After watching a helpful video provided to us on how to write a reflective writing piece, I will reflect back on my writing process while composing my research paper. I will provide a link to my first draft to my research paper - Paid Maternity For All.
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This post will be the start of my research paper, I will find four sources to support my topic- Should American government legally require companies to provide paid maternity leave? I will then summarize, evaluate and explain how the source material are relevant to my paper. Traister, Rebecca. "Labor Pains." New Republic, vol. 246, no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 12-17. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com.libdb.dccc.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=100757377&site=ehost-live. In this article Rebecca Traister hits on a lot of points about pregnancy in the workforce. She talks about the statistics of the age that women are having children. She explains that in the 70's the average woman had her first child at 21. by 2012 you saw most women pregnant at 26, this is an age that many young adults are at least a few years or starting a respectful job or career. Traister states "Around 15 percent of first births are now to women over the age of 35, compared with just 1 percent back in 1970. Women across all classes are now participating in the labor market like never before, and far too few are able to spare a cent" After reading this article you can get a clear idea that having a child is not an easy choice for some women to make and what holds them back is financial reasons. This source will be beneficial to my research paper because this article hits one a lot of points that I want to show in my paper. The statistics I believe would be a great shock factor, it opens ones eyes to see that pregnancy makes an economic and practical dent in the shape and solidity in one career. This source is filled with useful facts that could really help my paper. Among 41 nations, U.S. is the outlier when it comes to paid parental leave. Gretchen Livingston, fertility and family demographic. September 26, 2016 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/26/u-s-lacks-mandated-paid-parental-leave/ In this article, Livingston states that U.S. is the only country among 41 nations that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents. The smallest amount of paid leave required in any of the other 40 nations is about two months. Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Austria, Czech Republic, Latvia, Norway and Slovakia – offer over a year’s worth of paid leave. Maternity leave and the employment of new mothers in the United States
Lawrence M. BergerJane Waldfogel, Journal of Population Economics. June 2004, Volume 17, Issue 2, pp 331–349 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00148-003-0159-9?LI=true This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the relationships between maternity leave coverage and U.S. women’s post-birth leave taking and employment decisions from 1988 to 1996. The article also gives background information about the United States maternity leave policy. "The U.S. did not have a national maternity leave policy until 1993 (although employers who offer temporary disability coverage to employees have been required to offer the same coverage for maternity leave since the passage of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act). Prior to that time, maternity leave coverage was generally the result of state law, collective bargaining agreements, and employer policies." Write an introduction that provides the focus of your blog post, a link to Where to Invade Next, and a link to blog post #9 (Summary of Where to Invade Next).
In this blog post I will discuss three topics from the documentary Where to Invade Next, by Michael Moore and write brief arguments for each topic. In my previous blog post you will find a summary of the film. Topic: Health care in America Research: Can American adopt the same health care system as Germany? Argument: America has the ability to change tax and other laws in order to use the same methods has Germany. Topic: Drug policy in America Research: Should America legalize or decriminalize drug use or lower arrests for non-violent, drug related crime. Argument: After Portugal decriminalized all drug use the drug use rate actually dropped. If we did the same thing in America, the results would show in the criminal system. There would be less mass incarceration for drug-related crimes. Topic: Workers Rights in America
Research: Can The United States adapt the same methods as countries like Italy, providing mental stability for employees? Argument: If we stop spending money on military and similar things we could provide our companies the same benefits as Italy.
In the documentary Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore travels to various European counties as a one man army. As the “invader,” Michael Moore starts conversations with residents and heads of large industries. He dives into controversial and provocative topics that America has lost success in. In the beginning of the film Moore says, “Take the things we need from them and bring it all back home to the United States of America. We have problems no army can solve.”
