Is Bigger Better?

Everywhere in the world, the richest people build the biggest homes, but as the world’s wealthiest nation, the United States is also building the biggest bodies.

That is a quote written by Craig Lambert in his article published in the Harvard Magazine “The Way We Eat Now.” Lambert discusses Spurlock’s documentary and many of the reasons we are such an overweight nation. Lambert writes the following about “Super Size Me.”

Spurlock’s total immersion in fast food was a one-subject research study, and his body’s response a warning about the way we eat now. “Super Size Me” could be a credo for the United States, where people, like their automobiles, have because gargantuan. SUVs, big homes, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, bulking up with steroids-it’s a context of everything getting bigger.

Not only are we never satisfied, but we have become a nation of instant gratification. Credit cards give us immediate access to just about anything our hearts desire. When we see a Burger King commercial on TV showing a Whopper, our mouths start to water. Most of us just have to hop in the car and drive a short distance and, for just a little money, we have quick gratification. Most don’t stop at the Whopper though; they order the fries and Coke to go along with it. I can sympathize with the mother who works all day and doesn’t have time to cook. It’s many times cheaper, and instant, to run through McDonalds and pick up a couple of Happy Meals and burgers to go, than to buy the ingredients to fix a healthy nutritious dinner. I’m not saying all home made, healthy food needs to be expensive or time-consuming to prepare; however, I’m definitely guilty of running through Little Ceasar’s at least twice a month for a $5 pizza to feed my family. Am I guilty of not exercising personal responsibility?

There are enormous pressures on homes with both the husband and wife in the workforce. One reason things need to be fast is that Mom is not at home preparing meals and waiting for the kids to come home from school any more. She is out there in the office all day, commuting home, and maybe working extra hours at night. This means heating something in the microwave or hitting the drive-through at McDonalds.

I don’t work outside the home, but I’m taking a full class load. I normally have time to prepare dinner at home, but many times it’s easier to grab something cheap and inexpensive through a drive-through when I haven’t planned ahead. I know it’s not good, or healthy for my family, so why do I do it?

Personal responsibility surely does play a role, but we also live in a “toxic environment” that in many ways discourages healthy eating . . . There’s the incessant advertising and marketing of the poorest quality foods imaginable. To address this epidemic, you’d want to make healthful foods widely available, inexpensive, and convenient, and unhealthful foods relatively less so. Instead, we’ve done the opposite.

When we look around, it isn’t neccessarily the wealthier, more educated people who are the most overweight. It seems to be more of an epidemic among the lower classes and minority groups.

The highly educated have only half the level of obesity of those with lower education . . . the poor tend toward greater obesity because eating energy-dense, highly palatable, refined foods is cheaper per calorie consumed than buying fish and fresh fruits and vegetables . . . The last to fatten will be rich white women.

Hamburger with 20 percent fat content is much cheaper than hamburger with 4 percent fat. When macaroni and cheese is 3 for $1 that makes a pretty inexpensive meal for someone on a very limited budget. Little Debbies are $1 a box……who thinks that’s not a great deal? I don’t buy them anymore because, for me, that stuff is very addicting. Something is wrong, not only when healthy food is so much more expensive than highly processed hot dogs and bologna, but also with a country whose media glorifies size 0 models on one hand, and on the next commercial, as Lambert points out:

In beer and corn chips ads, you see beautiful, thin people playing volleyball on the beach. Even people who are grossly unfit, sitting on the couch eating those chips and drinking that beer, see this as a positive thing. They’re having a good time on the beach, and that gets associated with chips and beer.

I think Spurlock’s documentary is very eye-opening. From someone who has always had issues with food, I believe that it makes it much more difficult to refrain from eating the junk when it’s so easily available. I don’t believe it is just McDonalds that is making us fat, it’s also the lack of activity, lack of time, increased availablility of junk food, television adds, and so much more.

Films and documentaries are a great way to spark ideas that can make the writing process interesting for students. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t have an opinion one way or the other after watching “Super Size Me.” Further, there are so many different avenues one could write from. I believe it is much easier for students to find their voices, or write to a particular audience, when they have a strong opinion or feeling about something and understand that opinion counts. After viewing a film like Spurlocks, discussion should come easily in a “safe environment.”

