The Me Decade to the Me Millennium

The idea of narcissism and how it relates to our everyday lives is a big topic, and author Imogen Tyler handles it beautifully. Identity politics, as she describes it, is similar to narcissism in that people are trying to think what is best for themselves in this world, and many people see that as narcissism. She talks about how the "new narcissism" is about self-gratification, which is different than what "old narcissism" is, which is basically what it is defined by, a love of oneself over all others.
Minorities were the target of many of these narcissism papers she provided in the article, showing how it was hurting the dominant white males in society. Then the president Jimmy Carter starts talking about how narcissism will destroy the social structure of America. What? People caring about themselves and their ideas is going to destroy everything? No. People will constantly have to depend on each other, but now you actually have to treat other people with respect instead of just telling people what you want. These authors that Tyler has showcased only prove that narcissism is the right direction for us. The old power players are scared of the narcissism rising in our world. Let them be scared, they can't trick the masses anymore.

Final draft of Risky Play!

Parents of the millennials think they are helping their children by keeping them safe. However, overprotective parenting is being linked to a lack of child development relating to independence. Children need to be able to figure out their own paths and to explore their surroundings, which are constantly being monitored and hindered upon by adults. When children do get access to unsupervised play however, they expand on their knowledge of their surroundings and figure out what to do themselves, without help from adults. Risky play is the act of doing dangerous play to help children grow. Children should be allowed to have some risky play to grow as a human and to learn how to handle experiences on their own.
Risky play will always be a necessity of life, whether adults or other authority figures will try to stop is irrelevant, it will happen. Kids need to be able to experience some things on their own to learn how to deal with adult situations better. If they are confined to their own household and the protections of their parents they will be safe, but they will never learn about what is in the world outside of the house, what some of the other kids are doing, which their parents probably wouldn't approve of without their supervision. Growing up, I definitely stayed inside the house a lot, or in my backyard where my parents could see me. However, every once in a while I would take my bike and ride it around the block on the sidewalk, to where my parents couldn't see me and I felt free. I was by myself, and I was a  11 year old paranoid kid, so I wasn't worried about where my parents were, I was more worried about the people walking along the sidewalks or scary cars driving by. Over time, I became more comfortable with doing activities without adult supervision, like walking home from school and staying home by myself, and I continued to grow as a person thanks to that.
Mary E. Stapleton School was right down the street, exactly one mile away from my house. Cameron Middle school was exactly in between my house and Stapleton, exactly one mile away. When I was in middle school, I did not like being home alone, so I would always walk over to my mom’s work, Stapleton, where she is a kindergarten teacher. My brother is two years older, and would walk with me there, with his friends and my friends tagging along too. For whatever reason, I wanted to get back to Stapleton fast, so I had my brother’s friend ride my over, with me standing on his bicycle pegs. Everything was fine as we we’re going there, but as we were getting close I thought it would be a great idea to jump off the pegs, instead of waiting for him to stop. I did, ended up doing a flip, and I landed on my back. I ended up being fine, and I did not realize how scary it was until after the fact. There were not adults involved, and I walked away with just a couple of scrapes. I did not tell anyone because no adults were there for it and I was not too badly hurt, so I did not see the problem with it. This radically different than the normal me, who would have sat there and cried. This is connected to Gray’s article, which included a part about how children need to keep their emotions in check. This type of speedy, unsupervised play could have gotten me seriously injured, but it did not.
Adults have begun to move away from risky play because they don’t want to be seen as a bad parent. During her Atlantic article, “The Overprotected Kid,” Rosin stated “As the Tribune reader had intuited, the cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard”.  This quote brings out a lot of meaning, and an almost chicken and the egg situation. Did the overprotected kid come first, and harsher regulation due to parent’s needs, or did the parents hear about accidents, push for higher regulations, and then just snowball from there? If my parents were there when I jumped off the pegs, I couldn’t even fathom what would have happened. I did something dangerous, however I took responsibility for myself and I ended up okay. The types of overprotected parents talked about in the article probably would have quarantined the whole block and called in every agency imaginable to get something done about, while simultaneously lobbying in the state congress to get a ban on bicycle pegs.
Rosin had been writing the article about this type of parenting where kids do their own activities away from their parents and then she finally sees her kid do it. When she watches her son go to roll down the hill and get muddy and wet, she thinks he is going to cry, but instead he stands up and shakes it off. I believe in this moment she realizes that it can be a good thing for kids to learn by themselves without being sheltered. During the article, she was writing it like a stranger looking in, comparing her experience to the modern child’s experience, and even she had forgotten what she had done as a child for she was not prepared to let her kid go free, yet he thrived when he got to the playground. I think the generations are polarizing, one generation gives too little freedom, so the next gives too much. There needs to be a balance in order to have a healthy lifestyle, because being too cooped up can be bad for someone, but being always free can be just as bad. Once a balance is found, parents can be better parents. Both Rosin’s kid and I chose not to cry when we faced danger while playing unsupervised. Instead, we learned that we had to be able to deal with problems ourselves and adapt to situations. The parallel between myself and Rosin’s child is a great bridge to show that this is something kids will naturally learn to do, and should be given the option to learn, because everyone should be able to have unsupervised play sometimes.
Risky play is necessary for the development of children, and while it is not okay all the time, it should be permitted to help foster our children’s learning. Parents, at the heart of things, are only looking out for what is best for their children because they truly care about them and want them to succeed. However, these parents are shielding their children from the world. By letting children have the essence of freedom, they will become more comfortable with their surroundings.  Children need to grow on their own, and if adults are putting a stop to that, it threatens the child’s development, which is ironic because the adults think they are helping the child grow up normally.

