Reading Across the Curriculum: Brief Edition. 4th edition. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. Boston: Longman, 2011. 150-158. Print.…
Gary Earl Ross's article "Choosing not to read is choosing to be stupid" discusses the debatable topic that the nation is becoming less intelligent due to the decrease of people reading novels, poems and plays. As a University at Buffalo Professor Ross argues that he sees first hand "Slowly but inexorably we, as a nation, are getting dumber." I agree that the nation as a whole is becoming dumber, however it was not the article that persuaded me of this is was my former outside knowledge of this topic. Although I agree with the topic that the nation is becoming dumber I do not support the article because not only is it very harsh, but it also very biased towards his own feelings.…
Elementary teachers are often taught and encouraged to use trade books as the center of a unit. Using this method gives teachers an almost unlimited amount of resources to choose from, there are hundreds of trade books on hundreds on topics across all grade and reading levels. Although this may seem like a brilliant idea at first, there is currently a growing awareness of the truthfulness and misrepresentations within these trade books. They are all different containing different amounts and types of information, so how do we know what is really true or most important? Elementary teachers are required to use multiple informational for this reason, such as primary documents along with the trade books. In this article, the authors examine Abraham Lincoln and Amelia Earhart due to both of them being popular topics within the elementary curricula.…
In the chapter “True Lies,” author Jeffery L. Seglin illustrates the impact and consequences of lying in the business world.…
The Literary text, The Honest Truth is by Dan Gemeinhart takes place in washington during when most of the story occurs. The book tells the story of Mark, a boy on a trip up the famous mountain Mt. Rainier with his dog Beau. Who wants to see Mt. Rainer before he dies from cancer or hypothermia he must fight against older kids that try to steal his money. In order to achieve this goal, first, mark is so excited to go to seattle and start the trip but right before he got on the bus but right before he destroyed his grandfather’s watch. Then, in the middle of the story he is just about to leave Seattle and a man named Wesley and he invites him to get in his truck and Mark dose and they go to Mt. Rainer national park. It gets really intense when…
David Irving's "The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor," was published in New York, N.Y. and published in 1983, this book has a total of 310 pages.…
2. In considering the two (2) recent books, what do each of them have to say concerning the liberal arts?…
Over the Summer, I was given a privilege to read and respond to "Don't Know Much About History" by Kenneth C. Davis. When I was first given the prompt, I felt very challenged, but took it head on. Since having read, and responded to the novel, I have been able to make direct connections through every-day conversations, and topics in my classes. Without the knowledge that I obtained through learning a massive amount of history through a 694 page book, I would not have been able to contribute, nor make sincere associations with the conversations being held.…
In Patrick Henry’s “Speech in the Virginia Convention,” he remarked, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided and that is the lamp of experience.” Libraries are built on books, schools rely on them. Millions of people have written them to share knowledge and experiences with others. The value of a book is immeasurable, yet some things just can’t be learned by reading books alone.…
As I read, Should Doctors Tell the Truth by Joseph Collins I began to agree with Collins argument. Collin’s argues that doctors must frequently withhold the truth from their patients, which is equivalent to lying to them and should cultivate lying as a fine art. At the same time, no doctor has the right to tell a patient point blank that they have a major disease like epilepsy, dementia praecox etc. only after observation for a long period. In this piece Collins has 4 premises. Collins premises are the four types of patients who ask for the truth.…
Both the Zinn article and the documentary "The Men Who Built America" are good sources of learning, but if a reader wants a good source of learning that isn't biased or exaggerated he/she is better off reading the Zinn article. At first glance, the Zinn article is very long with over forty pages. The length of the article may cause a student to shy away from the reading. It may seem like a good idea, but the narrator of the documentary " The Men Who Built America" is very biased towards the characters by describing them as greedy and selfish. on the other hand, the article "Robber Barons and Rebels doesn't give a description of the characters who took part during the birth of capitalism in America. Instead, the Zinn Article gives the reader facts…
When it comes to America’s history, I believe there is much to be said that often is left out. Much of this I can reference back to a class that I was fortunate enough to take at Rutgers as a junior, Politics and Culture. The class had a very interesting aspect, which concerned historical memory. Historical memory can be defined as state sponsored collective memory. In order to understand this concept it is important to first understand the concept of collective memory. Collective memory is the emotional quality that is given to past events. It is not so much history based on fact, but instead how a certain society remembers their history. Essentially historical memory is a collection of narratives about the past that state-sponsored elites turn into non-negotiable facts, such as the way Loewe critiques the textbooks provided to students. These students then in turn take what the professor teaches and the textbook preaches at face value as absolute fact, essentially eradicating the possibility for negotiation and debate.…
The book, Burn this book Pen Writers Speak Out On The Power Of The Word, edited by Toni Morrison, is a highly interesting and revealing book. The essay titled, “Notes on Literature and Engagement” by Russell Banks is an interesting one. This essay is about the effects of novels on society and how some literary artists who write protest novels ignore the real purpose of a novel. This essay relates to a novel I read titled, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen which, according to this chapter is referred to as a protest novel.…
Lying is wrong on so many levels…many of the topics relating to lying are through trust. Tust is a big issue in modern America, including losing it, the lack of trust from American to American! We cant trust each other, no matter what happens to a fellow friend. My youth pastor shawn and I had a very good discussion about the positives and negatives through lying. Through our discussion, he couldn’t stress enough about trust within the other people. He got caught lying by his parents when he was sixteen. He could not go past san Pedro to surf, and one day he was going surfing and told his parents he was going to San Pedro to surf. While he was heading to long beach to surf, he got a ticket, and his mother had to go to teen court with him and found out the he was going to long beach, and got caught within his lie. As for his punishment, he got his keys taken away for a while, as well as having to call and check in with his parents all the time. This happened to me as well, when I got caught drinking going in to my sophomore year, I remember having to ride home every 2 hours to check in with you guys. He said that was horrible, and I could not agree more. “THOU SHALT NOT LIE” (10 commandments). This is a sin through God when you lie, so by lying you are hurting god with what you say. God is our father in heaven and he ulitimately is what we believe in as Christians. Lying is wrong and the people that I have talked to could not stress this enough to me.…
The debate regarding the education of our children has been going on since the institutionalization of education and will continue as long as we are a liberal democracy full of free thinking citizens. People will always have an opinion and we will, most likely, never be able to please every single person. William Galston and Robert Fullinwider are in full support of teaching a version of history that promotes patriotism and inspires those learning of it to feel a sense of pride and a duty to, in a sense, carry on the mission of the American heroes that have come before us and done great things in terms of the progress for our country. Harry Brighouse is quite different than Galston and Fullinwider in that he believes that by keeping the full truth, gruesome or not, from those that are being educated that we are doing a great disservice to them. I tend to side with Galston and Fullinwider with the feeling that our history needs to be taught in an inspiring sort of way. What benefit do we truly gain by teaching young Americans that yes, in fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great American whose work during the Civil Rights Movement was essential to where we have progressed to as a society today, but he was also an adulterer and plagiarist? By revealing the holes in an American hero’s character we are diminishing his greatness and his impact on the people that have learned of his story years and years after he made such a monumental impact on our country and the progress to end segregation. The gain from sharing that knowledge is extremely minimal compared to the damage it does to the credibility of his work that he is truly known and greatly respected for. It is much simpler and much more productive to producing patriotic citizens if we leave certain, inconsequential parts of the story out. This doesn’t mean we lie to anyone, we simply tell the part of the story that generates the desired feelings of national pride and/or…