Reading The End of Education was an experience I will never forget. Neil Postman was able to question almost every work attitude I have towards school in a matter of 200 pages. Postman brought up what I believe is the main reason students work hard and go to school, which is to earn a well-paying job. What he calls the god of Economic Utility, I call my motivation. The god of Economic Utility states, “If you will pay attention in school, and do your homework, and score well on tests, and behave yourself, you will be rewarded with a well-paying job when you are done,”(Postman 27), which is what I, and many more, do. I had always believed that my hopes and dreams would come true if I did as Postman described. However, after reading The End of Education, all of my work ethics were questioned.

      Why should I be working so hard if there is no guaranteed reward? What is the importance of all this work, if I cannot be guaranteed the job to feed myself? Questions like these came to me throughout the book, and although they are quite difficult to answer, I found them to be enjoying. Neil Postman helped me realize why education is so important, and why I need to go to school. I went to school solely because I was motivated to go to college and after get a job that would allow me to do most of the things I wanted. I can remember when I was in 7^th grade, and wished I had and Audi to drive when I was older. For that entire year, I went to school and completed my homework without complaints knowing that slowly but surely, I would be able to work my way to my goal. Now that a well-paying job is not certain, my motivation is gone. Postman, however, was able to enlighten me with a reason to go to school. The reason is the most important thing, not the motivation. Whatever reason you choose, it helps keep you going and working, even when you are not motivated. The reason helps show what kind of person you are, and what you are going to be. From this book, I have revised my work ethics, and changed my goals in life to better fit reality. Even though a well-paying job is not going to be waiting at the end of the rainbow right when I get there, Postman showed me how there will be more in the long run if I educate myself.

Works Cited:

Postman, Neil. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Vintage            Books, 1996. Print.

How Sleeping Affects Your Grades

      It is your senor year in high school and you are loaded with homework. Every single day you have homework in Math, English, History, Spanish, Science, and more. Whenever you come home, you realize that you will have another sleepless night trying to finish all the homework. Even after putting so much time and effort into studying, you still manage to do badly on your quizzes and tests. Plus, you keep trying to not fall asleep in the middle of class! You have tried to negotiate with your teachers to lower the work load each night, but all they say is, “This is the college life! We are preparing you for the future! If you cannot handle this easy homework, then you will fail in college!” or something along those lines. Then, after a long day at school, the cycle repeats itself.

      This kind of problem seems to be occurring throughout high school and college. Most students are worried about their grades and try to finish all the homework at night, which makes them have very few hours of sleep. Despite the effort, these same students still get bad grades in their classes. More and more research studies show that daytime sleepiness has a large impact on academic success as well as concentration, attention, and mood. Depending on your sleep habits can change your day and grades. According to Michael J. Breus, who is a clinical psychologist and specializes in sleep disorders, students who average C’s, D’s, and F’s sleep on average 40 minutes less than students who earn A’s and B’s. He also states insufficient sleep leads to daytime fatigue, ADHD, and a tendency to doze off in class. Therefore students who sleep more, have earlier bed times, and later weekday rise time have higher grades whereas students who sleepless and go to bed later tend to have lower grades. Imagine if school started an hour or two later. It would be beneficial to everyone! From the studies above, students would therefore naturally get higher grades than they were before.

       In college, the same problem is arising. Some students made remarks that it is normal to stay up all night to finish a paper or study for an exam. However, in college, work load is not the only reason students are having trouble sleeping. With new independence, constant social lives, visitors passing by the rooms, and more distractions, it is very difficult for students to sleep. Early morning classes do not help the case either. According to the Washington Times, James Maas the guru of college sleep has found a solution. Mr. Maas was able to speak at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 2007 and convinced the school to start classes back from 7:55 to 8:30 and asked to cut sports practices and homework expectations ten percent each. The results of this change were a decline of student visits to the health center, seventeen percent more students taking time for a hot breakfast, and an overall increase in GPA. Sports teams also saw good years even with this change.

      So many great things can come about in our society from a small change in time. With an increase in sleep, students in college and in high school will have higher performance in both grades and sports. The big question is why has this change not occurred throughout the nation? A reason is because of age. Children of younger age, like kindergarteners, tend to wake up very early in the morning and are very active. So for schools that have High school and lower/middle school combined, the change cannot occur. However, according to the Baltimore Post Examiner, students need to learn how to deal with early mornings since many jobs start around the same time as school starts. The main argument is schools are trying to prepare students for the real world and the work environment students will have in the future.

      What if school start time was pushed back though? Take a look back when you were a senor. If schools took a similar approach to what Mr. Maas was suggesting, student life would not be so difficult. The homework load would be smaller than it was before the change, problems focusing in class, either from lack of concentration or fatigue, would decrease, and grades would go up. Life would also be easier for teachers because they will not have to waste precious teaching time to wake a student up who were sleeping in their class. Plus, teachers would not have to explain why so many students are doing poorly. Overall, many people see the huge benefits of having schools start later, but there are still some who believe earlier starting times create a maximum teaching opportunity. Due to the difference in ideas, most schools are at a standstill on this topic and therefore no change has come about. 

Works Cited :

• Breus, Michael J. "Back to School, Back to Sleep." WebMD. MERCK, 2 Sept. 2004. Web. 22 Sept. 2013. <http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/fixing-sleep-problems-may-improve-childs-grades-and-behavior>
• Flanagan, Jason. "Do schools really need to start early? How about Parenting 101 classes instead?." Baltimore Post Examiner. N.p., 4 Dec. 2012. Web. 21 Sept. 2013. <http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/do-schools-really-need-to-start-early-how-about-parenting-101-classes-instead/2012/12/04>
• Pope, Justin. "Colleges wake up to notion that better sleep means better grades." The Washington Times. N.p., 3 Sept. 2012. Web. 22 Sept. 2013. <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/3/colleges-wake-up-to-notion-that-better-sleep-means/?page=all>

Language and how it is Devolving

Is Language Devolving?

      With the growth of television and the decline of Typography, one can see that language as a whole is slowing devolving. According to Amusing Ourselves to Death, during the 1600s, reading and writing was highly encouraged in the colonies in North America. The book goes on to say, that this encouragement was for all classes, not just the nobles. It also states that the common people were able to understand high diction speeches given by politicians, and then made their decision after. This was, however, before the television was invented. When the T.V. was first created, its popularity skyrocketed, which in turn lowered the ideas of reading and writing.

      According to Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the T.V. shows a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, and sequence. Neil goes on to say that the information through the T.V. is not coherent, irrelevant, and does not contain any context, whereas Typography makes the human mind classify information, create inferences, and reason. Lastly, Neil states that T.V. is harming society for three reasons. First, children cannot learn information at school due to the fun, lively environment child T.V. shows create, like Elmo’s World. Second, the average American watches four and a half hours of television a day, which adds up to about twelve years of a person’s life. And third, the T.V. causes disinformation, which means everything that is important in a piece of information is lost. With the television causing so many problems within society, it is obvious that Typography and language as a whole is devolving. To truly engage in the reading and writing world, one must understand the meaning of the words he/she is reading, weigh ideas, compare and contrast topics, uncover lies, and connect one generalization to another. However, the T.V. pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, simply feeds information to it’s audience, fragments topics to show only a portion of it, and breaks the continuity of context. Language is clearly devolving due to television, and this is most clearly seen in reality shows. Within reality shows, curse/swear words are now common and words that do not even exist in the dictionary are used in everyday life. Not only that, but the Television, and its ways, are being copied by both the radio, and the newspapers, leaving language with no hope of recovery.  With the youngest generation being caught up in television, these habits in the decline of language are only going to get worse, and worse.