Thinking Rhetorically (Everyone's an author)

To think rhetorically means you have to be open to listening to other people, for starters. You need to be understanding of the people you are listening to, and really pay attention to what they have to say. Once you hear their views, you have to think about why the hold those views, what is their life like, what is the context of the situation they are in, ect. After listening and thinking about another person’s point of view, you create your own opinion of the situation, which was probably influenced by what the person you talked to said.

A rhetorical situation is an event in which a rhetorical speech takes place, and it takes note of everything. The audience of a rhetorical situation is whoever the speech is intended for, as a speech would sound different if it was for a six year old compared to a thirty year old. The purpose in a rhetorical situation is what your goal is. Why are is the speech being made? Stance, is well, the stance you have on the topic your talking about. If the speech is informative, you should try to be objective. The context of the situation deals with what is already known about the topic, and how you are working on it. If you don’t have a lot of time, your project could suffer. The medium and design of a rhetorical situation deals with how to present your project. Should it be spoken? A poster? A handout? The project lead needs to decide which is the best course for their project.  The genre in a rhetorical situation deals with how to organize your project, whether it should be casual, formal, or somewhere inbetween.

Watson and Crick understood what the demographic of Nature would be, and thus used mainly ethos, which is making sure you are a credible source, to show their audience that they knew what they were talking about. By analyzing the demographic of Nature, they were better prepared to match their writing for the target audience.  

As we are learning in this class, writers need to have a voice. If they are writing about something they have only studied in books and haven’t actually thought about being in a position like that, they can sound drastically different that how they might want to sound. Thinking rhetorically lets them better understand the subjects they are writing about, and allows them to critically think about their writing more than they normally would.

Doing your homework in the sense of this article means to analyze the information you can find about the topic, and then synthesize the information you have learned to make a conclusion. In the example of buying a car, you would want to analyze the data such as MPG, color, cost, brand, ect. Then, after analyzing it, you would pick what is best suited for your needs. A personal example would be picking a college, analyze the colleges to see which have your majors, how far away they are, cost, and then synthesize the information to choose which one you want to attend.

Thanks for reading! 

