What Was America Thinking?

What Was America Thinking?

The article I read is called, “The Obama Transition: What Will Change Look Like?” It was about how people are worried about Obama switching to President in a bad, almost depression like, time. The article also talked about how they have a lot of things planned to make the smooth go as possible. I don’t blame the people who are worried at all. In fact I am as well. In this time of desperation we can’t afford to have things go wrong during the transition. Especially with a leader with close to no experience, and have him face an extremely important question. I am still in aw about how this country voted for a candidate with no experience and risk making these problems in country even worse. For example, the price of living rising, war, and stocks are falling. If it were up to me I would chose the candidate with more experience, because there would be a better chance of him choosing the right option to help our country. One of my problems with Obama is how he wants to pull the troops out of the war. Now I am all for the least amount of casualties, but I think we need to finish what we started, and not just give up. If we pull out now, people will think that we are weak and try to take advantage of us. My guess is if that happens we will have more terrorist attacks and lose the same amount even more people than we are losing now, but even more tragically. There will also be a lot of building or cities wreaked, and it will cost a lot to replace them, which is something we can’t afford.

Views on Guns and Hunting

Views on Guns and Hunting

The article I read, “John McCain, Barack Obama on outdoor issues—again”, is about what McCain and Obama really think of the issues at hand. McCain says that he is against gun control, which I pretty much agree with. I think you should be allowed to have a small revolver for self defense, but only if you have a license. In my opinion it should be illegal to own assault rifles, machine guns, or even just hunting rifles. The reason I feel so strongly about this is because I’m completely against hunting. If hunting rifles there will be a lot less hunting which will mean fewer animals will be brutally killed for no reason. Although McCain is a hunter this doesn’t mean I do not like him. I think he would be a great President. One of my favorite things about him is his role to try to prevent the destruction of wildlife. As you can tell I am someone who loves animals and nature. When I heard about how they were sucking up all of the prairie dogs in the lot near my house so they could build apartment I got so mad. I could not believe they would just kill animals to do that. Then I realized they did that to build my house. As I thought it over I came to my own conclusion. We do need to destroy some nature to build new building or house because our world keeps expanding, but we also need to keep a lot of it for animals, peaceful hikes, fishing and camping. For that reason I side with Obama. He his quoted saying, “We need to make sure that we’re good stewards of the land. It means that we are maintaining access to public lands but are also making sure that we are doing it in a responsible way.” What I think he is saying is that we do need to expand, but in a way that we keep some parts of this country uncontaminated by mans technology. It is a good thing that I can’t vote yet, because I would not know who to vote for. Half the time I side with Obama, and the other half, McCain.

McCain Doing Badly in Polls

McCain Doing Badly in Polls
The story I chose to respond to was called “McCain Pulls Out of Michigan.” This story was about McCain and how he dropped out of Michigan because the pulls are showing that he is doing very poorly there. I am a republican and I think it would be good for us to have McCain as a president because even though we are in a war right now I think the republicans in congress are handling it very well. Unfortunately other people don’t think that and want Obama to become our new president. If Obama become president I really don’t think that there is much that he could do better. If he pulls the U.S. out of the war, in my opinion, would be a very bad idea. All that would do is make us look weak to the terrorist, and also make the Iraq government start to fall apart, because terrorism would become more common since we are not there to help protect them. I know that everyone is saying that we need change for our country, but I think change is bad and we should keep up with what we are doing now and the war will be over when it is over.

Spore

Spore
The story that I wrote about is called “Just Had to Shout This One Out.” It is about a video game where you create a one celled organism and as you eat other thing you grow into multi-celled organism. As you go through the game you get stronger and try to create a civilization and not get taken over or thrown out of the city. I think that it’s amazing how they created a game that kids can learn from. It shows how this world has come to be from almost nothing to all of this. It such a good concept to show how this came to be because then the kids who play will more understand and possibly do better in science class while they are discussing that topic. In the article David Warlick’s son told him that one of the funniest parts of the game is going back and changing your spore’s characteristics to see if it can adapt to its surroundings. The game Spore to nearly 12 years to complete but it was worth it. In this game you can literally do anything. You can have your creation grown nine arms, make it the king of the world, or even create an under sea city. They should start to create more games like this about different things like maybe you start out a teenager and each hour you play is like half a year and you have to become a army leader and then a king and they set rules for their land and they can take over other lands to get more, then kids could learn about history and government. I bet kids would do better in school if they made games like that that they could play.

