2012 Relfections

In 2012 I learned a lot about loss.  I learned how to get through it and help others when they are suffering from it.  I have to admit 2012 wasn't a very good year for me.  This is supposed to be such a wonderful country and yet we have:

March 31, 2012—A gunman opened fire on a crowd of mourners at a North Miami, Florida, funeral home, killing two people and injuring 12 others.
April 2, 2012—A 43-year-old former student at Oikos University in Oakland, California, walked into his former school and killed seven people, “execution-style.” Three people were wounded.
April 6, 2012—Two men went on a deadly shooting spree in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shooting black men at random in an apparently racially motivated attack. Three men died and two were wounded.
May 29, 2012—A man in Seattle, Washington, opened fire in a coffee shop and killed five people and then himself.
July 20, 2012—James Holmes enters a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and opens fire with a semi-automatic weapon; twelve people are killed and fifty-eight are wounded.
December 14, 2012—One man, and possibly more, murders a reported twenty-six people at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, including twenty children, before killing himself.
(Just to name a few, there is a full list at http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead  if you would like to see all 16 major shootings in the U.S.)
So I guess this wasn't that great of a year for lots of people, but it wasn't the only downs to the year, and I have a couple of personal downers too. First off my grandmom moved in with us, which I loved and I'm sure she enjoyed the company, but she, at the time,was struggling with cancer so it was very hard for her the year that she stayed with us until she passed away in the summer. There was also my grandpa who died earlier in the year in California.  Another was family friends parents died within 2 weeks of each other.  In addition some of my closest friends moved to places like Tennessee and Texas.  Loss is hard to live with but I think it has helpped me a lot throughout the year, made me stronger in a way.  But don't get me wrong the U.S. has had many great accomplishments like taking out Osama bin laden and ending the war in Iraq, but still I feel like the world is turning into one big battleground with all of the wars and deaths surrounding us.
I like to make new years resolutions, but I almost never keep them. BUT!!!! I will try this year so here they are:

• Drop under 29 seconds in my fifty freestyle
• Survive the next end of the world
• Drop under a 1:09 in my  hundred freestyle
• Follow my dreams
• Go 2,450 yards or more in my 30 minute swim
• Get better at the Tuba
• Graduate high school and go to college
• Don't stink at life
• Take at least 2 honors classes
• Solve world hunger

Questions about the first amendment

I have a couple of questions about the first admendment , but I have decided on one that I think would be the most interesting. My question is: does the freedom of speech have the same portection if you are writing it on the internet instead of speaking it out loud.  So does it have the same limits?  Does it make a difference that it will be there forever not just a couple of seconds?  I am wondering all of this and if there is an answer at all?  Can it be debateable or is it already a different admendment?

The Answer: after much tiring reseacrch I have found this.....

• the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU (1997) that speech on the Internet receives the highest level of First Amendment protection. The Supreme Court explained that “our cases provide no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium
• The events associated with Internet censorship are similar to those for online/offline censorship of traditional/modern media such as newspapers or internet. One difference is that national borders are more permeable online: residents of a country that bans certain information can find it on websites hosted outside the country. Thus censors must work to prevent access to information even though they lack physical or legal control over the websites themselves. This in turn requires the use of technical censorship methods that are unique to the Internet, such as site blocking and content filtering
• Theb U.S. has almost no internet censorship but the most common motives or rationales for Internet censorship are politics and power, social norms and morals, and security concerns
• The ACLU's vision of an uncensored Internet was clearly shared by the U.S. Supreme Court when it declared, in Reno v. ACLU, the Internet to be a free speech zone, deserving at least as much First Amendment protection as that afforded to books, newspapers and magazines. The government, the court said, can no more restrict a person's access to words or images on the Internet than it could be allowed to snatch a book out of a reader's hands in the library, or cover over a statue of a nude in a museum.

After finding all of these facts I have concluded that the answer to my question is yes, the same protections and limits apply to posting things on the internet that apply to just saying something out loud.  The government can not restrict any images or words that you put on the internet, BUT I would be careful what you do put up on the internet because it will be there forever and anyone will be able to see it.  So ........... Think before you post and thanks for reading. ( :


My sources are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/faq/frequently-asked-questions-speech

Democrat vs. Republican Beliefs

I was doing my homework for rogate about the two political parties and found this great website about their main beliefs and views on different issues. 

 Check it out! 