“Any known risk becomes synonymous with hazard”

Parents of the millennials think they are helping their children by keeping them safe. However, overprotective parenting is being linked to a lack of child development relating to independence. Children need to be able to figure out their own paths and to explore their surroundings, which are constantly being monitored and hindered upon by adults. When children do get access to unsupervised play however, they expand on their knowledge of their surroundings and figure out what to do themselves, without help from adults. Children should be allowed to have some risky play to grow as a human and to learn how to handle experiences on their own.

Risky play will always be a necessity of life, whether adults or other authority figures will try to stop is irrelevant, it will happen. Kids need to be able to experience some things on their own to learn how to deal with adult situations better. If they are confined to their own household and the protections of their parents they will be safe, but they will never learn about what is in the world outside of the house, what some of the other kids are doing, which their parents probably wouldn't approve of without their supervision. Growing up, I definitely stayed inside the house a lot, or in my backyard where my parents could see me. However, every once in a while I would take my bike and ride it around the block, to where my parents couldn't see me and I felt free. I was by myself, and I was a paranoid kid, so I wasn't worried about where my parents were, I was more worried about the people walking along the sidewalks or scary cars driving by. Over time, I became more comfortable with doing things without adult supervision, like walking home from school and staying home by myself, and I continued to grow as a person thanks to that.

Mary E. Stapleton School was right down the street, exactly one mile away from my house. Cameron Middle school was exactly in between my house and Stapleton, exactly one mile away. When I was in middle school, I did not like being home alone, so I would always walk over to my mom’s work, Stapleton, where she is a kindergarten teacher. My brother is two years older, and would walk with me there, with his friends and my friends tagging along too. For whatever reason, I wanted to get back to Stapleton fast, so I had my brother’s friend ride my over, with me standing on his bicycle pegs. Everything was fine as we we’re going there, but as we were getting close I thought it would be a great idea to jump off the pegs, instead of waiting for him to stop. I did, ended up doing a flip, and I landed on my back. I ended up being fine, and I did not realize how scary it was until after the fact. There were not adults involved, and I walked away with just a couple of scrapes. I did not tell anyone because no adults were there for it and I was not too badly hurt, so I did not see the problem with it. This radically different than the normal me, who would have sat there and cried.[Ma1]  This type of speedy, unsupervised play could have gotten me seriously injured, but it did not.

Adults have begun to move away from risky play because they don’t want to be seen as a bad parent. Du[Ma2] ring her article, “The Overprotected Kid”, Rosin stated “As the Tribune reader had intuited, the cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard”.[Ma3]   This quote brings out a lot of meaning, and an almost chicken and the egg situation. Did the overprotected kid come first, and harsher regulation due to parent’s needs, or did the parents hear about accidents, push for higher regulations, and then just snowball from there? If my parents were there when I jumped off the pegs, I couldn’t even fathom what would have happened. I did something dangerous, however I took responsibility for myself and I ended up okay. The types of overprotected parents talked about in the article probably would have quarantined the whole block and called in every agency imaginable to get something done about, while simultaneously lobbying in the state congress to get a ban on bicycle pegs.

Rosin had been writing the article about this type of parenting where kids do their own thing and then she finally sees her kid do it. When she watches her son, she thinks he is going to cry, but instead he stands up and shakes it off. I believe in this moment she realizes that it can be a good thing for kids to learn by themselves without being sheltered. During the article, she was writing it like a stranger looking in, comparing her experience to the modern child’s experience, and even she had forgotten what she had done as a child for she was not prepared to let her kid go free, yet he thrived when he got to the playground. I think the generations are polarizing, one generation gives too little freedom, so the next gives too much. There needs to be a balance in order to have a healthy lifestyle, because being too cooped up can be bad for someone, but being always free can be just as bad. Once a balance is found, parents can be better parents.

Risky play is necessary for the development of children, and while it is not okay all the time, it should be permitted to help foster our children’s learning. Parents, at the heart of things, are only looking out for what is best for their children because they truly care about them and want them to succeed. However, these parents are shielding their children from the world. By letting children have the essence of freedom, they will become more comfortable with their surroundings.  Children need to grow on their own, and if adults are putting a stop to that, it threatens the child’s development, which is ironic because the adults think they are helping the child grow up normally.

