Critical Thinking

Japanese fishing trawler sunk by giant jellyfish

The article I chose talks about a ship that was sunk due to a giant jellyfish attack. I think that the article is somewhat messy because it goes from one thing to another. From my point of view the author should have stuck to an organize pattern because if he did the essay would have sounded more formal. To me it sounded like if the author had no idea what he was writing about because his article was based of another article and it did not provide ore information about the ship that sunk. I read two different articles one was supposed to be the original and the other was based off the original one. The second article was ore like a summary and the writer was still all over the place with the details of the story. Seeing that both writers were all over the place made me think that they did it on a rush.

"The Men We Carry in Our minds"

1. Sanders immediately acknowledges about the physical conditions about the men he knew when he was a boy because he saw them work so hard that their bodies were damaged. "The bodies of the men were twisted and maimed...The nails of their hands were black and split, the hands tattooed with scars...Some had lost their fingers.(3)" Sanders also saw how the laborers worked so hard all year round with no breaks, later this leads to the laborers. "Their ankles and knees ached from years of standing on the concrete. Anyone who had worked for long around machines was hard of hearing.(3)" The men worked so hard that their health started to deteriorate.

2. Sanders characterizes the soldiers he knew when he was growing up as men "who did not sweat and break down like mules." From his point of view Sanders says that the soldiers hardly worked all day in comparison to the laborers, but they were all willing to risk their life and put it on the lines when the war came to them. "They were all waiting-like so many braves waiting for the hunt to begin." This shows that indeed they were just waiting for the moment of the fight. The moment that would test the skills they learned as soldiers.

3. As a young boy Sanders had only seen the laborers who worked all their life and the soldiers who waited for the moment of the fight. Seeing only this two types of men is what led him to not imagine that he could aspire to be an engineer, or any of the men he saw on television. Since he was grew up seeing laborers work their life off and the soldiers waiting to go to war he assumed that all he could aspire to be was a laborer, laborers' boss and a soldier.

4. Sanders' father seemed to have partially changed by going from the "tire factory,and from the assembly line to the front office." Regardless of the partial escape his father was still affected by the year he had worked at "red-dirt farm", his father escaped from working his whole life until he died. His health was still damaged from the years he worked at the farm and carried over till he worked at the office.

5. The specific contrast that he between college men and women that he later understands are that men assumed that they would be rich since the very moment they were born because their fathers had been "rich." The contrast of women is that they complained about men having things easy and having more advantages. In his opinion Sanders think that women have the better life although; they spend most of the time tending the kids and being locked at home doing chores they do not get to work as hard as men do.

6.What tbrings lower- class men and women together are the desires they all have to make their lives different and to become better people. The realities they have in common is that they have the future in their hands and can change the world world to make it better.

7. What the college women have in common with the author of this essay is that they are interested in the arts and becoming better people for the good of the world.

Summary Self evaluation

1. To me the most challenging part of writing the summary was coming up with the main ideas of each section and the sction function. I think that that was the most challenging part mostly because I had to get it right because if I did not then my entire summary was going to be all wrong. To me the least challenging part was coming up with transitions because I had the entire summary written down and I had done it before. The transition process I had used it before in my past English classes when I had to write an essay.

2. To be honest I did not expect the grade I got because I thought that my summary was somewhat obscure. Now that I look back at it I see why I got the grade I got. I think it is very straight forward and meets the rubric requirements. When I was looking at the draft of the outline I thougtht that I was not so sure about what I was supposed to do, and how I was supposed to do it. Later I just read through the outline that I had put together and just edited by making some corrections and rephrasing the author's ideas.

3. Based on the comments I received, I think that my strenghts are paraphrasing, making transitions and clauses to join the ideas because Ireceived the comments based on the rubric and they reflect the same ideas from the rubric.

4. What I think I will try to inprove for my next summary is that I will try to use less prepositons that can make my summary sound too wordy because at the beginning of the first sentence were crossed out. After I read through it, I realized that I chould have done it before submitting it and it would have been perfect.

The Most Valuable Technique form Ch. 8

The most valuable tecnique I learned from chapter 8 is practice because if people practice a lot then they become better at whatever they are doing. I chose this because I noticed that when we have a reading from Susie's class from the "Reader" and we re-read it in class I become better on the subject. When I read it on my own it is somewhat clear but the more I read it again and again the subject becomes clearer. When I typed "practice" I remembered about the the video we saw in class and how the guy repeated the word so many times that it became very annoying. I think that the act of practicing soemthing can become very annoying and that might prevent one from learning and staying focus in what we are doing.I experienced it myself when I had to attend cross country practice in high school. I had to attend it everyday and had to practice myself during the weekends, it became very annoying because I had to hear the coach say the same thing every day. He complained about other athletes not going to practice. I assume that they stopped going to practice because they got tired of practicing. In my case I did miss one or two practices but because of injuries from practicing too much and it affected me because it made me want to quit. I remained focused untill the injuries hit me, then they push me down and not wanting to go to practice any more and it made my performances go down.

