pain of writing images

• heart being stabbed

he feels as if he might die. the pressure is almost unbearable from the start. the heart beats though, showing how through the pain, the thought of writing is actually what fuels him. This feeling can be related to any time you have that nervous feeling, tightness in your chest.

• cigg butts scattered amongst type writer keys

shows how long it feels he has been looking at his key board. every snuffed cigg another snuffed idea. the blend of his pain and stress with the keys on his typewriter.

• man looking in distorted mirror

at the end the pressure starts to become too much. he begins to feel worthless and unaware of his true identity. his reflections changes to things like clowns (hes a joke) and babies (hes not ready or matured)

a sentence starts out like... [freewrite...]

... a enormous brick wall. seeming impossible to
conquor. you look up at the top
knowing that you will never stand
high on top and look down
on the scattered verbs and pronouns.
but slowly you chip away at this wall.
thought by thought.
word by word.
syllable by syllable.
until it trembles
shakes.
and gives out. falling to a small pile
born a sentence

tele[phone?] freewrite...

Even though the said purpose for telephones is to allow people to speak to eachother from afar, it has becoming increasingly popular to textmessage someone instead. This shift from speaking to writing can be seen as both a good and bad thing. Is this just society reverting back to its more classic days of letter writing or is it just one more step of our society slowly becoming more and more impersonal and disconnected? One of the apparent benefits of textmessaging is that you can carry on a conversation while proceeding with our day to day activities. Once again our society's need to be constantly moving and progressing harms something as simple as taking the time to talk to one another. talk, not text. Text messaging also allows people to withhold their true emotions. You can take advantage of the lack of true personality expressed via text message. say you're happy when you are actually upset. say you're one place, while you are actally somewhere else. be faker than the hard plactic of the cellphone itself.

sample h: the good and the bad

good:

1. informative
2. extensive vocabulary
3. descriptive

bad:

1. doesn't focus on the large subject
2. too many facts given at a time
3. impersonal

sample g: the good and the bad

Good:

1. Written at a high level but not too complicated
2. Good vocabulary
3. Personal and almost conversational

Bad:

1. Few minor spelling and grammar issues
2. ...thats really it

answers for billy

Alexander's question #3

I believe Colins turns the focus of the poem to himself to mock how some poets end up talking more about themselves than their subject. In this poem supposedly about love, it is ironic to have a majority of the poem about the speaker instead of his lover.

DOC's question #2

He makes the poem purposely rediculouc to prove a point. Throuh his exagerations, Colins allowed the reader to see the flaws of the writing style.

Stephan's question #4

I don't think that this is Colins lashing out at love itself. I believe it is quite the opposite. If he didn't care about love and how it was represented, he would have taken the time to rewrite this rediculous poem to prove his point. Love clearly means a lot to Colins.

freewrite...

Today it is 48 degrees and beautiful, but I sure didn’t feel beautiful. As I walked to class I had to fight hard to put one foot in front of the other. Head down, last night’s make smeared across my face, I trudged to class. Once in class I tried to busy myself with the mundane assignments, but my mind would eventually drift off. No way had that really happened. What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? I stared out the window hearing his words over and over again, racing through my mind. “I just can’t be in this anymore. I just can’t be with you anymore.” I traced my finger along the scratches in my hard wooden desk, heart in my head.

questions for billy

1. What point were you proving in turning the focus of the poem to the speaker himself?
2. Why did you choose this poem to rewrite?
3. Do you always read poems critically; if so why?
4. Do you have such little faith in those metaphors individually, or just the way they were used together?
5. What do you believe to be the most important quality for a poem to have?
6. Do you enjoy using metaphors in your own writing; if so why and what purpose do they serve?

my way or the highway

My ideal way to communicate my ideas for this paper, or any paper for that matter, is via speech. I consider myself a relatively strong public speaker. Thanks to my years of acting in various plays and performances, I have pretty much lost any fear of making a fool out of myself in front of a group of people. I feel like speeches connect with the audience better than making them read an essay. I would also like to have a PowerPoint presentation to work with so I could hopefully connect with both audio and visual learners.  I work with PowerPoint presentations often at work and have found them to be quite helpful at holding an audiences attention.  Besides being more effective, I would also rather this method because I believe I would find it easier to prepare. I am not a strong writer in a formal "paper" format. It actually makes me nervous as I struggle to find the perfect words to express my thoughts. I also have trouble getting started on papers and finding the motivation to make it through them by their deadlines. Just talking, on the other hand, is significantly easier for me. And making PowerPoint presentations has always just been fun for me. Playing with colors, fonts, and special effects make it more creative and artistic which appeals to me more personally.

journey to the land of the long white cloud

The writer of Flight of the Kuaka, Don Stap, writes this scientific reflection as a present tense narrative. This leads to the writing feeling more story-like and less boringly educational. Even the title, Flight of the Kuaka, sounds like the title of an interesting story or legend, not a scientific article. The first paragraph sets the scene perfectly, giving the articl more of an adventure novel feel. It is incredibly visual, even a little comical, and serves as a great hook to pull the reader in. The story does become more informative as it continues on, giving more and more information about the birds and the danger they're in,but by that time, the reader is already sucked in.  


