Writing Proposal

In order to write a paper that is worth reading, it's best to pick a subject that speaks to you. Seeing that I have a sibling that has been a large influence in my life, I'm going to research how people with siblings feel about each other. I'll likely ask fellow classmates a certain set of questions and write about what they say. This should be good.

Millennium Wage

Poverty is a problem here in America too. Many people who make minimum wage can barely afford and apartment and other basic necessities like a fridge or a microwave. Imagine having a child or another person living with you when you can barely provide for yourself.

Having a minimum wage of $7.65 isn’t the problem, the problem is that a lot of companies are trying to increase their profit margins to an extent that the people that make minimum wage can no longer afford a lot of things. More people need to be able to purchase basic things than can right now and it starts with the distributors.

Multigenre Multigenre

Identical Twins

The most interesting thing that I read of the multigenre topics was about identical twins. I found this to be exceptionally interesting because of my enrollment in genetics class and it is very interesting to hear about how a set of twins deal with their identicalness when it comes to things such as weddings and birthday parties. Perhaps I will use the idea of talking about someone that shares the same birthday as myself and how that has affected me, seeing as I don’t have an identical twin, this would be the closest thing to it.  

Grammar and Punctuation Definitely Matter

                                                   A Word, Please:

The writer of this article talks about how many linguists believe that the likes of Twitter, is causing many languages to suffer at the feet of 140 characters. They then go over how they recently visited a real-estate website and found a few, although minor, grammatical errors. Before doing so; however, they commit one in the second paragraph, if you consider the one-sentence fragment to be a paragraph. 

They go over using hyphenation at the appropriate time and when to spell out a number rather than using its roman numeral counterpart (any number 10 or below in-case you were wondering). Overall, the idea behind this post is solid, making fun of a less-than-competent website developer that probably made minimum wage while making the website while not giving the websites actual URL in order to keep the post some-what classy. It also makes sense that this post is on a webpage that needs questionable-at-best companies to advertise on it in order to stay afloat. Correspond this with the fact that the post itself has errors makes it laughable and a fun read.  

What I expected to see
 when I chose this article

3 People That Started Something

1.) Mike Nemeth

Mike was inspired by his own life when he had his first daughter. He follows the idea of one-for-one with his book sales. For each book that is sold, another is given to a child that may not have a book to read. These books are often entertaining for not only the child to listen to / learn from while their parents read them, but also for the parent that is reading them too. This is due to Mike having the ability to write about normally copy-written things such as NCAA happenings. The idea behind making the books fun for the parents that are reading them is that it is more likely that they will read fun books to their children rather than not reading the typically boring ones. Enticing parents to read to their children this way allows the child to expand their vocabulary and can lead to a brighter future for them.

One of 3 books written by Mike Nemeth

2.) Mark Slagle & Alex Cox

Mark and Alex want to fight malnutrition, a daunting task in and of itself. Unlike Mike, they got their idea from working at another non-for-profit business. The theme of one-for-one seems to be a recurring one here as well. Every time they sell a packet of all natural peanut butter, they give away a sort-of nutrition pack to a kid in need. This is a little different from the TOMS original model seeing as the item they are giving away isn't the exact same item that they are selling, although it does involve peanut butter. They measure their success by how many people they help, not what they earn. Many of the other stories do not talk about how they measure success but this seems to be a large goal of theirs and so they talk about it quite frequently.

Mark and Alex's
Good Spread Company Logo

 3.) Steven Duque

Steven, like Mark, took his idea from a real life problem he was having. While living in college, Steven often needed refills on basic things such as soap and toothpaste after his night classes had finished and stores had closed. To get his machines into schools, he offers at least a 10% margin of all sales to go back to any school that has a machine. The entire idea here is to make the life of a college student a little less stressful. On top of giving back to hosting schools, Momba is also partnered with, Opportunity Works, an organization that empowers people with disabilities to get jobs back packaging Momba products.

Steven next to one of his Momba Machines

Pecha Kucha

The presenter does many things well. He provides many different pictures of what he is talking about and explains the images that may not be easily interpreted. The pictures that he used of the unique 3-D printed items were the most effective aspects of his presentation.

 The most lackluster part of his presentation was that he has a thick accent and was not completely fluent in English which made some of the more complicated areas hard to understand. He also did now have enough to talk about during some slides leaving anywhere from 2 – 5 seconds of no talking.

Overall I noticed that he had put in a lot of time and effort into his Pecha Kucha and it was rather good. Although I’m skeptical about how well a Pecha Kucha will turn out at the high school level, it does work very well on the professional side of things. I’m completely confident in making a Pecha Kucha that meets all requirements.

在中国教数学 (Teaching math in China)

在中国教数学

Talking to any math teacher on an educational level makes one realize just how much it takes to become a teacher. Likewise, if you’ve ever wanted to become a math teacher and have looked into the college courses they have to take, you may see classes that likely make you start doubting your decision just by reading their titles. You probably looked for these jobs in America which has been slowly declining in the mathematical department for many years. If you move this occupation over to China, the challenges in becoming a math teacher are exponentially increased.

I originally chose the topic of teaching in China because my penpal aspires to take part in the profession; however she did not tell me what kind of teacher she wanted to be. I then decided to narrow it down to teaching math in China because this was a topic I most wanted to explore as far as teaching professions go. I knew that China had many different ways in which they teach math and that the Chinese students score much higher on their math exams than most of the rest of the world.

I knew that the competition between the United States and China in math was very rigorous but I didn’t know that Canada felt the same way. By looking for my second secondary source, I found that the Canadian Embassy is also very concerned with falling behind in math to China. They have gone so far as to hire Chinese instructors from Shanghai to teacher their more advanced students.

I am just as concerned as the US and Canada governments on how far ahead China is becoming in math. Thinking about how much math affects the world and how slowly Americans are learning how to use these types of math is quite a nerve-racking thing to think about. I'm not the only one that is afraid of this as Britain's Education Minister Elizabeth Truss states,

A Chinese teacher
teaching math to her 4th grade class

              “it’s skyscrapers, and its ambitions, are all built on maths,”.

I would like to see more American institutes being on the same page as one another but that’s not to say that this page should be easy. The course needs to be much harder than it currently is and the teachers must make sure that every student understands the material completely before they are sent into the next class. This will make the instructional time faster and the teacher won’t have to explain old concepts.

       

Crawley, Philip. What Shanghai Can Teach Us About Teaching Math. The Globe and Mail, 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/what-shanghai-can-teach-us-about-teaching-math/article17835021/?page=all.

Wei, Kan. What Makes Chinese Math Lessons So Good?. The Globe and Mail, 9 June 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-makes-chinese-maths-lessons-so-good-24380.