"For A Fair Selection Everyone Has to Take the Same Exam: Please Climb that Tree."

Lately, much of my time has been spent on preparing for, paying for, and actually taking standardized test after standardized test.  For me, all these tests (ACT SAT etc.) seemed like the best way to "showcase my strengths" as a college counselor might say.  But in this case, or as this clever cartoon might put it:

I am the monkey who has been taking climbing lessons my entire life.  It's no surprise that I will be able to get up that tree given that my family has the means and support to buy study books for me, and allow me to take the test multiple times if at first I don't get "my absolute best."  To me, this system really doesn't look that "standardized" anymore.  As of 2008, students were allowed the option to take SATs that would not be reported, thereby allowing them to take as many SATs as necessary, until getting the score they "earned."  (Los Angeles Times).  To me, this seems to take out the "level playing field" because now, wealthy students not only have the means to take classes and buy books and prepare, but they can take as many tests as they would like, and appear to be the "better" student.

Not only can the wealthier students take the tests more times, but from my observations, New Trier (a pretty wealthy high school) takes a pretty solid amount of time to help students out with the ACTs, whether its review in science, or learning the skills in math.  I have never gone to another school, but I have heard from friends at other schools that this is not the norm.  Not every school has the time or resources to spend time tutoring kids on standardized tests.

So where is the "standardization" now?  What makes these tests standard if there are so many ways to get ahead?

Advertisements: Leaders of the blind

In Don DeLillo's "White Noise," a novel satarizing our consumption of products and advertisements, DeLillo says, "Babette was seated some distance away with Old Man Treadwell and a number of other blind people.  She was reading to them from a small and brightly colored stack of supermarket tabloids" (DeLillo, 137).  Through this quote I think that we can see how DeLillo sees society as blind, and unknowing of what they are hearing.  The fact that Babette is reading to a group of either old people or blind people or both, and that she is reading non other than gossip and advertisements in the form of a tabloid, represents how our society is spoon fed information, and is too blind to see the logical falicies behind it.

So often will we take a quote, or an internet source (such as wikipedia) or a radio podcast, or a real live interview and take it as the complete and utter truth.  Never second guessing it, and never checking it to other sources or corroborating it with other material, just because it sounds good.  I know I have done this, many times, and I'm pretty positive that everyone else does it, if not all the time, a lot of the time.

I good example of this was the story that we listened to on NPR, regarding a man named Mike Daisey and his experiences at an Apple technology factory.  His story was compelling, and touching, and inciteful, and personal, and honest, and all the things we absolutely love in to hear in a story, and it turned out to be mostly fabricated.  Now, I am sure that there are parts of truth in this story, and that this would probably be a pretty good representation for the truth, but the fact that a National news association didn't take the time to corroborate their stories just proves DeLillo's point.  We are trusting, blind and modern information will take advantage of that.

Freedom to Spend

When I think of oppression or an oppressive government the first things that come to mind for me are not being able to go where you want, not being able to say anything you want, not being able to feel the way you want to, and not being able to have the basic things that sustain you as a human being.  I have a feeling that my ideas of oppression are most likely in line with other people's ideas.  With the knowledge that oppression and freedom are generally thought to be opposites, one might think that freedom would be having all these things, right?  However, when polled “Most (young people) say that freedom means... freedom to buy what you want, when you want it, and use it how you want" (James B. Twitchell).  

We have grown up in a generation of people who are past the industrial revolution, past the evolution of cars, over the main part of the factory age, and into an age of mass spending.  This generation not only expects the fruits of these revolutions but believe that ”Revolution means freedom from necessity" (Fifteen Definitions of Freedom from #OccupyWallStreet).  And we are really bread from an early age to think all of this is ok.  From babysitting experiences, I can say that a pretty popular toy is the cash register toy, complete with credit cards and all.  Little kids can play house and practice buying things that they "need" or want, just like in real life! How has our interpretation of "need," or use of money changed in the last century and why has it changed?

Consumer Education, a requirement.

If you were given a test that asked you all about your money, income, tax, savings, etc. do you think you would do well?  If you answered "no" than you're pretty much on par with most high schoolers.  In fact, when given a survey by the Jumpstart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, the average high school student got about 48%.

"Why" might you ask "does this horrible test score exist?" And the truth is, for a lot of reasons but most notably, consumer education is NOT a high school requirement in 46 states, and money issues are not necessarily things that families openly talk about.  Education in schools regarding money and spending responsibly is often limited to a game of monopoly, or play shopping during elementary school.  Past that, schools often have little or no part in a students financial education.

