Sending the wrong message?

the article i just read talked about how the school administrators are all sending the wrong message because they do not enforce the rules about what students can or can't say. there are four types of censorship to consider in schools and they all cover different parts of speech. the four types of censorship are: 1. Overt censorship by school administrators 2.Student self-censorship resulting from a fear of overt administration censorship 3. Peer or social censorship 4. A subtle self-censorship, resulting from a narrow(Martinson 2005). these all stem off of the administrators sending the wrong message to the students. its all self controlled censorship, and i think that when the administrators say they do not hold back the freedom of speech of their students i think its a lie. i can see it in our school because when students say somethings they get away with it but when they say other things they get in trouble. if they don't hold back freedom of speech they should let the students speak their mind no matter what. most things are not going to disrupt the learning process of students like they say it will. because no matter what kids will still say things they are not supposed to and if it bothers other people than i think they need to get thicker skin and not let it effect them that much. people just need to let more things go so it causes less problems because once your out of school and in life on your own, things will get said that bother you but there is no administrator around to get them in trouble. i think that high school should prepare kids for the harsh reality that life is hard and a lot of things will bother you, rather than holding people back from saying things they should teach kids a way to work around the problems and they should help teach kids how to deal with certain things that come your way. i think that the schools try and make it look like the students have room for free speech but they really crack down and don't let kids express or say different things. For example there is a day of silence in school for spreading the word about gay rights, however if someone tried to make a day that was promoting the opposite of gay rights the school would never allow that. Now both days will make people uncomfortable but they would never say no to the day of silence because it would make it look like they hate gay people. this is the cross road that schools come to when they try and incorporate censorship in their schools. i think that schools should be more open to more ideas and by doing this i think that censorship can be a more equal thing instead of causing such big controversies.







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Censorship... Does it do more worse then good?

The issue I am covering for this final project is about censorship and how it affects student in schools and how it affects the school in general. there are many things that people look at when it comes to censorship because there are so many things that people think should be censored that aren't. when looking at it in schools it usually comes down to books in the library and Internet use. they do not know what they should not let students access and what they should be able to access. some people think that not letting students access certain information is harmful to their education. In this article I read, they talked about how Internet use in schools and colleges ends up in students being able to access pornographic material or other material which is thought to be inappropriate or unsuitable. But many experts say that balancing the dangers of  unsuitable ‘hits’against the curriculum advantages of access to up-to-date, motivating material can help the argument for both sides. many teachers are also taking the hit because they are usually responsible to make sure their students use the Internet safely and the right way without doing anything they are not supposed to be doing. they are supposed to make sure the censorship stays intact but they also have to educate at the same time. So which should they focus on? In my opinion they should focus less on keeping the censorship intact and focus more on teaching the students more about censorship and other things that they are supposed to be learning. Approaches to the Internet have been classified as either Utopian – seeing the information superhighway as a potentially liberating medium, in which ‘information wants to be free or Dystopian –focusing on the potential for control and surveillance represented by a global network. This reflects the ‘double life’ of technology (Noble, 1984) in which aspects of any innovation react the wishes of those who design and control it, but other aspects emerge as unintended consequences from the way that users adapt technologies to their own ends. I think the whole issue of censorship all comes back to the idea that the people in power always want to be watching everyone who is under them. that there is always someone watching and they can determine what information you can look at and which information you can not.

white felon vs. qualified african american

I read the article that talked about applying for jobs and race. There was a study done over a year of time in which there were applicants that had a very good resume put out for them to the companies. This was for a number of different jobs and all of the men were qualified. There were some white and some black participants in this study. One of the white participants was a convicted felon, however the still applying for the same jobs as everyone else. in the study they found that for the most part the white male was picked for a second call back and interview over the qualified black man. Even the white felon was taken over them after he admitted to having a criminal past. this strikes me as very unbelievable that someone could pick a felon over a very qualified person just because of the color of their skin. I think we see this more than we choose to look at in society. we know this is going on but no one does anything because no one wants to be that person who stands up for someone else of a different race to be considered an outsider by some of the same race. I think people are still scared of the stereotypes that are in society and people can not get over the fact that no matter what the color of your skin is, it should not matter because if you have the education and the qualifications you should get hired. This just further proves that African Americans have to work twice if not three times as hard to find a job and find a way to be accepted into society compared to a white person. there is no equality in society no matter what anyone says because all you have to do is sit back and listen and watch how people act around people of different races, and I bet if you look closely you'll notice even yourself act differently in front of people with a different skin color. For there to be equality in this society and to have people be treated better people have to drop the stereo types that they have and they have to accept people for what they can give and what their qualifications are rather than looking at the color of their skin and making a decision based on that only. I know there have been times when I was just like this, I'm not going to lie but when I really think about it I would feel more comfortable with a black man working for me who has a clean record who is very qualified rather than hiring a white man who has a criminal record even if they tell me about it. People should not be given an easy ride just because they have white skin. The days like this have to end if everyone wants any equality in the workplace and in just every day life.

