Pat's Blog

1.   Kabetogama

Pristene beautiful landscape

Amazing fishing

2.  Voyager park cabin

Fourteen years of memories

Taken by Congress

3.  National Parks good

or so they seem but in fact

negative effects

“Having been raised on gold stars for effort and smiley faces for self-esteem, they’ve learned that they can get by without hard work and real talent if they can talk the professor into giving them a break.”  This quote really got my attention becuase I felt a real connection with it.  I’ll admit that I never asked or begged a teacher to raise my grade or give me the oportunity for extra credit.  I took whatever grade I got, becuase I knew it reflected my work.  It always angered me when someone would beg the teacher to raise their grade when I knew they didn’t work as hard as me.  The thesis the writer sets forth is that, raising a students grade when they don’t deserve it only hurts them and others in the long run.  A few examples he uses are about engineering.  He gives examples of engineering projects gone wrong and how it was caused by a lack of knowledge.  He also says they are, “real world consequences of errors and lack of expertise.  I must say I completley agree with this article 100%.

I attended a computer skills assesment at 9:00, where I had to take a short test andI recieved a free flash drive.  At 10:00 I went to a scholarship information session hosted by Celeste Zuniga.  There was a lot of valuable information I learned at the session.

“I don’t believe that one is born compassionate….It must be learned, and it is learned by having adversity at our windows, coming through the gates of our yards, the walls of our towns, adversity that becomes so familiar that we begin to identify anc empathize with it.”  I choose this passage for multiple reasons.  First it caught my attention.  I hadn’t though about compassion like this, the author says compassion is something that must be developed, it simpley just does’t happen.  Second I thought it was the theisis, that compassion needs to be learned because there are a lot of people who are less fourtunate.  The author uses a couple examples she has witnessed in New York.  One specific one is when a homeless man came into a resturant during bad weather, and the store owner game him some food and hot drink.

“Stripped of its volunteer ideology, but still unable to compel service from dissenters, the military would end up weaker and less representative that the volunteer force-the very opposite of the draft’s intended goals.”  This quote caught my intention because the author directly states that the draft would have the opposite results of its intended purpose.  I think this is important to the essay because it directly attacks the opposing view.  I think the authors thesis is that, by imposing a draft, it only dimineses the volunteers and, in the long run, hurts the military.  He supports this using several arguments.  One is that there are required tests to enter the military now, and if there is a draft people who don’t want to join would purposly fail.  If they do that than they would have to lower the standards thus dumbing down the military.

I personally feel that a draft may have some good points, but in reality it has no chance of working.  It would be political suicide to try and reinstate it, so I have a hard time seeing a politician voting for it.  I agree that there is a large amount of hipocracy as stated in the first essay and if you think we should be fighting you should, yourself or allow family members to fight.

“After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear the worst from me.”  This quote sums up the basics of what the writter was talking about in this essay.  He summarized his experiences as a black man on the streets, being judged based his appearence.  His thesis is one about stereotypes and how they negativley effect innocent people.  He used his experience to support this thesis, he talked about walking and having a women run away from him, or him being chased around his own place of work, because they thought he was a burglar.

“If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider horizions will be fatal.”  I choose this quote because I think it hits a major point of the essay.  The author is saying that people are afraid of new things and think that they are bad, and she says it is bad to narrow your ideas and what you are exposed to.  I think the writers theisis is that books can broaden and enlighten your ideas and beliefs, she uses her specific example, about how she did not realize she was growing up in a segregated town until she read a book by Doris Lessing.

“We must remember that intelligence is not enough.  Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education. ”  This quote, in my opinion, is one of the pillars of this essay.  And in this way, I consider it the basic thesis of the essay.  The whole idea of the essay is to comment on what King believes is the true goal of education.  This quote displays that by basically stating what that goal of education is.  King supports his thesis by using the specific examle of Eugene Talmage, who is smart but a racist, and King asks the question, is a person like that actually educated.

“Like the naturalized citizens who are expected to know more about America than those of us born here, gay couples are being held to a standard the denizens of Vegas chapels and divorce courts have never had to meet: to justify the simple human urge, so taken for granted by the rest of us, to fully and legally come together.”  I choose this quote because I think that it best represents the idea of the essay.  It is important to the essay because it brings together the main ideas throughout the essay into one sentence.  I think the thesis of the essay is that, gay couples are being held to a double standard that straight couples are not, and most straight couples take their rights for granted.

“The miseries I saw , as a boy, in the lives of nearly all men I continue to see in the lives of many–the body-breaking toil, the tedium, the call to be tough, the humiliating powerlessness, the battle for a living and for terriroy. “  I choose this quote because it brings together his ideas about men when he was a kid, and how he sees the same things today.  It basically sums up the main ideas of the essay.  The thesis of his essay, I think, is about perspective.  He talks about his ideas of men and women he got when we was growing up as a poor kid.  He then compares that to the ideas of the rich women in college, who saw the men in their lives with all the power and glory, and assumed that all men went about the same way, not realizing most men were “the toilers and warriors”.