Undergraduate / "Be Prepared" and "No Sacrifice, No Victory!" [3]

Shaped by the Modern Age

The two mottos that have made me unique and have embedded themselves into my heart, mind, and soul are: "Be Prepared," and "No Sacrifice, No Victory!"

Ever since I heard Mufasa sing "Be Prepared," I have always been on the lookout for everything that needs to be prepared for. As the saying goes "When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade," so when in first grade I heard of Boy Scouts (the best organization ever), I just had to join it. During Boy Scouts, I learned that my favorite motto has wiggled its way into my life again so I had to stick with it. Since I had the motto already memorized, I excelled in scouts enthusiastically and even managed a couple of wins with my Pine Wood Derby cars. Now by the time you have read this letter, I am now an Eagle Scout and have started working on Ranger in the Venturing crew of my troop.

A few years ago a movie made it to the top of the top ten charts when everyone thought it couldn't and if it hadn't made it, I may have never have heard of the second quote that touched my life. Transformers taught me allot about technology so started to love that and it takes a whole other turn on my life and throws a huge quote out to me that I immediately grasp and never forget no matter how much I put into my mind, the quote "No Sacrifice, No Victory!" will never leave, and I'm happy for that to happen because this quote has helped me through allot of decisions that I have hated making during Middle School and High School.

Do to my love of technology, books, music, and movies, I have gained excessive knowledge through all of the facts that I have learned that I now sometimes edit everything I read. Both grammar and spelling errors are found all over this world and no one is trying anything to stop the decline of the human race that is present every day. Ever since this impending doom dawned on me, I have tried to live every day to its fullest and life has been great. But, I now have an extremely poor social life and very little friends. However, the friends I do have are good ones that anyone would love to have.

One thing I do is I help out everyone that I come into contact with. No matter what the job is, it is always hard to say no to it. Like the time when I was going around school selling popcorn for Boy Scouts, I went to a teacher who needed a few extra hands on the tech team for the Fall show and since I had experience, in tech theater, I had no way of saying no. When the show was done with, in December I received a poster to keep for the show with everyone's signature from the show. I now have decided to help the theater out and join the tech team again since I found it fun and exciting.

Ever since joining band, I have grown more excited as I have received a deeper understanding of music through practice and perfection. When I joined band, I was the smallest tuba player in my town and now I have gone through several growth spurts and am playing exceedingly well compared to then, when I was taught wrong.

Just recently, I had the choice of just refereeing the games I was assigned or doing that and getting a few extra. So I thought "The pay is good and I still can't say no when my schedule is empty." So I said yes and got three extra games I mean sure the pays well but three extra games was we'll worth it even if it was in the hot sun. During this day my sacrifice was family time and getting allot of sun, but my victory was a little extra money and time spent doing something that I love.

When I did my Eagle Scout Project, I had to think carefully about how I was going to help a school when it finally came to me. I decided to paint their playground area since there was no education on the playground.

When I think back to all of this and more, I can only see one thing: I am not like anyone else.

Undergraduate / Wake-up is at 8 not 5:45, all because of the school - issue of importance [3]

Choose an issue of importance to you-the issue could be personal, school related, local, political, or international in scope-and write an essay in which you explain the significance of that issue to yourself, your family, your community, or your generation.

Change in School Times

As an aspiring Eagle Scout, the issue that I would like to discuss is associated with the change in start time for schools in McKinney Independent School District. My concern about the earlier start time for school is that it is way too early for high school students to start.

Deborah Brauser, writer for Medscape Today, states that "...optimal sleep amounts remain about 9 to 9ź hours per night. On a practical level, this means that the average adolescent has difficulty falling asleep before 11 pm, and the ideal wake time is around 8 am"(Brauser). The only students that have a chance of not going to school at 7:30 AM are seniors and that's because they have enough credits to have a later start time.