Ghost Wars: What I Learned

After reading Ghost Wars it really solidified my views about our government and the actions that they take. They lie so much about all of the things that they are doing that we have just built our country on a bunch of them. The topic that surprised me most had to of been about 9/11 and how they were warned by the terrorists that something was going to happen and the government did nothing in response. This scares me in a way because it like they do not care about the well being of their people. In a worst case scenario I want to see who they save and don’t save because in most situations they save the rich and famous rather than the middle class who no body knows who they are.

            If these conspiracies were all real I wonder how our country would be run today. I wonder how much freedom we would really have compared to other countries. Would we still be a democracy? I have so many questions that no one can answer because only time will tell when all the truth finally comes out. One thing I learned that was most important was that I should double check what the government is saying to me when something bad is going to happen.  

Ghost Wars: The Wrap Up

Throughout reading this book many of the ideas I had in my head about the government changed a lot. Nothing in this book surprised me that much because I have always been looking into conspiracy kind of things. I have always liked to think some of the things that people are saying are true even if most of the things are bad things. When I read this book I came to a couple of realizations about our country and our government. I think the one that hit me the hardest was that there are never enough questions to get asked. When they answer one question you have to ask another one and keep picking away at them until you get every little detail out of them. The things that they fear most are the people who are not afraid to ask the serious questions that need to be asked. The more questions you ask the more you will get out of the situation. Another thing that arose from my reading was that the government back in the 50’s and 60’s would give non lethal items such as things to wiretap, and communication taps, spy equipment, etc.. There were so many things that they could use back against us later in the years. The generals would tell their men to pick up scrap metal and broken weapons, vehicles and anything they could bring back and rebuild. They would have mechanics and other people put back together the things and they would then put them to use and use them in battles and wars.

Ghost Wars: Osama

Steven Coll also talks about Osama bin Laden and the plan to go and capture him. The plan was unsuccessful and we did not capture or assassinate Osama. In my opinion I think that going after Osama so fast and so aggressive was stupid. We should have waited a year longer to gather way more information, figure out where he sleeps, eats, meets with generals, stores all of his weapons, etc. There are so many things that they needed to sure up before they went in their and started to blow a bunch of stuff up to go find a man in a huge desert and mountains that we are not native to and have not been traveling or living in for all of our lives. You put a bunch of our soldiers in their no matter how much fire power we have or how many soldiers we have there they will still have a huge advantage until we get acclimated to the area and the terrain. They have all of their bases and forts inside caves and tunnels in the hills where we cannot see them and they are heavily guarded. This was just a calling for us to fail and that is what we have done since we have been there. I think we are there for the wrong reasons at this point since it has been so many years. Like what else is our country trying to take from them or how much money is involved. They just used Osama as an excuse to blame someone for the attacks and to use him for an excuse to start war with another country. The worst part about our government and country is that we try and step into things that we are not needed in and usually just end up making it worse. We need to stop worrying about what other people are doing and worry about getting ourselves out of this huge recession. If we didn’t go to war and used all of that money to spend on things to help our country move forward and maybe get out a little more out of debt and not spend the money we don’t have. I think that going for Osama was a very stupid idea and think that we should have never gone into the way we did. This book helps me realize that we never needed to go in their when we did.

Ghost Wars: Wondering Why

One thing this book made me notice was that no matter what the government is talking about they are always leaving some small detail out of the question. For example, before 9/11 happened the government got a threat from terrorist that talked about American citizens getting hurt by an attack and injured. Even after receiving this threat they did not do that much to try and prevent anything; they did not even raise the threat level to a higher level. How ever no one knew about this until after the attack already happened. Something about this just doesn’t sit right especially because they knew something was going to happen and they did not make their best effort to protect their citizens. It is their priority to protect the citizens of their country from any enemy that comes our way. This just makes me question a lot more of the things the government comes out and says. I think it makes me wonder what else they are forgetting to tell us they know about serious attacks on the country or in another country. I don’t understand how the government expects us to trust them when they do very shady business behind the whole countries back. I feel like sometimes they have no regard for what the citizens think and they just do whatever they want because they have a seat of power. I think that most people would rather not hear the secrets our country has to offer because I think that we would be way more surprised then we think. These days it’s a good thing to keep things under wraps because with all of the social media and internet, it is very easy for important things to get leak all over the internet and when its there its there forever. I still do love the country we live in and the government no matter what they do to us and don’t tell us about they still give us a place of freedom to do a lot of things most countries can’t.  