Moore’s first target was Italy. Upon his arrival Moore realizes how happy Italians are and how different the environment is. Moore meets with a working class couple and they talk about paid vacation. The couple goes on to tell Moore how most Italian’s receives Two- hour lunch breaks, eight weeks paid vacation, a two week paid honeymoon, an extra month’s salary, and a 5 months maternity leave. After talking with the couple Moore moves up the work ladder and meets with the executives of billion dollar companies Lardini and Ducati. Moore questions how and why they supply their workers with so many weeks paid vacation. The CEO of Ducati responds “Workers are more comminuted, there is no clash between the profit of the company and the well-being of the people. By paying a good wage with good benefits the company still makes a healthy profit.” Even with the long vacations and long lunch breaks Italy is among the top 15 most productive counties in the world. The well- being of the employees is more valuable than the profit of the company. At the end of Moore’s Italians invasion he states “of course Italians have problems like all counties but my mission is to pick the flowers not the weeds.” France is next on Moore’s list. Moore’s first stop in France is a gourmet restaurant or otherwise known as the school cafeteria. In this scene you see kids preparing for lunch by forming a line at the stink to wash their hands then they make their way to an already plated table as they wait for their healthy four course lunch to be served. In France lunch time is consider a class where you learn how to eat in a civilized manner, enjoy healthy food and each other. Once a month the school’s chef gets together with the cities and schools officials as well as a dietitian to go over the school’s menu. Why do the French care so much about children’s lunches? Over time they want their children to learn what a balanced diet is and to pay attention to what they eat. Moore goes on to show the chef and some students what American students are served for lunch. Needless to say they pitied our lunches. Although these schools provide a healthy four chore meal, they spend less per lunch then the United States. Even one of the poorest schools in one of the poorest town eats a healthy based diet for lunch. Moore wonders how France can afford free health care, almost free daycare and remarkable school lunches. Simply they pay a little more in taxes, their paychecks also provide a line by line description of where their taxes are going unlike American paychecks. Moore’s next stop is Finland. Finland is at the top of having the best educated students in the world. Yet Finland students have the shortest school days and the shortest school years in the entire western world. Finland believes their students should have more time to be kids and to enjoy the life of a child so they cut out homework and do they have standardized testing. When Moore askes about this concept a teacher says “school is about happiness and finding a way to learn what makes you happy.” Finland wants their students to be happy and live a happy life. There is so much more to life than just school. Moore moves over to the country of Slovenia. Slovenia provides tuition-free higher education universities. The students live a debt free life yet Moore did come across a few students that had debt, these students came from America. When the Government decided to start charging tuition the students protested, and managed to delay the law which caused the government to collapse. Slovenia believes that education is a public good and that all colleges should be free for everyone. In Germany, workers have similar labor rights and work-life balances as other European countries. Considering how most people can see how successful German companies are, it is no surprise that their methods work. Work weeks are 36 hours long, but the employees get paid for 40. For example, at Faber Castell the workers are able to live a fulfilling life and come back to work more productive. And if they get too stressed at work, employees can get a prescription for three weeks at a spa. A country like Germany values the mental health of their employees more than The United States has ever. The war on drugs in The United States is considered to be a losing battle and has been one of the longest fought in the world. The country of Portugal approaches drug policy in a different way than the USA. In 15 years, there has been no person arrested and sent to jail for drug use. As hard as it is to believe the rate of drug abuse has gone down after policy. As well, they increased quality of treatment and heathcare. In the US, we have a very wrong proportion of inmates in prison due to drug-related crime. One of the Portuguese police officers said, “Human dignity is the backbone of our society.” Considering human dignity, Norway has one of the most progressive prison systems one observe. They take the phrase “no cruel and unusual punishment” literally and take away freedom as punishment. The country only has a 21 year max sentence, no death penalty, and healthy rehabilitation ideas at prisons. Even though Tunisia and Iceland are far away from each other on the map, both countries have made much progress when it comes to women’s rights. After the Tunisian Revolution in 2011, the Democratic Government decided that they did not want women’s rights in the constitution. The women fought back and protested. They took to the streets and finally achieved equal rights. With women in mind the first country to elect a female president was Iceland, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. As a country, they made leaps and bounds in gender equality. Also, Iceland investigated and prosecuted bankers that were involved in the Icelandic financial crisis and put them in prison. After Moore invaded these countries he discovered that these concepts weren’t foreign. All of them originated from The United States. The American dream seemed to be alive and well everywhere but America. At the end of the film Moore states, “These were not European ideas, these weren’t new ideas, these were our ideas (America), we didn’t need to invaded all of these countries to steal their ideas they were already ours, we didn’t need to invaded we just needed to go to the American’s lost in found. Maybe that was the answer.”