A New Way to Learn

A New Way to Learn
I chose the story “Macbeth: The Musical” by Mr. Fisch. I really enjoyed this article. It’s about a bunch of students who read Macbeth and then have the idea to turn it in to a musical. It sounds really fun, all of the students worked together to create lyrics and different notes for different parts to create suspense. I normally hate reading but I think it would be fun to turn it in to a musical. I have a hard time paying attention but this would be so helpful because it is actually fun and not boring. I think that’s so cool how they thought of a way to make class educational and also fun, normally that is really hard to do and I didn’t think they would be able to ever make a boring book fun. After reading this I got me thinking about how we could change our classes to make them fun but still educational. For math you could have competitions for who could solve the problem first and whoever won could get a piece of candy, then it might encourage people to work harder. For history we could do little skits about whatever we are learning or we could play jeopardy, but all of the questions would be about the unit that we are on. For science I really think that hands on experiments would be the best. Science would be so much more fun if we did experiments like you see people do in movies where they out to liquids in a beaker and it starts to foam or something. I got really excited when I was going into high school because I thought we were going to do stuff like that but instead the teacher just talks and we listen. And last I think for language arts we should also do the musical thing just because it sounds so much fun. Although since you can’t really do anything fun for test you could do what my elementary school fifth grade teacher did. Whenever we had a test if you only missed two points or less she would give you a soda, and we called it “The Pop Club.” It was really fun and I think that would encourage a lot of people to study for tests and do better. If we did at least one of these I think that would make school, or at least that class, a lot more fun.

Tweeting a Funeral?

Tweeting a Funeral?
This story is about a little three year old boy who was killed tragically at an ice cream shop by a car crashing through the window. The reporters asked if they could do a story on it at the funeral and the family members said that would be all right. Only one of the reporters was able to make the funeral so he used a new program called Twitter to send live updates to their sites. I’m all for technology but I think that is very disrespectful to the family to be sending text messages during the funeral. I don’t get why he couldn’t have just written down some notes and then posted them on the site when the funeral was over. It would have been the same notes just you would have had to read them at a later time, plus it would have been a lot less disrespectful. At the end of the story Mr. Fisch says, “We must learn to use the new tools at our disposal. Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try something. It means we need to learn to do it well. That is our mission.” I think what he said is completely appropriate, just because we don’t do things perfect doesn’t mean we should do them at all. If we were to just stop everything that we were doing that wasn’t perfect we wouldn’t be able to do anything because we don’t do anything perfect it is near impossible. There are always tiny flaws, especially in technology, but I think that eventually we will get it right.

Aurora School Kids Commemorate Sept. 11

Aurora school kids commemorate Sept. 11

I chose an article that talked about how the kids at Jewell Elementary school honored the victims on September 11th 2001. Even though the students were too young to remember the tragic day in our lives its nice to see that they still want to honor it. I am amazed at how mature the kids were when they spoke about it. They showed a lot of respect for our soldiers that died that day and said that they were happy to be in the ceremony. I remember back to the day that it happened I saw my dad watching TV and I ran in to look at it and I saw a plane crashed into the building and I just thought it was an accident from the pilot. When I got to school that day everyone was talking about it. I wasn’t really sure what to think , as bad as it sounds I wasn’t that sad, don’t get me wrong but I don’t think I really understood what was going on but as I got older I really started to realize what happened and how it changed everybody’s lives dramatically. Now I feel very bad for all of the people who lost their lives and I cant comprehend how bad their families feel. This attack was one of the worst attacks in our country it changed the way many people lived their lives not to mention the big war we are in now. This truly is a tragic and horrible day.