Stap has a very similar writing style to that of the article, DON'T, we studied last class. Both authors use qotations and  personal introductions for their characters. Stap presents a great visual when he introduces the character, Gill, by saying "In his early 60s, with close-cropped white hair," and "Gill's voice rises with enthusiam." He even introduced the birds with great visual description. Its easy to picture these amazing birds after being told they're "large, long-legged, cinamon-breasted sandpipers with upturned bills." This writing technique throws the reader right into the story to practically experience what the writer is going through.

What kind of reader are you?

2.  Go through the text deliberately and highlight every instance of dialogue.  What do you theorize its role in Lehrer’s argument?

This technique of using abundant dialog allows you see the “characters” as people rather than subjects. It also allows the reader to better understand such "characters" and not only how they interact with eachother, but the world around them. Reading dialog puts you in the writer's shoes and allows you to "walk" through the speakers experiences.

“These tasks have been studied so many times that we pretty much know where to look and what we’re going to find,” Jonides says
“These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar,” Jonides says. “The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.”
“We’re incredibly complicated creatures,” Shoda says. “Even the simplest aspects of personality are driven by dozens and dozens of different genes.”
“They turned my kitchen into a lab,” Carolyn told me. “They set up a little tent where they tested my oldest daughter on the delay task with some cookies. I remember thinking, I really hope she can wait.”
“I’m not interested in looking at the brain just so we can use a fancy machine,” he says. “The real question is what can we do with this fMRI data that we couldn’t do before?” Mischel “This is the group I’m most interested in,” he says. “They have substantially improved their lives.”Mischel “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” Duckworth “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”
“The core feature of the KIPP approach is that character matters for success,” Levin says. “Educators like to talk about character skills when kids are in kindergarten—we send young kids home with a report card about ‘working well with others’ or ‘not talking out of turn.’ But then, just when these skills start to matter, we stop trying to improve them. We just throw up our hands and complain.”
“When you do these large-scale educational studies, there are ninety-nine uninteresting reasons the study could fail,” Duckworth says. “Maybe a teacher doesn’t show the video, or maybe there’s a field trip on the day of the testing. This is what keeps me up at night.”
“This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?”
“We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ” 

“It went against the way we’d been thinking about personality since the four humors and the ancient Greeks,” he says.

 “I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at,” he says. “We just have to look in the right way.

 “Young kids are pure id,” Mischel says. “They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marveled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

 “We recently tried to do a version of it, and the kids were very excited about having food in the game room,” she says. “There are so many allergies and peculiar diets today that we don’t do many things with food.”

 “When you’re investigating will power in a four-year-old, little things make a big difference,” he says. “How big should the marshmallows be? What kind of cookies work best?”

 “I knew we’d designed it well when a few kids wanted to quit as soon as we explained the conditions to them,” he says. “They knew this was going to be very difficult.”

 “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

 “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

 “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

 “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.”

“When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.”

 “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

 “We can’t give these people marshmallows,” Berman says. “They know they’re part of a long-term study that looks at delay of gratification, so if you give them an obvious delay task they’ll do their best to resist. You’ll get a bunch of people who refuse to touch their marshmallow.

"A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,"
"They didn't even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later."
"There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows."
"It was really just idle dinnertime conversation," he says. "I'd ask them, 'How's Jane? How's Eric? How are they doing in school?'"
"That's when I realized I had to do this seriously,"
"Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person," Craig says. "Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me make better career choices and stuff."
"There's often a gap between what people are willing to tell you and how they behave in the real world,"
"What we're really measuring with the marshmallows isn't will power or self-control," Mischel says. "It's much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can't control the world, but we can control how we think about it."
"If you want to know why some kids can wait and others can't, then you've got to think like they think," Mischel says.
"At the time, it seemed like a mental X-ray machine," he says. You could solve a person by showing them a picture."
"The East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive hedonists, who were always living for the moment and never thought about the future," he says. "The Africans, meanwhile, would say that the East Indians didn't know how to live and would stuff money in their mattress and never enjoy themselves."

3.  Note every introduction and/or biographical background for the “characters” in Lehrer’s text.  How do these function in the text? 