Introduction: After watching a video on reflective writing, this week I will be reflecting on my Life-choice memoir draft by answering the questions provided above. While writing my memoir I worked primarily with myself. Although working with myself was easier, I would have preferred working with someone else for revisions, proof-reading, and other peer-to-peer evaluations. Before and during the process of writing, I referred back to text messages with my family concerning the event. The rhetorical mode that I used in my writing was narrative and the genre was non-fiction memoir. Although it wasn’t the best approach, I did not give myself the right amount of time to confidently finish my draft. Because I was on a crunch for time, I was able to get thoughts out quicker but was not able to reflect enough and couldn’t figure out a good conclusion. The first half of my memoir draft was written in my room at home. I decided to change settings and write the second half at the Chester County Library, which is one of my favorite and most productive work places. The environment of the Chester County Library works so well for me because of the people surrounding me and the quit environment. I wrote about my chosen topic because it is the most current event that my family is going through. The whole situation is taking a large toll on my family and when it comes to opinions we are all on different pages. Despite this, it was a good choice of topics. While writing this narrative, I felt confident in my choice of topics but it also helped me put myself in other people’s shoes. I saw a more objective view of the situation, rather than my firm opinions on it. Although I don’t have any “if only” moments, I can see some coming as I continue to revise. To revise, I will be primarily working with my boyfriend, who usually proof-reads and revises grammar.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was first published June 26th 1948 in an issue of The New Yorker. This short story is about a functional town that holds an annual tradition known as “The lottery”. The town’s villagers gather in a square where the lottery is conducted, a black wooden box in which contained slips of paper sat in the middle of the square. The head of each household will pick a slip from the black box. The family that receives the marked slip then brings up every member of their family to pick another slip. The story takes a shocking turn when you find out that the family member who draws the slip with the black dot will then be stoned to death by the town’s people, which includes their own family. I will also be answering questions that relate to this short story.
Are there any American traditions that share similarities with the lottery tradition in the village? Please provide a link to an article that illustrates the tradition you choose to discus. Professional sports have become an important part of American culture. From college-level, professional and international sports - all have become a critical part of America today. The National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world. It has become a tradition to many. A recent survey indicated that being identified with a favorite team is more important to people than being identified with their work and social groups, and religion. When hundreds of passionate fans and their rivals mix it can escalate into violence and in some cases it can become fatal. This is similar to the mob mentality in The Lottery. When large groups of people gather, then can lose sense of what is morally right. Some protests that lead to riots are similar. In this article by Complex it list example of fan violence. When have you made an important choice to break away or not break away from a strong cultural tradition you shared with a family, friend, or culture? My mom and father have been separated since before I was born, so my older brother and I would spend our childhood going back and forth between their houses. The hardest part about the separation between the two was the difference between their traditions. My father’s house was much stricter when it came to pretty much everything. My father’s side held a lot more traditions than my mother’s like annual family reunions. As the years went on and I become older family reunions became less about family and more of an obligation because of this I ultimately stopped going, while my brother continued. I was the one to break away from the family reunion that was a traditions.
Hills like white elephants by Ernest Hemingway is a short story that was originally published in the literary magazine Transition in 1927. This short story describes a scene between an unnamed American man and a girl (Jig) sitting at a bar outside of a train station in Spain. As the pair waits for their train the two have an indirect conversation about an operation they should or should not confront. After reading into the couple’s dialogue and their uneasy attitude toward this operation you realize the operation they speak of is an abortion. Ernest Hemingway leaves the readers to interpret the couple’s decision. Giving what is unsaid does the girl in the story keep the baby? Does she stay in her relationship with the man?
