Personal Narrative- Happy to be Away from Home Essay -- Personal Narra

"For years I never spoke to anyone about it. Never mentioned a thing to my parents or teachers or my classmates"(Rodriguez 623). 1 shiver as I read it-the most powerful sentence I have ever come across. Scared, confused and resentful, I slam the book shut. Silence confronts me. Not a whisper, not a murmur-I hear nothing. I am alone. The donn room is too dark, the single lamp too dim. Anxious and frightened I flop onto the bed and look out at the night sky. Not a star is to be seen-Just infinite dark space. My pulse quickens. Suddenly the room is too hot-too small. I feel claustrophobic. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing it to go away. It won't. My palms become sweaty and I feel nauseous. I kick my legs in the air, angrily lashing out at the haunting memories. With every kick the anger builds up, until tears of hopelessness and frustration roll down my cheeks onto the pillow. I can't take it anymore, and I scream, "Aaaaahhhh!" It's only an essay I remind myself. But that is exactly the problem-it has made me confront feelings that I have tried to ignore and had kept hidden for a very long time. I close my eyes and the memories flood my head, threatening to haunt me. I am the "scholarship boy" to a certain limit (Rodriguez 622). 1 am an excellent student. Always successful, always confident. Needing to be the best. I study and read to succeed-to get a report card with nothing but A's. I don't study to learn. I am a good student and yet at the same time, a bad one. I read, ace an exam, and then forget about it, for my sole purpose is to succeed and get ahead. But this does not make me bookish- merely ambitious and overzealous for success. "Education is the only way for you to succeed. Take advantage of every opportunity you get," my... .... It makes me feel ungrateful that my parents love me and miss me so much, yet I cannot fully return that. It took Rodriguez a lifetime to come to terms with that. I wonder if I'll ever have the courage he had to took back. At this point I do feel like I have lost quite a bit of the cultural part of my childhood, but as yet I do not view it as a great loss. One thing is for sure; the essay forced me to confront my true feelings and has given me a way to express myself and a way to deal with issues I would have never otherwise faced. At this point I cannot say whether I will try and recover my lost culture. I just hope that university does not create an even greater barrier and distance between my family and me. Works Cited Rodriguez, Richard. "Achievement of Desire." Ways of Reading. Ed. Tony Perrietto and Joan E. Feinberg. Boston: Bantam Books, 1999. 620-639.

Critical Reflection on Three Questions Essay

For this paper we will be doing some critical reflection on three basic; yet much argued questions. The first is an argument of Marc Prensky’s. Are our youth the digital natives that he coined? Are the older generation digital immigrants? Second, we will be looking into making money online and the question being asked: Are there limits? Lastly, we will be looking at whether or not it is a crime or netiquette to copy and paste or, in general use another’s works as your own. Is this wrong? In this paper, I will bring to light a few arguments and explain in detail and try to offer a feasible counter-argument in return. The first question offered by Mr. Marc Prensky is: Are our youth the digital natives and is the older generation the digital immigrants? I can agree that this, as a statement is, in my mind to a degree, is true. The one statement that I do not believe was cited here by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of a book titled Born Digital: â€Å"Are you a digital native? If you were born after 1980 then you are† (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008). This statement loses me in that when I was a freshman in high school, we all stared at the first iMac and Apple IIe with awe and wonder. No Facebook, no IM, just DOS and not even 3. . I doubt, very much, that a teenager from this day and age could even fathom on what to do with DOS. Prensky believes that I am the digital immigrant. I believe this statement. I was not born into the digital age, therefore I am not native. This would be much like my ancestors immigrating to the United States, we are not from here anymore then I am from this age. Also , Prensky goes on to add that: â€Å"Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to â€Å"serious† work. †Ã¢â‚¬  http://depd. wisc. edu/html/TSarticles/Digital%20Natives. htm I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. People from my generation are used to work. We will not hesitate to print something out instead of just reading it off the laptop. We grew up with words and almost no pictures (graphics) as is the opposite for the younger generation. Next, we will be discussing; making money online and the question being asked: Are there limits? When you talk about making money online, there are two main entities that come to mind. EBay and Amazon. These are two giants where the average Joe may open an account and sell what he has to anyone in the world. Making money online can be a very good thing. It can be very profitable, but are there limits? I believe there certainly are. Some people still do not realize that there are illegal ways that people are making money online right now. One way is by Nigerian Letter scams. In 2001, estimates by the Secret Service claimed that more than $100 million was lost to Nigerian letter scams each year (Mintz, 2002, p. 15). I believe that if done legitimately, there really should be no limit to how much one can make online. Ideas like Fraud, theft and other scams are not good practices to teach or follow and should be sought out and banned from the internet. This way we help to protect the innocent and naive from such false ventures. Lastly, we will be looking at whether or not it is a crime or just plain netiquette to copy and paste or, in general use another’s works as your own. Is this wrong? Is it really stealing to copy and paste from a website that you don’t even own? One would argue that a piece they spent time creating was indeed taken and used by someone else, perhaps on their Facebook page. I too have fallen victim to this a time or two. In the end, I wished them luck and hoped that what I did, in some way helped them. It made them happy to take what I had created and post it on their page; in some small way, it does honor to the original creator of said works. Someone took the time to not only read what was created, but they felt proud to use it. No, I do not think you can steal something like that. If you owned the website and had created a logo or an expression than that would be very different. However, on the likes of Facebook and Myspace I do not feel that such things exist. In conclusion, we have discussed an argument of Marc Prensky’s. Are our youth the digital natives that he coined? Are the older generation digital immigrants? Second, we looked into making money online and the question being asked: Are there limits? Lastly, we looked at whether or not it is a crime or netiquette to copy and paste or, in general use another’s works as your own. Is this wrong? We in turn discussed some relative arguments to all of the above questions, while adding a few counter-arguments and finished with our thoughts.

