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Showing posts from April, 2024

Life and Death

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  After reading Videotape, I was struggling to find the purpose or meaning behind it. It just seemed like a pointless essay that no one could relate to. I mean, who really likes to see people die? Yet, it proves a good point: the transience of life and desensitization of death. The essay prompted a question in my mind. Should death be shown? In our society, death is something that is always censored and not shown. especially to kids. Real, human death is never shown on any main stream news or videos. As a result, to me, death is something that has always seemed cursed in a way. Imagining a moment of someone filled with life, and the next they are devoid of that vital energy is almost too much to handle. Like something you weren't meant to see. However, with this censorship of death in media and society, there is a resulting fear of death. In my opinion, people shouldn't fear death. Thinking of ways that death can be more "normalized", removing some censorship comes to...

Testing: smart or stupid?

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Due to the testing this week and next week, I will come up with a verdict on its usefulness and practicality.  First, it is important to note that most tests are designed for a lot of people, thus they are supposedly standardized. Of course, the main goal of testing is to gauge students' ability/knowledge of something. There are many forms of testing, and some of them will be better in gauging ability than others by nature. For example, a driver's test result is probably pretty accurate whether someone can drive or not, while something like the SAT does not really indicate whether someone is a good reader/writer/mathematician.  Tests like the SAT do not always promote better reading/writing/math skills, but instead promote learning how to take the SAT, if that makes sense. It rewards learning the format of the test, learning the types of questions that will show up, and taking the test over and over (collegeboard is a greedy monopoly, but that is a topic for another time). Som...

Our responsibility to nature

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 Question 4... I think our responsibility as humans on this planet is to respect other life forms and the environment to the best of our ability. It should be the number one priority that we have as a civilization, since without a healthy planet we put ourselves at risk, not to mention every other organism, who definitely did not have a say in our choices.  Let's not forget that humans are also animals. We do not live separately of other animals, and we have just as much right to use the land as they do. Since we are so powerful, it is important that we look out for other species and the environment. The planet gave us the materials and resources to thrive, so we should try to protect the very thing that keeps us alive.  Yet today, we see a large portion of harm coming from large companies fueled by corporate greed. In this way, humans are flawed since we only aim to gain power, forgetting to respect nature along the way. An example is soda companies, who create millions ...