The Shitty First Draft

      Lamott says it perfectly, the first draft is like the little kid version of your essay, where anything is okay to say, because most people will not see it. You can make mistakes with your grammar (although if I catch grammar mistakes I will fix them because they are annoying!), leave blanks where words you can't think of should go, and just be yourself in your draft. You can put all your ideas in and just sort them out later. That is why its a draft, its not meant to be presentable the first time you write it. Revision will fix what needs to be fixed when you get there, but for the first draft, just write what you want to include in your paper. It's almost like digging for gold through your own paper. Say you have just written 3000 words, and the essay needs to be 1500. Go through the essay and start marking what you like or alternatively, start deleting or highlighting what you don't. Then with the remaining "good" writing, fix up the flow of the paper and see how it looks from there. If it needs more, go back and look at some of the stuff you got rid of, or if it needs less, just delete some more unnecessary information. The writing from this style seems like it would be a lot more personal too, which can be a good thing. It can show your passion for a topic and make your opinion present in an essay.

Overall, the idea of a shitty first draft is something I would like to try, but I tend to rigidly stick to rules I have learned it might be hard for me to do so.

The Inspired Writer!

Everyone has experienced the Inspired Writer in one way or another, everyone believes that some people are just naturally gifted writers. However, there are always misconceptions when people are uninformed. Misconceptions about published writers include always feeling the need to write. People perceive writers as always wanting to write, no matter when or where they might be. This leads into the next misconception, they do not have writers block, and are able to write continuously as they want, for they will always have ideas flowing. Another misconception includes that they will not make mistakes when the write, for they have perfect grammar and the first time they right, everything will be perfect and no revisions will be necessary.  I believed in these misconceptions just like many others. My teacher last year helped me through some of them though. My toughest writing assignment was my senior year research paper in high school. My teacher pushed us to think critically and create the best possible piece of writing we could do. He made sure we we’re making inferences and not just stating facts, or “fancy facts”. I was pushed to my limits to write that paper, and because of all the work I put into it, it came out great.

Allen’s writing process seemed very lost when she got to college. She didn’t really learn any new ways of revision that what she had learned in high school. She felt like she was trudging through writing, it didn’t seem to come natural to her, which she believed meant she wasn’t going to be a good writer, thanks to her idea of the inspired writer. I am surprised she didn’t see herself as a good writer in college. If she didn’t think she was that good, I would have assumed she would have switched majors to something else she thought she could be good at, instead of sticking with a major she thought she was bad at. As she grew up she adapted to a writing formula, which she still recommends and uses. The writing formula starts off with an introduction telling the reader why the paper is going to be important. Stating what the problem of the paper’s topic is the next step in the formula. The next part of the formula is to choose two examples of your topic to show how the problem affects people and/or the environment/surroundings. Next, identify the most common problem with the topic, and how it has tried to be addressed before. Finally, address the problem from a new (your) perspective, and how you would deal with the problem. When this process becomes too restrictive, she turns to other readers, however they need to be accredited. The author’s reason for writing seems to be wanting to communicate with people and share why she believes her ideas are important. My reasons for writing vary. If it is assigned writing about certain topic I don’t find interesting, my writing will suffer. However, if I am passionate about what I am writing about, it will turn out significantly better. 

The Play Deficit

      Both Rosin and Gray believe that freedom is key to child growth and development. Both believe that freedom will make children grow up without needing to rely on adults. They both believe that adults play too much of a role in the lives of kids these days, with Gray citing how “pickup games” have transferred into leagues run by adults with adults coaching and officiating the games. The main theme of these two articles is that kids are losing their independence, and the authors are looking at attempts of trying to bring back a time where kids learned ways of being independent. Gray rose points during his article about how the education establishment really only focuses on getting test scores up. People don’t learn life skills in their classes, they learn about their classes specifically to score well on the tests to prove they understand the material that was given to them. Many students lose out on skills because they never got to have certain experiences as children. Something interesting about Gray’s article was that he talked about the Sudbury Village School, which is actually in my hometown. It isn’t that well known in my town, I had never heard of it before, and most of my friends hadn’t heard of it either. One of the most powerful quotes from Grays article for myself was “You can’t teach creativity.” It really shows that kids need to be able to experience life in order to think outside of the box, instead of becoming another cog in the machine of administrational education.

