TOW #25 All schools should have good teachers By: The Times editorial board

For this TOW I would like to focus on my transitions. Looking back on my other TOWs I did not have many transitions and I would like to change that. In this TOW I would also like to work on my use of details. I need to continue practicing on working in details into my essays and so this will help me grow into incorporating details.

The debate over who is a good teacher has gone on since teachers have taught in schools. Some argue that seniority is the definitive mark of a good teacher, while other believe that newer teachers are better because they are more adaptable unlike the veteran teachers. This article believes it can give some insight on the topic. Written by the New York Times Editorial board there are many people who would have written this article. However, it is not shown that many people wrote this article. It is as if only one person wrote the article and not an entire board. While the article tries to stay neutral it becomes biased towards the veteran teachers when it references a recent study in Markham Middle School.

In all arguments articles try to stay neutral, however this article takes an obvious biased towards the veteran teachers. During the article it references a study showing that when newer teachers were laid off and veteran teachers were allowed to do teach freely test scores increased. By using this evidence to prove that there is a difference between having newer teachers and veteran teachers the article takes a side against the newer teacher. After showing its true colors the article can be clearly interpreted.

The article is meant for the masses. It is meant to explain to parents what is going on with their school and the teachers. It is also meant to expose the problems with American schooling at the moment. Even though the article is biased towards the veteran teachers it does bring up the faults that both groups have.

I believe that this article could work on its position. If it chose one side over another then the article would have been a lot more effective as an outlook against the newer teachers.

IRB Introduction Post Fourth Marking Period Banker to the Poor By: Muhammad Yunus

This an autobiography of Muhammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank. Winning a Noble Peace prize off this ground breaking idea Muhammad Yunus shows the audience how his journey. he book follows his journey from a person who originally gave out small pieces of money to help out stool makers in his community to get the raw materials they need to creating a bank based off his ideas of micro-economics.

The idea of micro-economics is that someone lends a poor person some money so that they can get their business off the ground. From there the same person aids the person he lent to into working on good financial avenues. With this combination of teaching and introduction of money to the lower levels of society it has been used to break the downward spiral of poverty in many places in the world.

When I was younger I went to the Noble Peace Prize Museum in Norway and we were there when Muhammad Yunus was awarded the prize. I was too young to understand what he had done, but I did know that he had helped poor people through a fancy new type of economics. I would like to learn about micro-economics and see why he was awarded the prize at the time that he did.

TOW #24 Poor Sleep Affects Children’s Thoughts and Emotions By: Joseph A. Buckhalt

What I plan on working on in this tow is to focus on the details. I plan on having the details to be many and prevalent in my work.  I will have the details back up my argument and not have a broad statement back up my argument. I will also try and have a better conclusion. I will try and end my conclusion with a "so what" question at the end to strengthen my conclusion.

Children have always complained that since they did not get enough sleep they will not be at their full potential. This has been the mantra for many people, while others argue that with less sleep they feel more alert. Dr. Buckhalt explains to the audience in this article the former statement is actually correct. Children with more sleep are bound to get better grades than those who do not get enough sleep. Through different lab testings and statistics the doctors can show this occur. With their new found knowledge they have also proposed a solution for schools that are worried about their student sleep cycle. This article uses, functional magnetic resonance-imaging (fMRI) to prove that without sleep students are not well equipped for the outside world. 

In the second paragraph of the article Dr. Buckhalt explains to his audience that with the help of fMRI doctors and psychologists will be able to analyze what is happening in the brain when the student does not get any sleep and when a student does get sleep. In the lab experiment they took 7-11 year old students who had a sleep apnea and some who did not. They split the two groups into the control and the experimental. Both groups underwent the same set of testing, one was for cognition and how well the students thought, while the other tested empathy and feeling. Both groups did well on the cognitive tests. However the tests for feeling was quite different. Student who had enough sleep did well on their tests while children who did not sleep well were mean and nasty during their tests. Proving that with lack of sleep children are less empathetic towards others.

The author in this article was talking to a variety of people. The main group of people whom he talked to was the masses or general people. Since most people have gone through school he was trying to tap into that idea of how they or their child has had to stay up late and work on projects so that they can get a better grade. The article was also speaking directly to school boards. It was almost even an attack on school boards by saying that students are given too much work and are punished for trying to get better grades.

I believe that the author did a wonderful job at portraying the problems associated with students not getting enough sleep. He was able to use the lab experiment to support his point and did so in a convincing way.