Reflecting on WRIT 1122

Overall, I really enjoyed this class because it gave me a chance to reflect on the news in an informal, yet academic fashion. I appreciated that we covered all sorts of aspects in the news... like the different angles on articles, the role photographs play, ect. Additionally, our textbook really complimented the structure of this class because Harris reveals ways to analyze other peoples' writing and to draw inspiration from it rather than just steal it. I was never really too interested with the news before and now I've definitely started keeping up with it. It's nice to be caught up and engaged with the world around me. It's kind of a bummer that my "10 free articles for the month" ran out on New York Times because I found there were a lot of good stories that were tailored to my interests. However, I've now started going to other websites like the Huffington Post and USA Today to get news. Being "in the know" so-to-speak is also helpful because it makes it a lot easier to engage in conversations with others about the news.

ee2 draft

I remember casually walking up the stairs in my Minnesota home on December 14, 2012 to see my mom crying. On the television there was a little girl being interviewed on CNN; my mom points to it and cries, “Some guy just walking into an elementary school and shot it up this morning. They’ve announced ten-some kids dead. I can’t even imagine… those parents…” That’s the first I heard of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut. Since its occurrence, the shooting and gun control have been the talk of the country.

Twenty children and six adult staff members died in Newton that day and the shooting has been deemed the second-deadliest shooting in American history. The shooter was quickly identified as Adam Lanza, who first killed his mother at their home then brought a semi-automatic rifle into Sandy Hook Elementary and began firing in hallways and classrooms. Afterwards he committed suicide in the woods behind the school.

Lanza entered the school early in the morning by shooting his way through the locked glass door. The noise provoked both the principle and school psychologist to rush to the scene of the crime, to which they encountered Lanza and were immediately shot to their death. Lanza then entered a classroom full of first graders, shooting all of them multiple times. That classroom was where most of the damage occurred; there was a sole survivor: a six-year-old girl who pretended to be dead as Lanza opened fire on all of her classmates. Lanza then coursed his way through the school, shooting students running for safety and teachers attempting to protect their students. It is undeniable that this one of the most heart-wrenching tragedies the United States has ever seen.

Why Lanza did this is unknown. There are a multitude of criminological theories that could be used to interpret his rationale but none would adequately justify his actions. According to an article published by The Telegraph, a newspaper based out of U.K., entitled, “Connecticut school shooting: troubled life of Adam Lanza, a fiercely intelligent killer,” people who knew him growing up had always described Lanza as a “weird kid,” who was both “reclusive and troubled.” He was also reported to have Asperger’s syndrome and another anti-social personality disorder. This is also known as sociopathy, which is the type of personality disorder that is the most closely linked with violence and criminal behavior. Additionally, “fifty percent of the populations in prisons meet the criteria for this diagnosis.” It was very evident to everyone in Lanza’s life that he had a lot of mental problems and was “deeply disturbed.” Lanza’s Asperger’s created a great difficulty within him to communicate with and feel empathy for others. For Lanza and others on the autistic spectrum, this can cause a lot of frustration, which can lead to aggression, but this diagnosis still does very little in explaining what led him to take a semi-automatic rifle to Sandy Hook on that fateful day.

It was also reported that Lanza’s mother was an avid gun collector and liked to take her children target shooting. According to law enforcement sources, between the years of 2010 and 2012, Nancy Lanza purchased four firearms for her home. Furthermore, the gun used to murder Nancy Lanza was one of her own. Due to this, many people across the blogosphere began to blame Nancy for her own death and the deaths at Sandy Hook, no longer referring to her as a victim. Through these facts we could arrive at a consensus that this deadly fusion of mental issues and accessibility to guns killed twenty-seven people, though in further research of this tragedy, it becomes increasingly complicated.

Lanza owned thousands of dollars worth of violent video games and was deeply immersed in video game culture.  [CONTINUE ON WITH THIS]

What drives any person to open fire on a vulnerable crowd? Within a span of just a few months, there have been a profusion of gun deaths in the United States, and after what happened at Sandy Hook, the citizens and the government have started to fight for gun control more than ever. [GO INTO STUFF ABOUT GUN CONTROL]

Picturing Life After Devastation (se2)

Arahama in Sendai before and after the tsunami 



http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/japan-quake-2011/

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami devastated Japan, killing nearly 16,000 people. The media reacted quickly to this turmoil, and thousands of stories and images surfaced the internet within a few days. ABC News published a story comprised solely of images that illustrated the disastrous effect the tsunami had on “dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands homes and businesses” in Japan. The story derived it’s inspiration from aerial photos of these areas before and after this devastation. 