Summarizing "The Overprotected Kid"

      One of the main points throughout our classes’ posts was that children are being hindered from exploring because of their parent’s over protectiveness. The children at the Land are being sent free into it, where they can learn, play, and figure out the world for themselves, instead of having parents tell them what they should and should not do. Kids should have the hands on experience and be able to refer to that when the encounter situations like it in their future, they need to be able to experience the situations, not hear about them. From the blogs I read, almost everyone every one experienced at least one of the six kinds of risky play. However, Victoria didn't get to experience any of them by herself. This isn't bad, however she still holds most of the same viewpoints that we have when referring the article, so maybe those viewpoints do not hold as much sway as we think. Another outlier viewpoint was Rachel, who was playing Devil’s Advocate on Julia’s blog. She said that prevention is an important part of the learning process, for if something is explained, such as why it should be prevented, children can take that with them instead of having to learn by doing. Children are becoming dependent on technology instead of experiencing events outside for themselves. It’s just easier for the parents as they know their kid is protected while inside of their home. This also relates to another main theme present in the blog posts, that being that kids do have to have a level of independence in order to really experience life and how to better deal with situations on their own. 

The Overprotected Kid

The Millennials face a tough battle against the world as they age, for most never had true freedom growing up and being thrown into society might be a culture shock for them. Hanna Rosen wrote her concerns involving Millennials, including not having enough free will, and due to parents taking control of the kids lives and protecting them, the children seldom got to leave their sight. These parents are a concerned for the Millennials, because they never got to go explore and learn things for themselves. The children need this sense of “free range”, the signifigance of this free range play is that the kids get to feel like they are truly growing up. The older they get, the farther they can go without their parents, and the older they will feel because they feel like they have more responsibility than before.

            Personally, I have always loved being active and playing outside. Starting from childhood, I loved feeling the wind in my hair as I ran and cycled around the neighborhood. I started riding my bike when I was in kindergarten, and I used to ride around the block with my brother, who is two years older than me. We used to go fast down the street, because seldom did cars come down the street in the first place, and if one did, we were always close to the sidewalk anyways. Risky play allows you to see the dangers in the world for yourself, and understand why some things should not be done, instead of just being told that something should not be done.

            However, some children have grown up using only technology, like watching television and playing video games, always inside the safety of their home instead of exploring the outside of their house. Children are more prone to technology now, they would rather stay inside on an iPad than go out and make new friends while doing physical activity. The children probably also are so used to being in their house they become comfortable there, with their parents, and don’t want to explore what else is going on in the world, because they are comfortable where they are. While I personally would not go to this extreme and spend all my time inside with my parents and technology, I also would not want to go to the other extreme, and go to this playgrounds such as The Land.

            The Land is a type of playground where Imagination is key. Modern playgrounds have adults supervising their kids while they play. The Land however, promotes independence in the kids, encouraging them to be themselves and act on their own, without parent supervision. This type of  playground would be called insane by most parents because of how it operates, the kids are free to do whatever they want in the park, and if something is deemed too dangerous, the employees of the playground will step in, but only if they are needed.

            In closing, the author left her own viewpoint about this type of playground. Rosin conveys near the end of the article that as a parent, she knows it can be hard to let your child have their space and be themselves, but it will be fine. They understand the decisions they are making and they need room to experiment, which is why he lets his son roll down the hill instead of trying to stop him. Personally, I believe that that while the Land is definitely addressing a real problem, I would be apprehensive to go there myself, or with my children.