Too few high school students get the amount of sleep they need. Lynne Lamberg, writer for Medscape Today, states, "Only about 20 percent of high school students get the recommended duration of sleep on school nights, but an experiment to shift the opening bell at one school a half-hour later produced impressive changes in students' sleep patterns and mood"(Lamberg). What she means is that 1/5 of the high school students are fully rested and refreshed each day they go to school and the other 4/5 of high school students drag themselves all through-out the day or fall asleep when they are supposed to be working.

"Even without the pressure of biological changes, if we combine an early school starting time--say 7:30 am, which, with a modest commute, makes 6:15 am a viable rising time--with our knowledge that optimal sleep need is 9 1/4 hours, we are asking that 16-year olds go to bed at 9 pm. Rare is a teenager that will keep such a schedule. School work, sports practices, clubs, volunteer work, and paid employment take precedence. When biological changes are factored in, the ability even to have merely 'adequate' sleep is lost," (Carskadon). I myself, at times, have been challenged to stay awake during class even though I had gone to sleep at 9:00 PM.

One other personal problem that I have with this time change is that I was actually trying to maintain a High School-Elementary School chess club. This is a mutual benefit club where McKinney North High school chess club students would get Green cord hours for teaching Vega elementary kids how to play chess Monday mornings before school. I successfully started one last school semester and now some kids might not ever discover their love for chess because of the time change and lack of opportunity.

 
Works Cited

Brauser, Deborah; Medscape Today, "Delayed School Start Times May Improve Adolescent Behaviors, Health";
Lamberg, Lynne; Psychiatric News, "Later High School Start Times May Benefit Teens' Mental Health";
Carskadon, Mary A., PhD; "Research on School Start Times and Biology";

Writing Feedback / 3 Hours-how 3 hours a week changed my life [NEW]

3 Hours

There is a lot that can happen in 3 hours: some of which can change the world and others are so mundane that if they happened, no one would care. Examples of those that can change the world are usually things that go boom! Something that you can do in three hours is watch a movie or three TV episodes. An example of those that are mundane is something like a fly being caught by a spider. Over the course of this last Semester, 3 hours a week has made a major impact on my life, me, and my future. When I walked up to Sarah Moore's ENGL 1301 C28 on August 26, 2011, I really didn't know how to write more than a half to three quarters of a page with double space. Now, I can write papers that still have meaning when they are a full page or even a page and a half.

Before that day, I did not know how to write on a whim and as a result, A&M never really got my full application in on time. As I've grown to know how to write essays this past Semester, I've started to look over my past essays and I've started to cretic them thoroughly. I recently Googled my name and found one of my essays from last year on essayforum.com. Currently, I can't believe that I was the person who wrote that horrible essay that just sounded like complaint after complaint. Not to mention the length was half a page and I thought it was great last year.

During this past semester, I have learned how to add details to an essay so that I could get it to a more proper length. Mainly, I've learned this by grading other peoples' essays on turnitin. With turitin, I was able to view how others wrote their own essays and used that to fix my own writing skills while I would help everyone with their grammar. By the end of the course, I could not find very many things wrong with a lot of my classmates' papers.

No matter what my career will be, I will always remember everything that I learned this past semester. As a Veterinarian, I will need to write down everything that happens so that I can have evidence for inevitable lawsuit that will come up (since all veterinarians and doctors have a suit filed against them at one point in their career). As someone in the movie business, I will need to be able to write down what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, and how it needs to happen in order for the movie/TV show to draw in the audience and capture them in the fantasy of that video. As a roller coaster designer, I will need to write down and describe the parts that I would need for the train to be safe and fun at the same time.

In Professor Moore's class, I was able to get all of my questions answered on writing and I plan on keeping the text book for future reference thanks to all of the help that it provided during this last semester.

From the past to now and to infinity and beyond, I know that 3 hours a week has changed my life for the better.

