Month: February 2018

As the rise of technology has come upon us, it has greatly affected the children all around the world. There are benefits to its progression, but there are also many cons when using this technology. One of the greatest cons is the negative social and emotional effect it has upon children. Oxford learning posted an article “How Technology Affects Kids’ Social and Emotional Learning.” Within the article, it refers to a study performed by Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT. In the study she found that over the past twenty years, there has been a forty percent decrease in the amount of empathy found within college students. It is because of social media and technology; our amount of face-to-face interactions have decreased (Oxford Learning). With less face to face interactions, bullying now occurs online and is unregulated. Now children have no escape, from anywhere they are able to be harassed by their peers from any distance. It is this bullying that effects our children and it shows within school. To reduce the issues that are being brought forth into our schools, we must reduce the amount of bullying that occurs online and through social media. By doing this and treating people with respect, we will be able turn this negative social and emotional effect into a more positive one.

Throughout recent years, it has been noted that people seem to be taking longer to reach adulthood. According to Henig, there are certain milestones to be reached before you are able to call yourself and adult. I agree with Henig in that certain milestones should be reached, however, due to our society’s advances in technology, especially within the medical fields, humans have been able to live longer lives. With this increase in life expectancy, it would only make sense to increase the average time span spent in each developmental stage in life. Having just argued that a longer lifespan leads to a later adulthood, now let’s turn our attention to the amount of possibilities open to today’s youth that has caused the delay of adulthood. The youth wants to be able to experience everything and to do this, they must delay adulthood. Before, eighteen-year olds, to see the world, would go off to the service to be able to see the world. This allowed them to travel while also having a job but brought in many health hazards and the chance of dying. Recently due to people volunteering into service, we have been fortunate enough to not need a draft which has now given many young adults the sense of adventure. These young adults want to travel and explore the world, procrastinating true adulthood. My point is to not agree or disagree with Henig in that certain milestones must be reached before adulthood, but that a person’s average lifespan is increasing, and this increase should not only be added onto the persons adult part of their life. Also, that due to not needing a military draft, young adults have become interested in the surrounding world resulting in a delay in becoming an adult. For these reasons, people are taking linger to become an adult

I believe that in the transition from childhood to adulthood, there are milestones that must be reached before one is able to call themselves an adult. Robin Henig recognizes these milestones and she lists hers as she writes, “Transition to adulthood is marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying, and having a child” (199). Robin Henig’s point is that until these milestones have been reached, a person is not an adult. Henig’s claim that each of these milestones need to be reached rests upon the assumption that the person is a heterosexual or also is interested in having a child. With today’s ever-changing world, I agree with Henig that completing school, leaving home, and becoming financially independent are important factors in becoming an adult. However, today more than ever, people are identifying themselves differently and this must certainly be taken into consideration. Other people may be too busy with jobs and other daily activities to have a child. Instead of making the points of marrying and having a child as being a milestone to be an adult, I would like to argue that a person needs to take an active part in society. This can be seen as voting, volunteering, or just being educated in today’s world and economy. Another milestone is to plan ahead for the future and retirement. This would include setting up your own 401K. This shows a sense of maturity. Between Henig’s milestones of completing school, leaving home, and becoming financially independent, with my milestones of being active within society and planning for retirement, then I believe an individual is able to call themselves an adult.

In the Introduction to “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide templates designed to better a student’s writing. Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein argue that the types of writing templates they offer a higher level of thinking and writing. As the authors themselves put in, “(The templates) represent the stock in trade of sophisticated thinking and writing, and they often require a great deal of practice and instruction to use successfully.” Although some people believe that copying the templates is plagiarism, Graff and Birkenstein insist that it is not. In sum, then, their view is that using templates is not plagiarism but is instead there to help a student better their writing.

I agree. In my view, the types of templates that the authors recommend are not only useful but offer a different view of writing styles than what I am used to. For instance, the authors offer different ways of how to enter a conversation that I would have not considered before. Some might object, of course, on the grounds that this copying of a template is plagiarism. Yet I would argue that it is not because the template is a base for your writing. The writer still has to fill in the blanks with their own argument or viewpoints and in doing so, might have to adjust the template to fit their writing. Overall, then, I believe that templates are useful and help students better their writing while teaching them ways to improve their writing syles.

Social media makes relationships, such as friendships, weaker because people are able to know what a person is doing at any point in time. As Robin Dunbar states, “What Facebook does and why it’s been so successful in so many ways is it allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear” (Konnikova 237). From the pictures people upload or by their statuses they post, we are able to see where our friends are and what they are doing at any given time. We can see if our friend is on vacation with their family, going out to dinner with a significant other, or even if that person is in a relationship or not. Being able to know what each of your friends are doing at any given time makes relationships weaker because you no longer have to call a friend just to see what they are doing. Robin Dunbar recognizes this explains that, “without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and at the time invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones” (Konnikova 238). This constant knowing and lack of making deeper connections, causes relationships among people to become weaker. To confirm this, I looked at my social media to see how many true friends I had on it that I also hang out with and talk to in real life. From close to four-hundred friends, I discovered that only twenty of them were true friends that I actually hung out with and talked to on a daily basis. Another sixty of my social media friends are people that I would spend time with occasionally, but I would not consider them a close friend. Instead of investing time with friends, the time is spent on social media to see what a friend is doing and because of this, relationships among individuals have weakened dramatically.