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Off Topic a Bit

How will we, as future teachers, engage students in learning who really don’t care about their education? What if our pay increases depended on the results of our classes standardized testing? My daughter is in the tenth grade and I received the following email from her English teacher. I know a lot of kids just don’t care about their grades, and teachers can only do so much, but I could really sense this teachers frustration in his email. My daughter completes her assignments, and said as long as you do the work, it’s easy to get an A. What is keeping the kids from doing the work? I actually observed her English class last semester with the teacher who had to fail the students. He is a fun and engaging teacher. This email got me thinking. I’ve been out of school a lot longer than most of my classmates. I would be interested to hear what some of you think. Would the use of technology engage more students in learning? Or, would the same students still not care? Here is a copy of the email….I blocked out the teacher’s name.

Parents:

Well, the first two weeks of the second semester are coming to a close. The beginning of the second semester is the opportunity for your child to start over, and many of your children need this because at least 15 of them failed the first semester with Mr. ****** who told me that most of them failed because they did not follow through on assignments. And after only two weeks, I can already see this pattern with many of the same students. So far, we have nearly 85 points, and not one assignment has been
graded; all the student had to do was do the work. Unfortunately, there are students who do NOT have a A+ because they do not do the work. This is a pattern that is happening among many students because they don’t care about education. I need your help instilling, in your child, the need for an education; unfortunately, many of these student don’t care because their parents don’t take an interest in their child’s education. Hopefully, by you providing your email, we can help your child succeed.

Can You Decipher This?

CMIIW TXT MSG is G9 IMNSHO BYKT TAFN

If you can understand that lingo, you are a text message pro! I had to use the acronym dictionary to come up with these abbreviations, which mean, “Correct me if I’m wrong, text message is (I didn’t know the short for that) genius in my not so humble opinion but you knew that, that’s all for now.” Wow! This is a whole new language created out of convenience and necessity for those who text with their phones because you are only allowed to type so many characters at one time. I guess you could call it a new shorter short hand. I would need to keep my acronym dictionary handy to understand, but I suppose, as with any language, the more you speak it, or write it, the more fluent you become.

Kris Axtman, writer forThe Christian Science Monitor, writes the following about text lingo

Need a translation? Not if you’re a 13-year old who’s been Internet-connected since birth. For the rest of us, welcome to the world of Net Lingo-the keyboard generation’s gift to language and culture. “sup” is not a call to supper, buy a query: “What’s up?” And Josh’s “n2n” reply? “Not too much.”

It seems that teenagers have always had their own little language, but this is different, much more extensive. Should we be concerned? As I said earlier, I don’t think so, but there are many more who believe we should. Axtman writes

As in every age, teenagers today are adapting the English language to meet their needs for self-expression. But this time, it’s happening online-and at lightning speed. To some, it’s a creative twist on dialogue, and a new, harmless version of teen slang. But to anxious grammarians and harried teachers, it’s the linguistic ruin of Generation IM (instant messenger).

In her article, Axtman quotes a mother of two teenage sons who identifies some positives and negatives of instant messenging

Instant messaging has just replaced the phone … for their generation . . . she has noticed that her oldest son, who’s normally quite shy around girls, feels more comfortable talking to them online-a positve, she thinks. A negative, though, is that their grammar is becoming atrocious, and Net lingo is starting to show up on school assignments: they talk with these abbreviated words and run-on sentences with no punctuation. I call it speed talking, and it’s starting to carry over into their homework. 

full article

Teachers and grammarians are concerned about Net lingo, while linguists seem to be fascinated by it. If it really is spilling over into formal writing assignments, perhaps we should be concerned about it. In an article in The Washington Post, Lori Arantani writes about one teacher’s solution to the problem

A few years ago, after several weeks of grading papers filled with IM-speak and other jargon, Goodman took matters into her own hands. When the students showed up for class the following day, she asked them to read a paragraph she had written using many of the same phrases they used in their papers.

The paragraph was about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The teacher said the kids laughed but understood her point. In her article, Arantani quotes teacher Liela Christenbury

In some ways, IM is an English teacher’s dream because it’s using writing for a real purpose, towards a real audience, and that’s something we always struggle with in a classroom

I find it interesting that writing has always been a derivative of speech. People could talk long before they could write. Children learn to speak naturally, but generally don’t learn to write until they go to school. Is this new Internet language going to be the opposite? It has taken a written form and, while we may say TGIF, for “thank God it’s Friday,” or TMI for “too much information,” I don’t hear people saying “IYKWIM” for “if you know what I mean.” Perhaps that will happen eventually. I’m anxious to hear what others think about this topic.

