Knight-Thon

This past weekend I was involved in one of the most impactful things of my life– Knight-Thon.

Writing “Universally”

After listening to our first guest speaker, Kristen, on Monday I immediately thought about the fine art of journalism—big surprise. The way you are supposed to tell a story is to state “the facts” while triggering your audience emotions so they will come back to watch some more. Because if they don’t come back to watch then you lose your job. She talked about having to writing a translation about what she does to people who might not understand what she is saying. It could be described as “dumbing down” your writing so a general audience could understand. That is, to an extent, of what journalists have to do. I am not saying journalists or Kristen “dumb” things down, we are just tasked with making our writing universal. So not only is it tough to strike the emotion of our audience we also have to write universally. I will agree with our guest speaker that this is not an easy task at all.

Music to Bring Awareness

So I was getting a hair cut the other day and my hair dresser and I started talking about brothels and sex slavery–casual, I know– and the next day she shared this on my Facebook page. I might not be a fan of this type of music but it does a good job of getting a point across. I think its cool that our generation is so creative and has social media outlets to share and express their thoughts on different issues in our world.

Blackfish & Half the Sky

What in the world do these two documentaries have in common? A lot more than you would think. I want to start this post off with a disclaimer–

Food Not Bombs

Hii everyone,

First off I would like to say sorry if you thought my questions towards “Food Not Bombs” were harmful or disrespectful in any way.

Half the Sky ch 9

I find our nation so ironic in the sense that we have freedom of religion, yet we judge others for their religion.

Cushman

This article had a lot of good points however, it was very one sided. You only read the perspective of one teacher and on top of that it was kind of confusing at first.

SLTPC Chapter 5

This chapter starts off with highlighting your strengths and weaknesses in order to complete a successful service learning project. However, the issue I have with assessing your own strengths and weaknesses is that you might say you are bad at something just because you do not want to do that certain thing because you are lazy.

Half the Sky ch 5

The writing style of Half the Sky is equivalent to taking a spin class.

For those of you who haven’t taken a basic spin class just know this; there is a warm-up, a very hard climb and a cool down. For those of you who haven’t read Half the Sky just know this; there is a warm-up, a extremely difficult climb that some do not make it to the top and a cool down. What I mean by this is during chapter 5 of Half the Sky I felt like I was taking a spin class. No, I was not sweating my brains out but I was pushing myself to get over the vivid climb that WuDunn and Kristof put their readers through in order to understand the severity of what they are talking about. Then once the brave readers get over that climb there is a nice cool down section that lets the readers know that there is a solution to all of the problems in the world.

This writing style kind of works for me and kind of doesn’t. It really depends on the day. Today chapter 5 had me queasy and not wanting to finish the chapter because of the graphic picture WuDunn and Kristof painted in my head of Du’a getting rapped and a stick getting shoved in a place sticks do not belong. That kind of stuff seems unreal to me and I would like to think it does not happen. But the reason why their writing style does work for me is because it makes me realize this kind of stuff DOES happen and it opens my eyes to the world around me. It makes me want to get up and do something and then it provides resources to do so. However, I can see how a lot of people would turn this book down as soon as they start to read the vivid details.

At the end of the day we all need to open our own eyes and open others and know that this kind of stuff does happen whether we get over the difficult hill of reading it or not. So my fellow classmates; lets get over these hills together and breathe in through our nose and out through our mouths. We can do it!

J. Biebs

I know this is off topic of our Half the Sky discussion but I want to know everyone’s thoughts on J Biebs getting arrested and how the media blew it up. Do you guys think that worked to his benefit because people are talking about him and more people know about him? Or do you think the media did that to make him look bad and teach him a lesson? Basically, what I am trying to ask is what do you think the media should have done in that situation? In case you haven’t seen the smiling delinquent here he is…

and no, that is not Miley Cyrus.