The introductions make it more readable because it makes it more story-like than informative. This leads to a deeper connection with and understanding of the text.

The behavioral and genetic aspects of the project are overseen by Yuichi Shoda, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, who was one of Mischel’s graduate students. He’s been following these “marshmallow subjects” for more than thirty years: he knows everything about them from their academic records and their social graces to their ability to deal with frustration and stress.
Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist.

Last year, Duckworth and Mischel were approached by David Levin, the co-founder of KIPP, an organization of sixty-six public charter schools across the country

Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair
child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him
Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers
After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research.
But occasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery school
Starting in 1981, Mischel sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school.
And so, last year, Mischel, who is now a professor at Columbia,
The family settled in Brooklyn, where Mischel’s parents opened up a five-and-dime. Mischel attended New York University, studying poetry under Delmore Schwartz and Allen Tate, and taking studio-art classes with Philip Guston

Marc Berman, a lanky graduate student with an easy grin, speaks about his research with the infectious enthusiasm of a freshman taking his first philosophy class. Berman works in the lab of John Jonides, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, who is in charge of the brain-scanning experiments on the original Bing subjects

 For more information see:

 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1DUI3rlHZ

to be continued...

Consistent traits in a person take a certain amount of time and diligence to find. “I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at… We just have to look in the right way.” Mischel proposes children who could delay their wants and show self control would also be able to do this as an adult. This consistency was shown in the children who didn’t immediately eat the marshmallow. Mischel’s research looks at these consistencies in the “right way.” He compares the children’s self control to that of when they are adults and studies the patterns of behavior. If they did not eat the first marshmallow in order to get the second one, then as adults, they tended to be overall more successful in life. Other consistencies can be picked up through a study like this as well. For example, someone who has always enjoyed being hyper might be attracted to a product on the market known as Red Bull due to the jolts of energy it advertises supplying.

strawberries with a side of cyclamate please

You can walk into any restaurant and see them amongst the array of ketchup packets and salt shakers. That little dish with the rainbow assortment of various sugar substitutes can be found almost anywhere as the commercial below advertises. As early as the 19^th century, these less than sweet powders have been luring people with false promises of a healthier way to satisfy those sugar cravings. 

The increasing popularity of sugar substitutes is a clear reflection on the priorities of today’s society. Most of us cling to the desire to become what the media portrays as beautiful: thin.  People will go out of their way to purchase pricy items that promise its consumption will lead to a dramatic weight loss, or even skip meals altogether, in attempt to drop their weight to a “glowing” 78 pounds matching their favorite celebrity of the week. News flash: Sugar is supposed to be sweet and indulging, and believe it or not, you are allowed to indulge from time to time!

This chemically goodness is a perfect symbol for society today. America has become obsessed with being as fake as those sugar substitutes. Let’s start off with our beloved politicians shall we? Most of them are just as bad as the creators of the commercials, one trying to sell us just as much b.s. as the next. And all of us are fake from time to time. Whether it’s sucking up to our boss, or trying to make our new girlfriend’s parents like us, we all at one time or another try and act just a little more sweet than we actually are.

As long as we keep consuming these lovely little packets of false hopes of social acceptance, we can’t even blame producers for continuing to produce them. We have made it quite clear we no longer want those sweets baked with love from grandma’s house. We are perfectly content giving up the childhood memories baked in with the flour, water, and, most of all, sugar.

bologna

After watching the Pantene commercial, many students were irritated, or even enraged. One of the main reasons for these reactions is the bait and switch the creators use. They lead the viewer to develop a connection with the main character and then, at the last minute, redirect that connection with the character to a connection with the product.  The connection built with this young and deaf female character is due mainly to the sympathy the viewer feels for her.   She appears to be constantly bullied for attempting to pursue a seemingly impossible dream.  The scenes with shots of her crying or of her standing helplessly by her severely injured mentor's bedside can't help but stir up feelings of compassion for the girl. 

Just when the viewer finds his or her self grinning with happiness as this character he or she has grown to adore achieves their impossible goal, the attention of the commercial shifts as the words “You can shine” appear on the screen.  After this emotional rollercoaster of a commercial, the only message the creator wants the consumer to get is to buy their product. They bait you with this pitiable deaf girl and make you think they are just urging you to achieve your goals. Then, they basically say, “nahhh… just kidding. You probably can’t achieve your dreams like this girl, but you can have nice hair like her.”

This is the switch that tends to make the viewer so angry.   He or she developed not only compassion for the girl, but confidence in his or her self.  And just as quickly as that feeling came, it was ripped from the viewer with those simple words, “You can shine.”