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Feel free to comment!

Creative Language?

The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language, of course-they gathered when printing was introduced, in the 15th century, as well as when the telephone was introduced in the 19th, and when broadcasting came along in the 20th; and they gathered again when it was noticed that Internet writing broke several of the rules of formal standard English-in such areas as punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

This is an excerpt from an article published in The Science Dailyby Professor David Crystal, Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. Why is it that people are resistant to change? It seems that change is often brought about by the younger generation, and it is the older generation that thinks language, or English, is “going to the dogs!” This topic is very interesting to me. I want to find out if the Instant Messenger language, or text language is really wreaking havoc on modern English. Crystal claims that

All that has happened, in fact, is that the language’s resources for the expression of informality in writing have hugely increased-something which has not been seen in English since the Middle Ages, and which was largely lost when Standard English came to be established in the 18th century.

I have read some articles that express great concern for what texting has done to our language, more importantly, and pertinent to my blog, the formal writing of students. I’m anxious to further my knowledge on this subject and excited to learn more about this newly created, innovative language which, I believe, can set apart this 21st Century in history. Professor Crystal suggests that

Rather than condemning it, therefore, we should be exulting in the fact that the Internet is allowing us to once more explore the power of the written language in a creative ways

Of course, there is a time and a place for everything, and while texting and IMing each has its place, so do the teaching and the writing of formal English. However, Professor Crystal also states

Blogging and other forms have given radical opportunities to develop new stylistic rules . . . new forms of interaction seen in Internet exchanges are far more important than changes in vocabulary, grammar, and spelling.

We have discussed in class the challenge of finding one’s voice when writing. I believe that the use of Internet writing has given kids, and adults, the opportunity to express themselves in a new, unique, and creative way. I also believe that this will carry over into the classroom in writing classes. Practice makes perfect, and kids today are getting a lot of practice writing. Who cares if it isn’t grammatically correct? It may be a challenge for students to remember to use correct writing in formal work, but just as we adapt our speech in different social settings, I believe we can adapt our writing when needed.

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I’ve changed my mind!

       Ok friends, I’ve changed the topic of my blog! Nothing like last minute! I’ve been searching for information on depression in teenagers and I found lots of information, but when I started looking at using writing therapy in a classroom setting, I found very little. I gave into the frustration and decided to take another route. It could have something to do with the fact that we’ve got two more posts due this week and I’m feeling the pressure.
     I’m also taking “The Study of Modern English” this semester and we are studying language change. I thought it would be interesting to research and write about the effects of Internet chatting, IM’ing, and texting on our language, and if it is affecting students’ writing in the classroom. I’ve added a couple of subscriptions to my feed, and I’ll probably check into others. I’ve added BBC News and I’m also keepingThe Washington Post and Science Daily .  I’m very interested in this topic as a future teacher and as a mom. My oldest daughter spends a lot of time chatting and instant messenging with her friends online. Kids just don’t talk on the phone anymore. I’m fascinated that they have created their own little code language. As a parent, I think it’s important to stay informed with their language. Maybe I’ll learn something beyond my use of brb, rofl, and ttyl!

I’m learning this blogging stuff for a writing class. To be more specific, English 310: Teaching Writing for Secondary Teachers….something like that.

I’m thankful I’m learning more about today’s technology and communication between teenagers. I asked my 10th grade daughter last night how she thought kids would react in an English class where the students posted all their work on a blog, where others could read and respond. She thought that would be cool. She spends hours on the computer reading friends’ Facebooks, chatting, instant messenging and emailing. I think this would be a cool approach for High School teachers.

For this class, I’m going to concentrate on depression and teenagers. It’s a topic that interests me, and I believe it’s often overlooked, but definitely relevant in today’s society. I have three daughters, none of whom I think are depressed, but as a future teacher, and a person who works with high school girls in a church youth group, I am interested to learn more about a topic that is often overlooked by parents and teachers. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to approach the topic yet. I subscribed to feeds from the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today. I also found a pretty cool website through the University of Michigan that has some good info on teens and depression. I may take it a step further and check out teens and suicide; I’m not sure.