Although Ernest Hemingway does not explicitly state the couple’s finally decision there are implications that might help the reader conduct their own ending. In the beginning of the story the girl seems to be very dependent on her significant other. She is yearning for his approval and looking for him to tell her what to do. You can sense in the beginning that she is insecure once being ignored after her elephant statement. “I know. But I if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” As the story continues her insecurity turns to passive aggression. The aggression she holds is what tells me that she keeps the baby. She hoped he would understand that she didn’t want an abortion, but neither one wanted to force each other into it even though she felt pressured. They could have been because she was referred to as a girl the whole story. One can assume she was younger than him. By the underlying tenseness and the dynamic between them I don’t believe they will stay together either. By the end she seemed like she wanted nothing to do with him. “I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” It was obvious that she wasn’t fine. My sophomore year (2010), my childhood best friends and I were inseparable. I rather not use their real names so I’ll call them – Sadie, Laurie, Cam, Pam. This story might sound cliché but this story is true and very dear to my heart. The five of us would do anything and everything together. I must admit we weren’t the most well behaved kids, we defiantly had a reputation. Pam would throw parties at her parent’s house every time they went away, which seemed to be very often. We would steal our parent’s alcohol and even experimented with weed. We were very reckless kids yet most of us had a good head on our shoulders, we knew when enough was enough. But not all of us knew when to stop. Sadie and Laurie started to act out more and more as the months went on. They started getting attention from older boys and hanging around people who introduced them to harder drugs. At first I didn’t see it as a problem, they were still my close friends and I would love them no matter what but it only got worst from there. It wasn’t the same hanging out, I felt uncomfortable and I didn’t want to be pressured into the things they were doing - smoking cigs, hanging around disrespectful boys who wanted nothing more than to get into our pants. But the girls craved the attention, they would do anything for it. People would talk, they would say horrible things about Sadie and Laurie. There was always a rumor floating around about them and at this point I didn’t even know what real. It was sad to watch from the sideline as they both crumbled from the outside in. This was the point that I had to tell myself I need to separate myself from people I knew most my life and it was difficult decision walking away from them but I knew it was best for my well-being. Later on that year Sadie’s mom took her out school because her drug problem and then a couple months later Laurie’s mom her out of school for a similar reason. That year was a learning year for all of us. I do admit I miss the friendship I had with Sadie and Laurie still till this day.
In this podcast What You Don't Know by Lulu Wang, she talks about a time when she had to make a difficult life decision. That decision was whether to go against her family’s cultural beliefs and tell her grandmother (NaiNai) that she was dying of stage four lung cancer or respect their wishes by not telling her. NaiNai's family kept her ignorant of her own expected death. But was that the wrong decision morally or what kept her alive? In Lulu family's cultural it is customary for doctors to give bad news to the family members rather than directly telling the patient. In this case it gives the family the control of whether or not to tell the patient. After hearing the news that NaiNai was dying from stage 4 lung cancer and has three months to live, the family made the decision not to tell her.