Photos play an important role in the world of media journalism; they give the reader a whole new perspective on a story. Furthermore, they help to engage and inform the reader about the story in a different light. While the usage of photos is not always necessary, when used they are meant to draw in and captivate the reader, allowing them to realize the central message of the article. Images complement the narrative, used to highlight the point of view of the writer. In the tsunami article, however, there is no narrative, except of that in captions. While these captions only reveal the area in which the image is identifying, they are still crucial to the construction of the article because they give the images context. Without them, this article would make no sense. 

This article is unique because it is one of few that actually asks the reader to interact with it to reveal information. The first line of the article instructs you to “hover over each satellite photo to view the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami.” The article continues to show you before and after photos of 39 distinct areas in Japan, like Sendai Airport, the Fukushima nuclear plant and Iwaki beach, just to name a few, while the images primarily consist of differing coasts, villages and cities. These photos demonstrate the harsh impact the tsunami had on the environment; there were countless shattered homes and businesses. They resemble a dystopic world that the Japanese were forced to suffer through after this occurrence.

With natural disasters, it’s impossible to imagine what that world was like unless you’ve previously experienced a tragedy like that. Everything from the past life of those people washed away that day. When the news cycles to the U.S. the only basis we have to visualize this is the photos people take. There are millions of images of this tsunami to browse through on blogs and news sites, but also on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All these images allow people outside of Japan to paint a picture in their heads of what it really could’ve been like. Moreover, photographs documenting events like this are monumental in the building and supporting relief foundations for these areas. They trigger empathy and our emotions drive us to wanting to help them. 

In aerial photography, the reader achieves a new sense of the widespread devastation. They don’t realize the detriments this had on specifically one family or one neighborhood, but rather how the entire country was in ruins. They see what once was stretches of farms, homes, the ocean transform into a blackened dystopia. 

Photograph Validity

I thought that Morris’ editorial offered an interpretation of the way we perceive ‘caption-less’ photographs that questions the validity of every photograph I’ve ever seen, especially those from my childhood. There are so many pictures that have sparked memories for me in a way. By this I mean there would be no memory if not for the photograph. I have spent hours sifting through the remnants from my past in photo boxes labeled “Family” or “Bailey” and that’s about the extent of the caption. The rest is left for me to interpret. 

In his editorial, Morris claims, “All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.” I think this an extremely complex point he is making. In a way, photographs are always true; they are snapshots in time and illustrate exactly how something/someone looked at a given point (disregarding all the photoshopped pictures nowadays.) Photographs are, a lot of time, evidence of a certain event. This all kind of reminds me of the saying that floats around the internet: “Pics or it didn’t happen.” 

However, the point Morris is trying to get across is that without captions, we have no idea what a photograph is even of. Think about baby pictures of yourself. In my opinion, literally every single baby looks the exact same. So how am I supposed to tell that that’s me in a picture? Today, I can take my mom’s word for it. But two hundred years from now, how is anybody going to be able to tell?

Take the iconic image from the Great Depression of the migrant mother as an example. Even the photographer admits to knowing very little about this woman, not even her name. Yet, we view this photograph as describing life during the Depression very accurately. 

Taking an approach

Taking an approach, as defined by Joseph Harris, is combining all his aforementioned techniques (rewriting, forwarding & countering) and writing something with your own unique spin on it. He claims, “When you take on the approach of another writer both your thinking and theirs need to change. Otherwise you are simply applying ideas to examples. To transform is to reshape, not to replace or rebut. The original does not go away but is remade into something new.”

I think Harris’ example of cover songs works well as an analogy. When someone does a cover of a song, their goal isn’t and shouldn’t be to sound exactly like the original singer. If that was the case, why would anyone want to listen to that persons’ song when they could just go and listen to the original? The point of a cover song is to sing someone else’s lyrics but with your own voice, and to make it your own.

The same applies with writing. It’s about using your own words and ideas and using the original as nothing but a source of inspiration. In my writing, I like to take an approach by finding a specific technique I appreciate in another author’s writing and implementing it into my own. 