Research Papers / The Green Mile; The Last Mile of Death till you reach "Old Sparky" [NEW]

The Green Mile

In the year 1999, Director Frank Darabont released The Green Mile, written by Stephen King (Novel) and Frank Darabont (Screenplay). The main characters include Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks and Dabbs Greer), Brutus 'Brutal' Howell (David Morse), Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), and John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan). The movie starts out with the protagonist (Old Paul Edgecomb) recalling his memory of his time as a prison guard in the Great Depression (Green Mile). He recalls the year 1935 as the year his bladder infection was the worst it had ever been (Green Mile). He then talks of the first day that he had met John Coffey "Just like the drink only not spelled the same," (Green Mile). He then proceeds to talk about the amazing things that started happening in and around Death Row Block "E" like his bladder infection getting cured, a mouse coming back to life, a cure for a tumor, and finally the "insanity" punishment that one of the guards and a certain inmate so rightly deserved (Green Mile). Once he is done with his story, it is found that he is one hundred and eight years old and still has many, many more years to go thanks to John Coffey, a very gifted man who was executed in 1935 for the rape and killing of two innocent little girls (Green Mile). He was found to be innocent during the story but only the viewer gets to know that part (Green Mile).

This movie has become a period piece due to the themes it has used from the 1930's and the 1990's. The historical themes that are found throughout the movie include: the strict rules that aren't always enforced in a nursing home, segregation, God's importance, illiteracy of Blacks, corruption in prisons, open and shut cases, and no delay before an execution.

The rules of a nursing home are displayed from the nineties in the beginning of the movie when everyone is worried about Paul who seemed to keep to himself and violate rules all the time by going on walks alone and eating only plain white bread every day. I can't find anything about rules for patients to follow in nursing homes, but thanks to TV and some movies, I know that they exist and that some nursing homes really do kick out patients when they violate some rules, like trying to throw orgies to feel young again, but they nurses in the Old Folks Home in the movie allowed him to go on his walks because he never ran into trouble and he was kind enough for them to turn away even when he brought a friend along with him (Green Mile and ).

Segregation was illustrated by how everyone took one look at John and declared him guilty just because he was black and they could easily compare him to a dog gone rogue (they never stopped to listen to his side of the story). Back in the 1900s to the 1950s, "'Colored' Gets Three Years - 'White' Gets Thirty Days," was the way most cases that had a 'black' and a 'white' committing the same crime, in this case though the 'white' committed grand theft auto and the 'black' only stole a bicycle (Teaching History). In this film, if it had been a white man who was found at the scene of the murder, then they would have listened to whatever he had to say and he may have gotten life in prison at the most.

The way God's importance was shown was by Paul asking what he is going to so when God asks him why one of his "greatest creations" was killed.

The illiteracy of blacks comes in when Paul is surprised to hear that John can spell his name, he then asks for John to spell his name and proceeds to interrupt him in the middle of the first name.

When the townspeople find John with the two raped and dead girls, they immediately trial and persecute him on site (not literally). This went to show how officials weren't doing a full police investigation if they could present enough evidence that someone could easily find their person guilty, not to mention that if nobody wanted to look at ALL of the evidence they didn't have to.

The entire time period for the memory in this film is only a few weeks between John getting convicted and John getting executed whereas in today's world a minimum of ten years takes place before an execution can be taken place, during this time the defendant has many appeals before various or sometimes the same courts to determine if they truly are guilty, if a life sentence is better, or if they are innocent of the charge(s).

The corruption in prisons is shown by having all of the guards take John out of jail (illegal) and smuggle him to the wardens house to see the warden's wife at night for a surprise visit (unheard of) (Green Mile). During the 1930's, chain gangs, money and drugs were all being used corruptly throughout prisons (Blackwell). "Payoffs and privileges were the rule at New Jersey State Prison in 1930..." (Blackwell). "On [the prisoner's] body [was] found $193 in bills and a vial of heroin" (Blackwell). These are just two of the accounts that were documented from the thirties, since then prisons have been sealed more tighter than ever before (Blackwell). Thanks to Robert Burns, chain gangs halted entirely in December of 1932 but when the Alabama citizens got fed up with prisoner perks, Alabama reinstituted the system and today there are at least three southern states carrying on the chain gang helpers (Blackwell).

