classy Mr. Vice President oh so classy.

Union Vs Government

Education in the United States has be declining for the past 60 years is what some could say a known fact. As I look closer into the topic I see that even though there is an extreme lack of funding the system itself does need some reforming. I have this article from newsweek that had some experts on the debate of the teachers union vs the government education.

It's no wonder that people are looking for an entity to blame for school failures. But blaming unions for failing schools is like blaming the middle class for the recession. Our union's mantra is "what is good for kids and what is fair for teachers." If teachers' unions were to blame for failing schools, then places like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, who have relatively few unionized teachers, would do much better than the states with the most densely unionized teachers—Massachusetts, New York, Maryland. But those are the states whose schools do best.

So there are problems to solve, one of which is poverty. And I would argue that having a strong union, an entity that will look at what is done right and what is wrong and solve things and change things, is the way to go. We need well-prepared and well-supported teachers, early-childhood education, and a focus on graduation. We find these elements in lots of different places, and the differences between the places that work and those that don't is good labor-management relations.

On this side of the argument it makes it sound like schools do better and do worst with teachers union. This seems to be a stupid way of arguing because all shes really saying is that unions don't make a difference in how schools perform. So I don't understand why they are rejecting government reform. The education system and unions are a very hostile place the more I dwell upon it.

Gallery is Up and Ready

So the past few weeks of me working on my community service has been really hectic due to a lot of let downs. At first I had spoken to the Lafayette library about doing a show there and I had gotten conformation that it would work out. I was told to wait for an e-mail from them so I could send them my proposition for what I needed. I waited for a long time and then I called them back and it turns out that the lady I had spoken to was really unorganized and no one knew who I was or who the lady I asked for was. Basically the library deal was off. So I called Fast Frames in down town Lafayette and asked if I could hang some stuff up and they were really cool and let me. As I was collecting everyone's art to go deliver it, one of the artist had a last second drop out. It was lame but I guess he had his reasons so I can't really hold a grudge. However I had someone to fill his place luckily. In the long run I feel like i went about it in an unprepared way but I never thought it would take that much energy to put together. I guess its a trial and error thing to do, I really wasn't happy about how rushed it ended up being, but I learned a lot about organizing people. Moral of the story is that you have to micro manage people from time to time.

Review: The Cove

I just recently saw the documentary called The Cove for a stretch mark for my psych class but I thought that it was so relevant that I should blog about it. The movie is based on the international whaling laws and how the Japanese government refuses to stop. It also informs you on the recent decline in marine life conservations both with whaling and the coral reefs. Its a really interesting and some what inspiring movie.

Tibet benifits from Chinses Involvement

I think that its funny that the more dependent we become on China for stabilizing our economy, the farther we go into debt, the more we villanize them. We loaned Europe money knowing that we would benefit from there post-war economy, China has done the same for us and we hate them for it. Now I don't agree with many of China's actions, but then again I don't agree with many of Americas either, but I found an article of China's brutal involvement with Tibet and felt that I needed to post it.

Since 2001, Beijing has spent $45.4 billion on development in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). (That's what the Chinese government calls Tibet, even though many Tibetans live in neighboring provinces, too). The effect: double-digit GDP growth for the past nine years. About a third of the money went to infrastructure investment, including the train connecting Beijing to Lhasa. "A clear benefit of the train was that it makes industrial goods cheaper for Tibetans, who, like everyone else in the world, like household conveniences, but normally had to pay very high prices," said Ben Hillman, a Tibet expert from the Australian National University's China Institute. The train also provides an opportunity for Tibetan goods to be sold outside of the region and for a massive increase in number of tourists, reaching more than 5.5 million in 2009—up from close to 2 million in 2005, the year before the train. The Chinese government's Tibet tourism bureau expects the numbers to keep climbing. While Tibetan independence groups like Free Tibet raise sustainability concerns about the increase in tourism, Hillman points out that "tourism is an important industry that can benefit local Tibetans."

I guess that China's involvement in Tibet had benificial after all to an extent. It shows the other side of things which is always an important angle to look at. I almost want to make a connection to China's involvement in Tibet to America's involvement in Iraq but I know that there would be too much of open broad comparison that I would be attacked. I just hope that even though both conflicts were violent that some good comes out of it.

Leprechaun Museum

Yeah this is actually real. Its opening tomorrow and I really want to go but I doubt I will because its in Ireland. I just wanted to spread the word, here is a article on the museum

Obama's Youtube Chat

This is one of the videos that Obama posts on youtube every week. Its his more modern version of Roosevelt's fire side chats. It's an introduction to him introducing his new education reform bill. I'm exited to hear how the American people think of the bill and how the congress will deal with it.