Ida Tarbell Muckraker, Journalist, Monopoly Critic

Ida Tarbell (November 5, 1857–January 6, 1944) was a critic of corporate power and muckraking journalist. Famous for her exposà ©s  of corporate America and for biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Tarbell was added to the National Womens Hall of Fame in 2000. In 1999, when NYUs Department of Journalism ranked important works of journalism from the 20th century, Ida Tarbells work on Standard Oil made fifth place. She appeared on a U.S. postage stamp in September 2002 in a four-part collection honoring women in journalism. Fast Facts: Ida Tarbell Known For: Writing exposà ©s about corporate monopolies and biographies on historical figuresBorn: November 5, 1857 in Amity Township, PennsylvaniaParents: Franklin Sumner Tarbell Sr. and Esther Ann TarbellDied: January 6, 1944 in Bridgeport, ConnecticutEducation: Allegheny College, Sorbonne, and the University of ParisPublished Works: The History of the Standard Oil Company, The Business of Being a Woman, The Ways of Women, and All in the Days WorkAwards and Honors: Member of the National Womens Hall of FameNotable Quote: Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions. We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moments rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference. Early Life Originally from Pennsylvania, where her father made his fortune in the oil boom and then lost his business due to Rockefellers monopoly on oil, Ida Tarbell read widely in her childhood. She attended Allegheny College to prepare for a teaching career. She was the only woman in her class. She graduated in 1880 with a degree in science, but she didnt work as a teacher or a scientist. Instead, she turned to writing. Writing Career She took a job with the Chautauquan,  writing about social issues of the day. She  decided to go to Paris where she studied at the Sorbonne and University of Paris. She  supported herself by writing for American magazines, including writing biographies of such French figures as Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis Pasteur for  McClures Magazine. In 1894, Ida Tarbell was hired by McClures Magazine and returned to America.  Her Lincoln series was very popular, bringing in more than one hundred thousand new subscribers to the magazine.  She published some of her articles as books, including biographies of Napoleon, Madame Roland, and President Lincoln. In 1896, she was made a contributing editor. As  McClures  published more about social issues of the day, Tarbell began to write about the corruption and abuses of public and corporate power. This type of journalism was branded muckraking by President Theodore Roosevelt. Standard Oil and American Magazine Ida Tarbell is best known for the two-volume work, originally nineteen  articles for McClures, on John D. Rockefeller and his oil interests, titled The History of the Standard Oil Company and published in 1904. The exposà © resulted in federal action and, eventually, the breakup of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey under the 1911 Sherman Antitrust Act. Her father, who had lost his fortune when driven out of business by the Rockefeller company,  originally warned her not to write about the company. He feared they would destroy the magazine and that she would lose her job. From 1906 to 1915, Ida Tarbell joined other writers at the American magazine, where she was a writer, editor, and co-owner. After the magazine was sold in 1915, she hit the lecture circuit and worked as a freelance writer. Later Writings Ida Tarbell wrote other books, including several more on Lincoln, an autobiography in 1939, and two books on women: The Business of Being a Woman in 1912 and The Ways of Women in 1915. In these, she argued that womens best contribution was with home and family. She repeatedly turned down requests to become involved in causes like birth control and woman suffrage. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson offered Tarbell a government position. Though she did not accept his offer, in 1919 she was part of his Industrial Conference and President Hardings 1925 Unemployment Conference. She continued writing and traveled to Italy where she wrote about the fearful despot just rising in power, Benito Mussolini. Ida Tarbell published her autobiography in 1939,  All in the Days Work. In her later years, she enjoyed time on her Connecticut farm. In 1944 she died of pneumonia  in a hospital near her farm.