Book Reports / comparing Castiglione's Book of the Courtier with Paul's first letter to Timothy [NEW]

I need to make sure that all of my citings are accurate enough to be in MLA format

>>Start Essay

Justin Graham
Prof. Jill Foltz
HUMA 1301-C70
May 27, 2014

Essay #1: Civic Philosophies

By using, The Book of the Courtier, by: Count Baldesar Castiglione and Paul's first letter to Timothy, this essay will be discussing the difference of opinion of the authors on the various topics of gender roles, education and wealth levels, and the way one needs to be viewed in society. Paul's first letter to Timothy is a sacred text that talks about how the church and the followers should behave, act, and conduct service. The Book of the Courtier is an account of the Courtiers who came after the knights yet still held the same esteem.

Throughout history, women have been lower in the eyes of most. The Standard English Version of the Bible even says "...that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness-with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing-if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control." (1 Timothy 2:9-15). Whereas in The Book of the Courtier, the Magnifico was the one ho stated that, "'If in every age you will compare women's worth with that of men, you will find that they have never been and are not now at all inferior to men in worth; for leaving aside the times that are so ancient, if you come to the time when the Goths ruled in Italy, you will find that there was a queen among them, Amala- sontha,"' who long reigned with admirable wisdom; then Theo- dolinda, queen of the Lombards, of singular worth; Theo- dora," " the Greek empress; and in Italy among many others the Countess Matilda was a most illustrious lady...'" (201-202, Book 3, section 34). Castiglione, it seems, had such a high respect for women, that he even had them "...[rush] to the walls in arms, and[fight] so fiercely that in a short time they drove Philip off with disgrace and loss: which their husbands had not been able to do" in his Book of the Courtier, instead of having the men do it themselves (200, Book 3, section 32). Paul, on the other hand, did not hold women to the same regard, with this evidence, it can be determined that Paul did not think of women as anything other than child bearers, he even goes on saying that, "...she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives," meaning that women could not take care of themselves, they must instead be a burden on another man (or a believing woman who is more than likely married) and in doing so, "Let the church not be burdened,..." (1 Timothy 8:6) (1 Timothy 8:16).

The elite that these two had in mind were different as well. Castiglione wanted his Courtier to, "'... be nobly born and of gentle race; because it is far less unseemly for one of ignoble birth to fail in worthy deeds, than for one of noble birth, who, if he strays from the path of his predecessors, stains his family name, and not only fails to achieve but loses what has been achieved already; for noble birth is like a bright lamp that manifests and makes visible good and evil deeds, and kindles and stimulates to virtue both by fear of shame and by hope of praise.'" (22, Book 1, section 14). Whereas Paul, "...[urged] that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved..." (1 Timothy 2:1-4). Castiglione, on one hand, wanted his Courtiers to be of noble birth whereas Paul treated all men equal and wish for everyone to look at each other the same way and be partial to no one.

Castiglione's Courtiers need to be, "...endowed by nature not only with talent and beauty of person and feature, but with a certain grace and (as we say) air that shall make him at first sight pleasing and agreeable to all who see him; and I would have this an ornament that should dispose and unite all his actions..." (23, Book 1, Section 14). The representatives who Paul calls for, "...must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil," (1 Timothy 9:2-7). It seems that certain qualities are required to be in each group, yet Castiglione's requirements are more nurture and how the person looks whereas Paul wants people to grow into his representatives no matter how they look.

The list could go on, but this essay has discussed enough information to show how Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier differs from the English Standard Version of the Holy Bible's first letter to Timothy from Paul. The view for their representatives is somewhat similar but all in all, the two documents contradict each other on a much grander scale, such as when talking of how to treat women, Paul writes about how they should be modest and not revealing at all, which seems similar to another religion that has a reputation for having problems accepting everyone else, and the other case presented where Castiglione wanted noble births to fill his elite class and have everyone else below them aside from everyone on the high court.

Works Cited

Castiglione, Baldassarre. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903. Open Library. Internet Archive, 2008. Web.
ESV: Study Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2007. Print.