Ghost Wars: The Maps

Throughout the book there are maps placed that each show a different place and a different thing on them. There are 4 main important ones that have to do with information the United States got and did not act on. The first map is labeled as “The Birth of Modern Saudi Arabia” which shows Saudi Arabia at the close of World War 2. It gives you the 1945 boundaries which gave Saudi Arabia more land and room over all of the neighboring countries. But it also gives the modern boundaries which close down on some of the land that they got back in 1945. It makes the whole country itself smaller which gave them less power. The second map they have is labeled “Massoud at War 1983-1985” which shows Afghanistan and the land around it and where Massoud and his men were. It shows the hills that Massoud and his men went down to attack convoys of Soviet troops that were there. They would come out of the shadows and attack the convoys then disappear until they were alone and took the scrap metal, weapons, and pieces of tanks and other weapons and then bring them back on horseback to Panjshir where they would have mechanics that would put them back together for future rebel use. The third map that they have labeled in this book is called “Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm” which is a bird’s eye view shot of Osama’s farm from satellites. It shows how close his training facility was to the airport and how it had a direct road to the airport leading from it. There was a 10 foot wall surrounding the entire farm, a six story office building that ended up being bombed out in 2001, and about 80 living structures were inside of these walls. They went back and forth on whether they should raid the place or not because they did not know which building he was in or if they went into the wrong building if he was in the one next to that one. They also did not know what to do with all of the collateral damage that would occur. How they would explain this whole situation to people and other countries and governments that would be wondering what is going on. The final map that they have labeled as “The CIA in the Panjshir, 1997-2000” which shows the routes of flights and driving paths that many of them took to complete these special missions they had to do. They give you arrows from where the journey started which was sometimes up to 770 miles away but also sometimes as close as 230 miles away from the target place. All they were trying to do was to establish a renewed counterterrorism liaison by giving Massoud more cash, more secure communications, listening devices, and other nonlethal spy gear.

Ghost Wars: Intro

This book is definitely for the reader who likes conspiracy. It’s written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author Steven Coll who along with writing this book wrote the book the Bin Laden’s. This book covers topics from a vast variety of time from the CIA back in 1979 to present day issues. Anything from the soviet invasion to the attacks on the world trade centers. It talks about who was actually responsible for the attacks and who knew about them before they happened and didn’t act on the threat. It also gives the people some sort of an idea of what has been happening over the past couple of years and it shows them how much our government actually knows and doesn’t act on. It made me as a reader question a lot of information I get from the news and any other media source because it makes me think what they are failing to tell us. How bad the situation actually is over in the Middle East and what is going on. Why we are chasing Osama bin laden around the deserts of his home country to try and kill him and fail at that which caused us to waste millions upon millions of dollars on trying to kill a single man. Reading this book makes me think about and makes me angry at our government because of the things that they think they can do to other places and people and think that they can get away with it without consequence. The whole war in Afghanistan and in Iraq is an outcome to something they thought would not get this bad.  It shows that there are consequences to actions that you take in places you have no right to be. The reason I think this book got an award is because the author does a great job at giving an entire overview of the whole situation that was and is going on and writes it in a way that people can understand.

Death Penalty #3

The stages in a case about this starts with a crime that qualifies for capital punishment. These crimes usually are never walked up upon by police and always relies on evidence and pictures to solve the case. the next step in the case is to make an arrest. This is the part of the process that can mess the whole life up for an innocent person. The police are usually pressured to arrest someone as fast as they can to settle the neighborhood and everyone around the case. After this the person is brought in front of a court to gets the plea and the charges that are being brought against them. They than have to be proven guilty or "Death Qualified". After they are proven guilty they get the burden of trying to show how bad a mistake they made to sentence them to death. They also get the chance to get a clemency hearing. However if they fail to prove their innocence they have to wait until they get served their warrant for death.

The most humane way is through lethal injection which is when certain chemicals are injected into their body. It first puts them to sleep, than they get a chemical that stops all muscle movement. Eventually they get a shot that stops their heart and that is the end of the process. I think that hanging and firing squad are the two most inhumane ways to kill someone. These can both be considered "cruel and unusual" because there are way to many things that can go wrong, which could make the situation turn into torture. These both can cause very slow painful deaths also.

All of the statistics about other states and the death penalty really surprised me. I think it was the amount of people on death row in some of the states. For example in California there has been 669 death row inmates and only 13 executions, in Texas there has been 370 inmates and 405 total executions. The stats could keep going on and on. These numbers are really surprising because that is so many people to have waiting on when they are going to die or even if they will ever get off death row. All this info shows me is more reasons why the death penalty should not be put in because there is way to many flaws in the system to where it is not fair enough for everyone that comes through the process.