Do you know what your parents salary is?  Probably not.  Most of our generation does not know because to most families, money discussion is taboo and extremely private (MSN Money).  Money is often a source of friction in families, especially during times like we just had in "The great Recession."  Families don't want to talk about money, and it's really the kids that lose out because they grow up to be completely financially illiterate.

Ok, back to the point.  These people who were surveyed and got that average of 48% will all be turning 18 within the next three years.  At that point, no matter where they are in there lives, college, work, family, they will be getting credit card offers, and more than likely taking those offers.  78% of households in America have one or more credit cards and an average balance of $8,300 ("Credit Card Bill of Rights").  You're almost guaranteed to at least have a credit card, and will more than likely be in debt within the next few years, so I ask you, is being "punished" (uncontrollable amounts of debt) for something we don't know about really fair?

The Hunger Games: A story of race

"The Hunger Games" has made a lot of news in the last few weeks for an intriguing story, interesting new actors, and an extremely successful opening week, but even amongst all of those things one of the most talked about subjects regarding the movie is still race.  Even in the weeks leading up to the premier, social media sites such as twitter were buzzing with tweets such as "Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad #ihatemyself."  An article in The New Yorker entitled "White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games" talks about our notion as a predominantly white culture/country to imagine anyone and everyone as white until explicitly instructed to do otherwise.

The bigger issue, says the author of the article, is our "culture's association of whiteness with innocence."  In AS this year we have often talked about a whitewashing of history, or a tendency for us to try to forget that every story, even stories in history books, are told with at least a little bias.  This tendency to be quite color blind to history has spread to mainstream with tweets like, "Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture."  The bigger issue is that we cannot see biases in history books, and TV (hello TV tokenism?) and radio and mainstream everything, but we can see when they seem out of whack.  Why was there such a reaction to the color of Rue's skin anyway?  How much do reactions like these affect our every day life?  How much do these kinds of reactions exist inside each one of us, even if we don't verbalize it?

Materialism and the Industrial Revolution

"We were not made materialistic by machine power; rather, it was machine power that was made by our materialism"
As humans we often think that there must have been a time, a time when we were really just satisfied with living, and hunting or gathering or whatever we did and we never got bored, and we were happy with having nothing, but in reality that's just not true.  The first humans wanted fire to improve living, am I wrong?  Later humans wanted domesticated animals like cows and pigs so that they didn't have to migrate, right?  So materialism had to be the force behind motivating the industrial revolution.

However, I think there is sort of an exception to the rule.  We may have created machine power to quench or materialistic thirst, but the machines never really satisfied that thirst.  Over time the average household income has only gone up, and not just we have more money, but we are actually richer.  We have more money to spend, and more things to buy.  An illustration of this can be seen with the amount of advertisements people take in daily, in the 1980s that number barely reached 2000, now the average consumer sees over 4000 ads per day.  The number of bankruptcy filers have only increased over the past 10 years, leading me to believe that we may have already had a materialism problem when the industrial revolution started, but the industrial revolution has only increased that problem within us.

Atheism on the rise

In politics, and in the world in general we often see people bashing the very religious people, whether it be Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, you name it, they've been bashed for somehow being too extreme.  A lot of this criticism comes from the way these members of the religion present themselves to those of different beliefs, or are presented by others to others with different beliefs.  Basically, it's all bad advertising that gets this group a bad rep.  (Now, this is not a blog in which I intend to defend or bash any religion or belief system at all, so if that's what you're looking for, sorry).  Anyway, often the counter argument to extreme religion is "logic" and scientific research, often Atheism.

Atheism is usually presented as logical, scientific, modern, and in turn presents religions as overly extreme and not based in anything, but lately I have seen Atheist groups play on very extreme images and words themselves.  Take the advertisements above and below, both of these are billboards published by the AmericanAtheists, in an effort to ultimately persuade people to join their cause, but in the ad I see nothing but religion bashing and there is a complete lack of facts about Atheism at all.  Why would it not be effective to use facts about Atheism as opposed to facts making religions look crazy?  Personally, I believe organizations like these lose a lot of credit when they sink to "bashing" level and can't offer any real facts.  There are even some groups that go as far as to consider Atheism its own religion, thereby pretty much ruining the point.