What I Have Learned!

Well for beginners I have learned too much to only write a 5 paragraph paper. So I guess I am going to have to summarize what I have and haven’t learned…well it’s mostly what I have learned because there isn’t really anything that I haven’t learned that is associated with the 9th grade Global Education English class.
One of my favorite learning experiences has been writing the blogs or the 1 or 2 paragraph responses to articles or subjects we have learned about! Honestly my favorite learning experience would be Weights class but it’s too irrelevant to this class and this paper I have to write. When I first had to write the paragraph or two for the articles I read I was like “wow, only a paragraph? This is going to take a few seconds!” But I was dead wrong, on my first article it took me almost a whole hour to write on paragraph and I still had another, how could this be? Well first I had to write a 1 SENTECNE thesis (seems easy but your wrong), then choose a side (ex: if I thought Iran should have nuclear power [actually weapons but they wouldn’t admit it] and say what we should do), and after all that we had to find some sort of support or reason that took almost as much time as the first paragraph. Well now I could take almost any article and read it (for some I might need a little more knowledge than others) and within a few minutes make a thesis and have my choices and reasoning sorted out!

Let’s say Osama Bin Laden was captured and the citizens of the United States got to choose what the government does with him, and Mr. Fielder has us write a paper to our state legislature about what we want to happen, here is what I would write if I had the choice to either have him be killed or tortured for life. (Notice this is a shortened version of what I would write because I don’t have all hour to write one example)

Thesis: If I could choose from death or torture to a man that killed thousands of our own people I would choose torture.

Paragraph 1 + Support: Does anyone think a man that killed thousands of our own people deserve to die instantly by a bullet without any pain or to be hurt for the rest of his days for taking friends and family of others. Some might say that its inhumane to torture him, but what it humane to kill thousands and destroy a whole country’s economy system? On the 11th of September in 2001 he decided to hire two attackers and take a airliners into the twin towers, and kill all the people in the building, later on he released a tape saying it was his plan to do all that.

Sometimes I would article (not by choice, obviously!) and have NO idea what it’s about or what its point was, until the Great Mr. Fielder introduced me and the rest of the class to “margin noting” and the great Q.C.V.I. (Questions-Comments/Connections-Vocabulary-Interesting Ideas) technique. For a few weeks we just read random (actually very connected articles, but they seemed very different from each other) and would have to do little summaries for almost every paragraph, then after we were done with that we had to write 5 Questions we had, 5 Comments/Connections we made, find 5 or more words we didn’t know, and write 5 interesting ideas. Sometimes I would spend more time on the QCVIs than reading a 5 page article and doing margin noting, I was hard but it made me understand the first time I read something not the 5th.

I also learned that there was a mass genocide in Rwanda, while I didn’t even know there was a country named Rwanda! First off the teacher told us we had to learn about Rwanda that is located in Africa…ok, nothing big, this is school, we learn new things but this wasn’t new. The genocide has been going around for years and almost one million are dead because of it, and yet again there seemed to be no media coverage about it. In many was a I was shocked and kind of surprised that it’s been going on for so many years but I never knew about it, I mean if a dog in Asia gets hit by a famous person car it would get more coverage that this.

Would you rather?

Would you rather be kicked out of your land, killed for it, or both? Personally I would rather just be kicked out.



I would be a native in the United States during colonization rather than in South Africa, Rwanda, or Australia.
During the colonization of the United States, of the 18 hundreds, Native Americans where getting forced to move west, rather than being killed, or just getting kicked out and find your new homes all for yourself. They were just told to move west but with information on how to get there and suggestions on places to settle. Even though they were discriminated they were still allowed to learn to read and write, but they had to learn by themselves while in South Africa and Australia they were arrested if they tried to learn or teach others. And in Rwanda you were killed by the other culture (Hutu) just for being a Tutsi.  Or if you were a Hutu, you would have to kill you neighbor, friends, coworker, and to some extents your family!

Ok, that was just a little overview on where I would rether be, some have advantages and disatvantages to others, but for the place where I wouldn't like to be would be Rwanda, why?  Well first off I dont think I would enjoy killing people that I know or dont know with a Machette that cost my supplier about 10 cents.  The shiping of them was probably more expensive but as I was saying, just the thought of going up to someone, and plainly with not much reson cut off an arm or leg, then leave them to bleed and suffer for a few hours, then go back and take another arm and so on untill we run out of things to take or their die.  And from a differnet point of view would be to be a Tutsi, the people that ruled the Hutus for years and always had a higher standard of living, getting slaughtered by the Hutus.  I personally wouldn't enjoy having no where to run and my neighbor/fiends trying to kill me.  And to make matters worse, the United Nations werent doing anything because they had oreders for the "top" not to fire at enemy at all costs because it might start a all out war and/or a genocide...well first thing is that a few hundred thousand people have died (800 to be exact) and its still not considered genocide.