Lit Blog Response- Discussing Main Point and Meaning

1) I do not think the author's survey results indicate that feminist is, by and large, dirty word for her fellow students because Lybby does not provide more information that says that people think it's a dirty word. She provides the same amount of information for both points, she spends time talking on how people are not concern about feminist. On paragraph 3 she says that people said that they knew about the word but they just did not cara about the subject.

2) The reasons Libby offers as to why there are not more self-identified femisnts are that people think that being a feminist is something bad, that people are confused about what it really means. Another reason is that some men think that as males they should not be involved in the situation being. Some people think that they cannot be feminist because they are not doing anything to make things better.

3. Libby thinks that more people should identify themselves as feminists because she does not think that feminist is a bad word or that it has anything wrong. She thinks that feminist are just people who fight for women equal rights. In fact she thinks that the negative connotation should be ignored because it disturbs the real meaning of the word.

Tranfer Motivational Conference

Despite all the talking during the presentations of the guest speaker I had an amazing time at the conference. I disliked the fact that a lot of people were talking while the guest speakers or the college representatives were presenting. It made me very upset because I wanted to hear what they had to say in order to learn new things. The biggest highlight was Cruz Reynoso because I enjoyed hearing the stories of his life and stories of his family. It was very inspirational hearing his words of wisdom and how he conveyed us to become together as a group and let the schools know that we want to go back to the old system in which college students did not have to pay for classes. Hearing how he had to work on the field picking fruits and working hard and still managed to become such an important figure in politics made think that if you ever want to be somebody, you have to work hard make sacrifices and not give up. For me this conference was serious although it seemed that it was the opposite for other people. I felt very dissapointed and ashamed to be part of the Foothill Puente program because some of my classmated kept being asked to be quiet. I felt very disspaointed because I thought that they were not representing our school. I do not mind whether my classmates get mad me for publishing this but it seemed for them that they were not taking the conference serious. It seemed so because when I went to my workshop half of the class was in the same worshop. I don't think that it was appropiate for them to not take advantage of this oppurtunity and learn something new. I know I should not be saying this because everyone is responsible for their own actions, everyone makes different choices and some peopke made them at the conference by talking and during the guest speakers presentation. From my point of view it prevented some people from learning.

Anzaldua Blog Response # 2

Anzaldua's essay structurure is different from that of an academic writing by having very small parts of poems or sayings in beween some of the paragraphs. Some of the sayings or quotes she presents in the essay are not by other authors but also by her mother. In a formal essay I have never seen someone quoting what their mom said and use it as a proof in an essay. She also writes a list of the different languages that Mexicans speak are, this is not part of an academic essay because it is not a paragraph that proves and makes an argument. What I think makes it an acadademic text is the point that she is trying make, also the sidenotes that show that ahe did a lot of research to get to the point that she wanted to make. She discusses each point she intoduces in her paragraphs also. What makes it different from a traditional essay is that it contains a lot of spanish sentences. This might make the text confusing to read for some people who do not speak spanish, even if she later trnaslates them it can become very distracting. I think that she writes her essay providing many spanish vocabulary to go along with the title of the essay which is "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." By writing some sentences and words in spanish she is showing that she speaks how she speaks and that no one was going to stop her. What she was trying to accomplish is that she wanted to show that there are many different languages that people speak within their same language.
Reason she gives for writing the essay in the way she did:
"Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish..."(44)

Anzaldua Blog Response

When I was in seventh and eigth grades I was taking my ESL classes, I was learning English because I had recently moved to the United States. I was not judged by Americans who spoke English, but by people of my own etnicity. While in class I used to not talk to anyone because I knew that if I talked to them they would make fun of my Salvadoran spanish accent. All of my classmates were Mexicans one or two were Asian so I could not talk to the Asians because I did not speak English and I could not talk to the Mexicans because they made fun of me. They said mean and derogatory things about me. Due to this issue I grew a strong rage towards some Mexican teenagers. I had a Mexican girlfriend and she was very nice and sweet, she never said anything that could hurt me and she was the only person who I can speak to in school and she would understand and not make fun of my accent. She had a friend and she was Mexican also and one we were both sitting in the cafeteria having our lunch when her friend came to our table. It was the day that we had received our progress reports and my friend was happy about me having straight A's that she told her friend that I had a 4.00 GPA. The girl just gave me a look full of envy and madness and said "caras vemos mañas no sabemos." It was one of the things that I have never forgotten. The girl knew who I was and where from and whenever she saw me she would look the other direction. What she said made me very upset but I said nothing to her nor to anyone who said things like this to me excet one time. I was again in the school cafeteria waiting in line to get my food when someone said something in English that I did not understand and I said "no hablo Ingles." Someone behind me was so impatient that I did not move forward on the line that said "Go back to Mexico" I turned to him and said "no soy Mexicana." The guy was Mexican I could see it, and I felt it in his words. Later I realized that the guy was in my P.E class.