Additionally, Harris points out the importance in acknowledging your influences. This is just granting credit to those who deserve it. Back to the cover song analogy: you don’t see people putting up a video on YouTube of them singing “Free Bird” and claiming it’s their own. It would be about two seconds before they were called out on it. 

Repairing Schools: It Starts With Our Youth (Short Essay #1)

Last week, David Kirp wrote an article for the New York Times called, “The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools,” which aimed to reveal the key to a first-rate education in broken schools. He shows this by exploring the progression of a small public school in Union City, NJ, and how they went from a place where “the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them” to a place where 75% of the kids are going off to college after graduation, and many to top universities. He listed several steps that led to this advancement -- starting in pre-kindergarden, transforming teaching methods, making the shift from a test-taking mindset to more of a thinking mindset, and the list goes further than that. It seems Kirp’s article is aimed towards people higher up in the schooling system, such as superintendents and principles, though I plan on getting my message out to teachers in lower and elementary schools.

I took an immediate liking to this article because I recognize the need for change in schools, but I think this change is especially necessary for younger kids. Kirp is without a doubt accurate in his assertions, though to create better schools, the best way to do it is emphasizing on a couple key structural changes that can be goals rather than giving schools ten or fifteen changes that are massively difficult to implement. 

The first step to better schools is honing a safer and more open-minded learning and social environment. Kids are spending nearly a third of their waking hours in school, so it should feel like a second home to them. In order to achieve this, the teachers in the school need to be more adamant on eliminating bullying and imposing a love of learning in kids. It’s about teaching to respect one another both inside and out of the classroom. We need to teach kids that laughing or scoffing at another kid’s question is damaging, and that kind of behavior can’t be tolerated. We need to completely eradicate words like “gay” and “retard” used in a derogatory sense from these kids’ vocabulary. Above all else, showing kids it’s safe and cool to be smart and to love going to school and learning new things is what’s going to change not only our schools, but ultimately our entire country. 

The second step in this equation is maintaining creativity and divergent thinking in youth. Kirp touched on this a bit in his article when expressing the necessity for both cognitive and non-cognitive (thinking and feeling) lesson plans. This is absolutely true. In the long run, the purpose of school is to prepare kids for life in the real world, not a test. The first twelve years of education, therefore, shouldn’t be seen as nothing but a prerequisite to standardized tests, but rather a process we can use to explore the different strengths and weaknesses in every child’s brain. We can do this by implementing more creative exercises in the classroom and encouraging divergent thinking. Creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas and divergent thinking includes conceiving multiple solutions or outcomes to a given problem. When you ask a kid what two plus two is, the only way to be correct is by saying it’s four. But then ask that same kid how to get the answer four by doing a math problem and there are innumerable possibilities that they could devise. It could be 2+2, 1+3, 1x4, -9239+9243, and so forth.

The point is, most of the kids in elementary and middle school now are just going through the motions of day-to-day life, just waiting for Friday to roll around again, especially those enrolled in broken schools. But this is the next generation we’re talking about; it’s not only their future we’re changing but also our own. Kirp says there’s a lot that needs to be done, and there is, but these steps are the first that need to be taken. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/the-secret-to-fixing-bad-schools.html?pagewanted=1

The idea of countering

When I was working on the high school newspaper, one big thing we always encouraged the younger writers to do is highlight different angles of all the stories in the news. It was never about disputing the original article, but rather exploring another side to it. That’s kind of how Joseph Harris defined countering. He claims, “to counter is not to nullify but to suggest a different way of thinking.” To find an example of countering, it’s perhaps the easiest to immediately turn to the editorial section on a credible news site. 

Facebook and journalism have become somewhat of a cliched pair at this point. Facebook has become one of those view things that you can talk about and almost everyone knows what you’re talking about. There’s so many articles and posts about Facebook all over the web and most of them are pretty boring to read because we’ve seen them all before. 

But, while surfing the online paper for the Star Tribune (the main newspaper for my home, Minneapolis), I read an editorial on why there’s suddenly a decline in Facebook usage and I found it pretty interesting. It’s called, “The trouble with Facebook is the people,” and it’s about how we’re not using Facebook as often because we’re realizing that people are just boring. I’ve read tons of articles and blog posts on the topic of Facebook but I only really enjoy reading one if it is something unique. That’s the whole idea of countering: to put a fresh spin on a hackneyed story.