Obama Education Plan

Obama has been very progressive with many major topics involving the reform for a better America but he hasn't really tackled education with the intensity he has used on the war or the health bill. On March 13, 2010, the Bush Administration handed him a bill to reform the education system and Obama is currently re-writing it and will be proposing it soon. Time Magazine listed some of the highlights

— By 2020, all students graduating from high school would need to be ready for college or a career. That's a shift away from the current law, which calls for all students to be performing at grade level in reading and math by 2014.

— Give more rewards — money and flexibility — to high-poverty schools that are seeing big gains in student achievement and use them as a model for other schools in low-income neighborhoods that struggle with performance.

— Punish the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools using aggressive measures, such as having the state take over federal funding for poor students, replacing the principal and half the teaching staff or closing the school altogether.

— Duncan has said the name No Child Left Behind will be dropped because it is associated with a harsh law that punishes schools for not reaching benchmarks even if they've made big gains. He said the administration will work with Congress to come up with a new name.

Amy Wilkins, a vice president with The Education Trust in Washington, D.C., called the blueprint a "culture shift."

"One of the things America has not been clear about is what k-12 is supposed to do," Wilkins said. "In this, we're saying K-12 is supposed to prepare kids for college and meaningful careers."

Although I feel that like most politicians Obama will promise us more than he can actually give us, I still really like the idea of rewarding schools with success. It's planned that more than four billion dollars will be given to the education system, which hasn't been done in forty five years.

Classroom Chaos

Although teachers, unions, and improper funding are the main damage to the educational system the students are to be blamed as well. The control over students has declined over the past forty years. I'm not saying laws that protect children from being hit by teachers are good but when it wasn't illegal there were a lot more well behaved children.

The solution is probably not to encourage teachers to bean kids with erasers. But something is needed. Jennifer Scoggins, 32, a New York teacher currently working on her Ph.D., said she had no chance to succeed when she began her first teaching job in 2001. She was asked to take over a second-grade class in Harlem midyear—after several other teachers had given up. The kids were out of control when she arrived, and things never improved. "Chairs were being thrown, kids were stabbing each other with pencils," she said. "I felt absolutely like a total failure. The only thing I was proud of was that I never cried in front of the kids. But I cried everywhere else: in supply closets, on the subway, at home." Even though Scoggins had earned a master's in education, she said, "very practical things were never taught."

The more I look into the educational system and its problems, the more unfixable they appear. I feel like we need to change the people in education not the laws, we need society desperated for education because its what we need for the future.

School Reform

I've noticed that certain topics have always been on the political agenda for reformation. Health Care, Big Business, Congress, War, Foreign Relations, and Education. Why is it that although we speak of how we have a doomed generation, who will have to carry our nations debt, we don't even think to educate them to deal with the problem.

"People in unbelievably crappy school buildings, dealing with terrible conditions, whose classrooms are alive with learning. They are just unbelievable. And then across the hall is a classroom that's just the most depressing thing you've ever seen. The kids know it. The parents know it. The administration knows it. It's no secret." But it is hard to change.

In a newsweek article about school reform I saw two sides of the education reform debate. Although after reading both sides of the debate my oppinon didn't change, i proved to be just as liberal as ever, I still felt educated on educations.

Tattoo Time

I'm really happy that tattoo's aren't affected by the recession but I'm also surprised. Since tattooing is a luxury job it would be considered to be the first to go, not only because of money variation in tattoos but because of the smaller audience that get tattoos.

Rising Rates of Abortions

I was searching for some blog worthy articles to write a piece on and as I was skimming through tittles I saw the claim that 40% of women get abortions. I guess the article was the author defending the statistic that she had used in another article. Like many people, so many in fact that she had to do the math just to make the statistic legitimate, I questioned it.

I started with this statistic from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that studies reproductive health and supports abortion rights: “From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.” According to the census, the United States population was 295,753,151 in 2005 (I used this, rather than its most recent estimate, to stay consistent with the Guttmacher figure, which counted abortions only through 2005). That population is 50.7 percent (150 million people) female. Subtract the 24.3 percent of the population that is under 18 and you’re down to 113.6 million women. Forty-five million is 39.6 percent of that, or, as I wrote it, “about 40 percent.”

At first i thought i was a huge overestimate, but I feel like over time the number can only go up. The more normal having a sex life becomes the more likely more and more people will have mistakes. What I mean by normal is that the more socially acceptable it is the more likely the number of people having sex earlier will start there for having more chances to get pregnant.