Before hearing Wang's full story I instantly disagreed with the Wang family's decision. I felt just like what Lulu had stated to her mother - "I'm pretty sure a lot of other Americans would feel the way that I felt, that somebody's going to die. It's their right to know." Yet the more I listened the more I could understand the decision not to tell. The Chinese cultural believe that mental and emotional health are completely linked to physical health. In the United States the battle is just as hard with medication. Medication will fight a disease, but destroy the body in the process. We let this happen because we focus more on the medication than mental wellbeing. One notices in the podcast that NaiNai is joyful throughout the months where she was said to have been dying. She was given no medicine in three years after the diagnosis and her loved ones believed that it was because they had not told her. I agree with both sides. Someone who is diagnosed with a deadly disease needs to be treated with honesty, but also joy instead of deceit. Sometimes you have to tell someone close a difficult truth that they know yet have been pushing away. My boyfriend of three years has been struggling with ongoing mental health. He's coped with it in healthy ways and unhealthy ways. One night had been far worse than others. I came home to him completely blacked-out drunk, in rare form. Instead of the night I expected, I had to stay by his side all night on a roller-coaster of emotions. The next day he had no recollection of any of any of the terrible things he had said about himself. It was then my duty to tell him the truths he said out loud the night before and that he needed to become more serious about his mental health. That's a night I will never forget. Sometimes unsettling truths are drawn out through bad methods. But ultimately, if someone is there to help without judgment it can be healed.
The late Maya Angelou was a well-known American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. Maya Angelou’s full name is Marguerite Annie Johnson. My name is Margaret is a short story in Angelou’s autobiography - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This post will focus on the racism and inequality that Margaret faced growing up in the twenties. In this short story Margaret overcomes a conflict with her superior, Mrs. Cullinan – a wealthy white women, who Margaret works for as a servant. Mrs. Cullinan, while influenced by her upper-class friends, decides that Margaret is too long of a name and changes it to Mary for her own convenience. Margaret is enraged by this disrespect and decides she no longer wants to work for Mrs. Cullinan. Instead of quitting Margaret tries to find ways to get fired until one day she learns about Mrs. Cullinan’s beloved casserole dish and two green glass cups. To break away from Mrs. Cullinan’s oppression, Margaret drops the casserole dish and two green glass cups on the tile floor. I will share my opinion on Margaret's decision to rebel and my own challenges to either resist or not resist oppression, or refuse to obey an authority figure. By Margaret breaking Mrs. Cullinan’s beloved casserole dish and two green glass cups, Margaret breaks free from Mrs. Cullinan’s oppression. Margaret describes Mrs. Cullinan the night she was first called Mary. “That evening I decided to write a poem on being white, fat, old and without children. It was going to be a tragic ballad.” Since she had pity for Mrs. Cullinan. For example, “I smiled at her. Poor thing. No organs and couldn’t even pronounce my name correctly.” By smashing the favorite dish, Margaret gains power over Mrs. Cullinan in a non-systemic, different way. The power Mrs. Cullinan has is purely systemic. I agree with Margaret because she was able to equalize classism through materialism. I haven’t had many times that I can recall resisting oppression but I have in a way challenged the status quo. I live in an area that you are expected to go to the college straight out of high school. I’ve challenged this by taking four years off of school to mature. During those years I’ve experienced the feeling of being looked down upon for choosing a different life style. In this lifestyle I’ve learned in a different way than I would through a textbook. I believe learning through life experiences does challenge the status quo.
Introduction: The focus of this blog post is to educate the consumers through different writing processes by three well known authors: Maria Popova, Anne Lammot and Ray Bradbury. I co-authored these processes with Siani M. Davis, Dominique Candidi, David Miller and Ashley Coley. The Daily Writing Routines of Great Writers (Maria Popova) Quote 1: " I’m a serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home."-Maya Angelou Quote 2: "I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism."-Haruki Murakami Quote 3: “Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this”(Bradbury 2). Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anne Lamott) Quote 1: "It reminds me that all I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame"(Lamott 4). Quote 2: "writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained"(Lamott 8). Quote 3: “Practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts”(Lamott 5) Zen in the Art of Writing (Ray Bradbury) Quote 1: “if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover YON, even as I flopped around and finally found me”(Bradbury 19). Quote 2: "But along through those years I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface"(Bradbury 17). Quote 3: “The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effordor a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping”(Bradbury 13). Our Processes 1: Listen to music while you write for more clarity. 2: Write an hour and if nothing is coming then take a break for an hour. If your mind allows the words to flow during that hour, then write another hour and so on until it stops. 3. Write in a calm atmosphere. |