In Place of Meta Post III

I would like for you to read my post titled I Would Prefer Not To. It really got me thinking about my thoughts on standardized testing and what our country is turning to for our educations.

Junior Theme Part 2

As I began to do research, I realized that focusing just on the topics presented in Richistan will not be enough.  I started trying to broaden my search, and I have decided to go with the idea of focusing on the middle class and how it is disappearing.  I think that Richistan will present a good side of the story in the sense that it might show how some of the middle class is moving up.  But I need to focus on finding the other side, the part of the middle class that is sliding into poverty.  If anybody has any ideas for where to find stuff, I will gladly take the advice.  CQ Rearcher already gave me a great article.

Mr. Bolos gave me a GREAT YouTube video about the decrease in the size of the middle class. You can find it by going to YouTube and typing into the search box "Elizabeth Warren 'The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class'" or it is linked here.  I should warn you that it's an hour long and I watched the entire thing, but the information that I needed most was found in the last 5 minutes of the video.  But for anybody who is focusing on something like consumerism over the past few years, it presents an excellent series of facts concerning 1973's spending versus 2003's spending. Hopefully that helps!

Also, as I continue reading my book, I love finding connections in between sources and between my classes as well.  For example, the video by Elizabeth Warren voices many opinions that I have found in my CQ Researcher article.  Warren also references the financial expert Robert Frank, and he is the author of the book that I'm reading.  Plus, in Frank's book, he references the movie Wall Street which I just watched in my Financial Management class.  It's pretty cool getting to see the overlap that develops.

The Third Month's Insanity

March is easily the best month of the year for one reason, the basketball.  March Madness becomes the center of everyone's focus, at least in my house.  At school, people carry around laptops streaming live video footage so that they don't miss a minute.  There's even a "Boss" button for people who are watching at work so that if their boss appears, they push the button and a spreadsheet pops up onto the screen so it looks like the person is doing work.

March Madness provides a great time for people to bond over a sport that is so fun to watch.  I would argue against anybody that it is more fun to watch than football, even the Super Bowl.  And in my opinion, a majority of the college basketball players are better athletes than NFL players.  True, a basketball game is 40 minutes, and a football game 60 is minutes, but it has been proven that of those 60 minutes in a football game, the players actually only play for 11 minutes on average. In college basketball, the players play for all 40 minutes.  I'm not going to argue that the NCAA tournament is more "American" but I enjoy it more than the NFL playoffs.

Filling out a bracket is one of the best parts of the Madness.  Mine has been exceptionally terrible this year, but I've decided that it doesn't matter.  In the end the best team will win, and we all know that that team is Duke.

Just a Thought...

One of my ideas for a potential Junior Theme topic, which I'm not going to do, was to focus on Internet Privacy.  I kind of already wrote a blog about it which can be found here. But I think that it's a really interesting topic.  Why is it that people feel so free to post anything that they want on the Internet? My friend Zoe is in a movie that comes out April 1 called Trust, the trailer can be found here. It is the story of a teenage girl who meets a person via the Internet.  I won't spoil the story, but let's just say that the person on the other end of the Internet relationship doesn't turn out to be who she thinks its going to be.  The Internet is a dangerous place, people need to put up as many precautions and forms of protection as possible.  It's unbelievable how quickly the Internet has become a tool for getting to know someone.  You think you know someone at school, you check out their Facebook page and suddenly you're not sure if you're even looking at the right person.

Junior Theme Part 1

This past week is the week that we started the overwhelming and dreaded Junior Theme.  The project that my friends in other classes have been complaining about year, the huge grade for the quarter, the thing that I will be spending a majority of my time on for the next month. And despite all of the negative that Junior Theme connotes, I'm excited to take it on.

I'm not going to lie, I was weary starting off because we were given almost no guidelines.  There was no list of topics, not even a list of books to choose from.  All I had to go on was the idea that my Junior Theme had to connect to the United States.  It had to be a current issue, but had to be relatable to the past.  I had no clue where to start. I went back through my notes, found some good "why" questions, but none that I felt that I could write a big paper on, nor that I would want to spend a month combing through research on.

So on our first day of "research" in the library, I went through the book carts looking for any book that sounded interesting to me.  I landed on a topic that I never would have thought I would want to do.  The book I found is called Richistan by Robert Frank.  It is a non-fiction book, but it looked fascinating to me.  It is about how people have become instantly rich in this country.  From the summary that I read, it compares the idea of new money with old money, and why people are getting rich, and the levels of relative "richness." I'm excited to get started.