This info just supported my reason to abolish the death penalty because there are simply way to many people on death row. For example there are 3261 death row inmates throughout the whole country. The system is also very racist. With most of the inmates being black with white victims. I think that everyone should take a look at these statistics and realize that this is doing more bad than good and is costing the people as taxpayers so much extra money that is not needed to be spent.

Boggess

While watching the Front line video about Clifford Boggess I knew what decision I would have made. On one side he was clearly a cold blooded killer who had no remorse for what he did until after he committed the crimes. On the other side he said he was a changed man and that his stay on death row changed him for the better. In my opinion only certain people change for the good while they go to jail, prison, death row, whatever it may be. Only the certain people who really want forgiveness for what they have done and actually want to change their life for the better. I believed this about Boggess until the interview with his Girlfriend when she said that she knew he was a threat to society and that she wanted him dead because he had been threatening her to. I think that the death penalty is pointless. We are trying to show how killing people for crimes is supposed to deter it, but in reality it is not even doing that. Criminals will keep killing and committing capital crimes no matter what their sentence is and a life sentence would be way worse than dieing. It gives them so much time to think about what they have done and to be bothered by it for the rest of their life.

Drug Testing in schools

I think that student drug testing should not be allowed unless the student themselves were caught in the act or with a drug. It is not fair to make kids test when some of them join extra curricular activities to simply get away from all of the drugs and bad things on the streets. "There is growing recognition that extracurricular involvement plays a role in protecting students from substance abuse and other dangerous health behaviors." (National Education Association) If someone wants to spend enough money to test every kid that goes through an activity, why don't they just spend the money on things to improve the activities so more kids join and maybe get out of the bad activity. No matter how successful drug testing is, kids are still going to be doing drugs all through out high school and there are plenty of ways to pass drug tests even if you shouldn't. The success of the drug test will not out weigh the psychological affect it will have on all of the kids if they can't even get the trust of their coaches/sponsors to not test them. Students should be building trust with the adults in the school and with the administrators not building a mistrust. The test also do not discover the drugs that most people are worried about in high school teens. "The risk that testing students for illicit drugs "will be understood to signal that alcohol and tobacco are of lesser danger is not an idle concern." (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence) On student privacy I think that students should have the right to have all of their privacy protected outside of school. For example if someone gets arrested the police department should not be able to tell the high school that the specific person was arrested for whatever reason. However if the student is on school property there is every right for them to be searched if it is reasonable. They should have to prove the reason and give evidence for the search and the students parents,lawyer and a police officer should all be present during the time of the search.

Religion

In the article that I read it talked about 6th grade classes in Texas to remove the words Christmas and Rosh Hashanah from their curriculum and put in Hindu religious words. I think that they should keep all the old names and add the new ones so all of the young kids get more knowledge about the world around them. The more educated we are about other religions and things the more we can be compatible with all of those other people in the world. But if we limit what we teach to our kids and learn about religion our ideas might get skewed to the wrong place. Many people do not even know that there are other religions other than the one that they are. There are so many things that separate us in the world that I think the more we learn about other religions the less that will separate us and the more we can realize how close we are to each other. I think that it would be a terrible idea for the state of Texas to do this because it will just cause unwanted violence and arguments that could have been prevented before hand.

Reactions to 9/11 movie

This video that we watched the past two class periods in my opinion sent a very strong message to me. I never really realized how much people came together in that time of horror or even just fear. I kind of remember what I was doing that day and what I was thinking but I can say it was not even close to what those two kids that were saying at the end of the video. When the people were saying things back and forth to each other I was really paying attention to if their arugements made sense and I was trying to figure out why they were arguing rather than embracing each other. It was almost like all of the pent up rage and saddness that came down on New York came out in those arugements and then at the end everyone was hugging. No one really knew where to funnel the emotions they were feeling. Many of the people who were there at ground zero cleaning up saw things that they have never seen before. That one guy said he has never seen  body parts seperate from the body like that. He said that there were heads, arms, legs, feet, etc... getting pulled out of the debris. This video really changed my mind about how I thought about 9/11 and how I think about what people should have or could have been saying that day. Although it was hard on the whole country many people came together and got through it with the hope and compassion of the men and women that fought to clean everything up.

Speech codes.

Speech codes are usually set into place by an admistration becasue they want to try and protect certain speech that is not protected by the first amendment. By doing this it limits the free speech they give us in their school. I think that speech can be very hurtful a lot of the times and if it is not going to cause any physical harm they should not be able to limit it. If someone says like "I hate anyone who is not white because white people rule the world and are smarter than everyone else." than that is that persons opinion and they should be able to express it. If we do not get the chance to express our opinions how are we as students suposed to expand our thinking beyond the values and beliefs we have from birth. Everyone has different beliefs and opinions on things and everyone should be able to say these aloud. I think that speech codes are a good thing to have to an extent but once it crosses that line they should be taken out and revised.