Grading in Schools

On thursday we had a in class talk about the standard grading system of schools.  As most people already know you get grades based on how well you can understand topics in school. A, B, C, D, and F are the five grades you can get, A being the highest and F being the lowest. 
What some people don't know is that there is a different grading system and sujective/objective grading.  Subjective means that the teacher has an opinion of your grade. One teacher may think your work is much better than another teacher.  Most writing is subjective since there is more than one possible answer.  Objective is grading in which there is one exact answer that you either get right or wrong.  An example of objective would be a math problem.  If you are givin the problem 89 + 11 there is only one right answer so the teacher can't mark you wrong if you get the  answer 100.      Another topic we disscused was instead of using the A, B, C, etc. grading system you could get marks like proficent, advanced proficent and so on.  Personally I like the kind we use currently becasue it gives us more of an exact grade that the other kind.  For example if you get a advanced proficent that could be anywhere from a 85 to a 100.  I don't think that a 85 is good enough, but I wouldn't know if I got that because the grade would just read advanced proficent.  In the A, B, C, D, F system I would be able to tell if I got a 87 or a 95 or even a 69 and wouldn't have to wonder.
One topic I kind of wondered about was why grading is based on a 100 point scale.  It wouldn't be on a ten point scale because that wouldn't be exact enough and on things like tests there could only be 10 questions.  If there were more questions than 10 wouldn't each question only cout for a fraction of a point?  But then why 100, why not 1,000 that would be even more exact.  So I am really not sure the answer to this puzzling question.  If you think of any other reason please post a comment because I am wondering what other people might think.
Something else popped into my mind when we were talking the other day.  I was thinking and came to the conclusion that students grades reflect the teachers grade, or how well they are teaching.  For example if a whole class fails a test then doesn't that say that the teacher didn't do a good enough job since it is not just a couple failures.  Can teachers get grades? Do they have a powerschool they can go to to see how well their doing?  I think that in all classes, every marking period, all the students should write comments for the teachers based on how well they are learning from them.  We could kind of give them advice on how we learn the best.  It would help us learn more and teachers get more done in the school year.
I think that students deffinently need the grading to see how well they are doing in classes, but tearchers would probbably benefit from a little too.

Sir Ken Robbinson's Ted Talk

I think that Sir Robbinsons ted talk was very interesting, but it was kind of hard to follow. He talked about some very interesting topics that I had never thought about before. I think it was very much like the creativity crisis article since it was about the same thing. I also found his childhood very entertaining. My favorite part of his speech was probably the story about the girl who did not do good in school, but loved to dance. That just shows how even parents can misunderstand their kids and just because someone is not good at one thing doesn't mean they can't be good at anything. He was an amazing speaker and I would like to see what other people talk about during their 18 minutes of Ted Talk.

The Creativity Crisis

          I think that the article we read ( the creativity crisis) was very interesting and contained a ton of information that I never had known before.  I never knew what the exact deffinetion of creativity was, in fact I didn't know there was a deffinetion at all.  In this article I also learned what divergent and convergent thinking was. 

          I actually wasn't surprised when I found that the creativity scores are falling because they're just like IQ scores.  Its a mix of the kids not caring enough to do good in school and all of the testing becoming much more complex.   Creativity is falling because kids are being stuffed with so much school (math and language arts) information there is hardly any time to relax and bring out all of your creative thoughts or ideas.  I found it stupid that teachers thought there was no room for creativity because it is creativity and divergent thinking that will help us suceed in life and on standardized tests.  I agree that creative tasks should be incoorparated into classes much more.

          The story about the school in Akron was very interesting as well, it showed how divergent thinking and useful projects help devlop the creativity in the person.  The school grew to one of the top three in all of Akron with 42% living in poverty and some still think that creativity will not help at all in school.  I remember doing a lot of projects like this, that force you to think instead of jumping to an answer, in elementary school, but they had stopped giving them when I got into 7th grade.  I thought they were so exciting to do because you're trying to solve a problem with your friends and everyone has different ideas, all which are amazing, but so different.  They were especially fun when it was hands on problem solving.  Instead of just writimg it down on paper you could experiement with different ideas and the classroom just became so free in what you could do.  I also got to use this type of hands on or divergent thinking learning when my 6th grade class went to a place called fairview for four days.  The whole point of the trip was hands on problem solving and puzzles.  This is where the students really got engaged in what they were doing. 

          I agree with almost everything the paper said. Schools should start teaching more divergent thinking in classes.  Without creativity we would never have had tv's or cars or the internet.  Without creativity we will never get things like food printers or the cure to cancer.

All about me

Hello everyone. : )
My name is Justin and I love to swim, I swim on Jersey storm in the winter and Country Pool in the summer.  I am in the marching band after school and so far we have got 2nd place in both of the comps. we have gone to (You can see all the videos on Youtube).  I play the baritone horn in the marching band and tuba in wind ensemble.  I take band (obviously) and Geometry honors as my math class.  I am also on Excell this year and love to play frisbee.