This past week I had some free time and enjoyed watching TV. I have been paying more attention to the new commercials and publicity displayed in the media.
As students, learning is not only done in the classroom through courses by professors, but also in extracurricular activities. A conference, for instance, might give students new insights, too. In a typical class, achieving the best academic performance is the largest goal for every student, accomplished by completing assignments, class participation, discussion and exams.
The political climate we find ourselves in today is radically binary; for this, we must give thanks to the luminary influence of this presidential election. There seems to be much class, racial and ideological resentment, all of which are rising to the surface of the American conscience. Sadly, all it took for such contempt to become public and commonplace was an election. The vitriol with which both sides of the aisle — both sides — hate the other candidate, party and platform simply boggles my mind.
If you are like most students heading back to school this Fall, you have a lot going on. For many people, that includes studying for classes, extracurricular activities, hanging out with friends and Fall football games. But as Fall starts to wind down, you will start looking forward to visiting friends and family back home for the holidays. The problem with traveling is that it can be quite expensive. But, there are ways to save on your travel expenses, and your credit card (or future credit card) is a great place to start.
Animal rights advocacy can be for everyone.
Hey, Gators!
Nephew, I don’t want you to know a world made up in shades of one color. Blue like sadness, like masculinity, like rigid gender norms and small minds. Really, I do not want you to grow up to be an a------.
How many times have we been told, “You get out what you put in”? This applies to so many aspects of life, from friendships and romantic relationships to academics and physical fitness. The validity of this statement is widely accepted; it is honestly difficult to dispute. It’s logical, and it continues to prove itself right, time after time.
Since I was 13 or so, I’ve done my best to be as involved as I could with music wherever I am. It started when my two friends and I were contacted via Myspace by a local guitarist’s girlfriend to see if we’d want to come see him play. We became good friends after that, and my friends and I sold his CDs at his gigs at the Daytona Beach Bandshell all summer. Through that, we met a lot of musicians and bands. We took every chance we got to see them play at the Bandshell, at the mall or any of the other venues my hometown had to offer to minors when its music scene was still thriving for the younger crowd. I lost connections with most of the musicians I met because I was so young when I started to get involved. But now that I’m a more appropriate age, I’m pretty immersed in the local music scenes of both Gainesville and the Daytona area, and I’ve never been happier.
On Wednesday morning, the world lost a great man; a man bigger than politics, whose name alone is synonymous with the state of Israel.
Considering how many people in our society experience college, I find it interesting just how few novels are written with collegiate settings. I recently finished the book “Loner” by Teddy Wayne, which offers quite a frightening perspective on certain people and places around us. This novel is not a cute 200-page story that takes place at an elite university, but is instead a disturbing portrait of a notable chunk of our culture. What makes this book successful is its dynamic main character, a Harvard University freshman named David Federman. To call Federman a first-class narcissist, entitled braggart, unreliable narrator and know-it-all would be putting it lightly.
As someone who was raised by immigrant parents and has traveled abroad multiple times in her life, I am acutely aware of the average American’s geographic and cultural ignorance. This shouldn’t be a surprise to most people; after all, it is a subject of self-deprecating humor on late-night talk shows. We seem to be aware that the Average Joe can’t differentiate Iraq from Iran and thinks all Asian food comes from the same place. We laugh at him and take comfort in the fact that we know our Pad Thai isn’t Chinese, thank you very much. But are we really much better?
It seems like each time I turn on the news, incidences of gun violence flood the screen. They happen with such frequency that they no longer feel unusual. Sometimes they are not even considered nationally newsworthy. Yet one this week caught my attention.
Often, I like to ask people: How would the history of humanity have been different if discrimination never exited?
I was a baby for the first 20 years of my life — or at least it felt that way. There was always something I wasn’t old enough to do: drive, buy cigarettes, join the Army, gamble, drink or enter a bar. You see, I had always wanted to be treated like an adult, ever since I consciously understood there were legal differences based on age.
The best thing about studying abroad in China was the food. I ate everything my stomach could fit — and then some. I ate a different kind of ice cream almost every day, and each one cost less than a dollar. Trying street food became a hobby. While I often went to different cafes to study at night, one thing they all had in common was their low prices. I could knock back three cappuccinos topped with cute foam art for the price of a single grande pumpkin spice latte.
The internet has done weird things for comedy. Good things, but certainly weird things. Video-sharing websites like YouTube, Newgrounds and Vine have paved the way for all sorts of art: mediums like sketches, animations and music. The internet digitized the formerly newspaper-dominated comic strip with works like “Penny Arcade” and “xkcd.” And beyond this, the eldritch phenomenon that is memes has introduced audiences to meta-humor and explored the darker side of the human psyche. Memes are spooky stuff.
Whether it was due to a class discussion on the “student as customer” debate or a fellow columnist’s musings on Rate My Professors or simply my own preoccupation with funding graduate school, my mind keeps coming back to the ways in which higher education and the market economy intersect. Over the past few years, higher education has been increasingly characterized as a business transaction in which the student is the customer “purchasing” a degree and entrance into the job market. It seems innocuous enough, treating college students as valued customers, but despite the increased bargaining power this conceptual shift gives us, it undeniably warps the way we approach our education.
Last week, in the middle of my creative writing class, my teacher stepped out to use the bathroom during our 10-minute break. This is usually a good time to crack light jokes with your neighbor or try and make small talk. Instead, every person except me and another guy was on his or her phone. The only reason I wasn’t looking down at mine was because it was plugged into the wall, charging. There was total silence in the room; nobody even glanced up or attempted to connect with another human being. And then our teacher walked back in and we resumed class. Is this just a minute instance of a current phenomenon I plan on stretching out of proportion? Possibly.
Solutions by The State News
