Respnse # 4

Alan Wood

8/31/11

Education: Response # 4

            When you think of teachers today, you automatically think that they are caring people. This is most often true, because in order for someone to choose to go into that line of work, they would generally have to care about children or care about educating children. But like everything else, it is not always completely true. Everybody always ends up with a mean teacher who they don’t like. These teachers are sometimes very mean and have no place whatsoever teaching young children. But these types of teachers are a very small percentage of the overall number of teachers today who genuinely care about their students.

            Most teachers try and develop personal relationships with their students, because having a relationship with your kids might as well be in the job description. When a teacher decides that what they want to do with their lives is teach, it is because of one of two reasons. They either want to mold the minds of children or because they just love kids and want to work with them. So teachers already begin caring about their students before they even have them.

            Students never really bother to think about things from a teachers perspective, all we see is a mean teacher who punishes us or a push over who is cool. Students will always end up liking the push over type of teacher better than anyone else because we can do what we want and get away with whatever. Students don’t live the other type of teacher, the mean one who punishes us, because it’s the exact opposite, we don’t get we want and don’t get away with whatever. All we can think is “they hate me”, which is completely untrue. Sometimes it takes someone who really does care about you in order to do make the tough decisions in life, like punishing. Not to say that a push over type of teacher doesn’t care, it’s just that they care about you and want you to like them, so they decide to be the cool teacher and not the mean one. But as students we never see that, we never see who really cares about us and who doesn’t. We are never able to see anything from the other person’s perspective.

            Occasionally there are those teachers who are just straight up cruel people and have no place at all teaching kids. I once had a teacher who was so mean; he threw a math text book at me just because I had to stand up from my desk to see the white board because I was too short to see over the kid sitting in front of me. People like that, who unleash their anger on innocent students have no place in that line of work, but yet we have them and there will always be the select few who are like that. This however does not depict all teachers or even the majority of teachers today. Because most teachers today are truly caring people who care about their students.

Works Cited

Noddings, Nell. "Caring In Education." Encyclopedia of Informal Education (2005): n. pag. Web. 30 Aug 2011. <http://www.infed.org/biblio/noddings_caring_in_education.htm>.

Response # 3

Alan Wood

8/29/11

Response # 3

When reading the forward and introduction to Someplace Like America it talked about the plight of Americas homeless. The beginning of the introduction spoke of a thirty-five year old hobo named Kenneth Burr being murdered in 1984 in Santa Barbara, California. Then someone who was unrelated to the murder of Kenneth Burr, posted a note to capitalize on the murder. The note depicted that the homeless are the scum of the Earth and that they have no place in Santa Barbara. These kinds of acts show us what kind of world we live I today, a world that is bound to hate anyone who is not somewhat like ourselves. Isn’t America supposed to be the land of the free and aren’t all men created equal. Evidently not, evidently America is the land of the oppressed and those who think they’re better than everyone else.

People today think that the homeless are bad and are the scum of America. Most homeless people however are people who were just like us that befell some type of financial tragedy. The author speaks of a woman who had fallen from upper class privileges and a frugal white collar mom, who is raising her children on her own, who works two jobs year around and is barely able to survive. He talks of a waitress in her sixties whose tips are so down she will never be able to retire and will probably work till she dies. Or a Latino man who is citizen of the United States, who fears being beaten by the cops who believe that he is undocumented just because of the color of his skin. All of these people are no different than ourselves, everyday hard working people who have just fallen down on their luck. But yet every day we persecute them for being a little different, a little less rich then us, a little less fortunate.

Someplace Like America helped open my eyes to the plight of the poor and the homeless in America. These people live as if they are in a third world country, but they aren’t living in a third world country instead they are living in the richest country in the world. But clearly we are too rich too share with those who are in need. Clearly we think that because we are richer and that other people are poorer that they shouldn’t be around. It is supposed to be that all men are equal to one another, but it’s not that way. There will always be those people who feel like they are better or those who feel the need to oppress those they don’t like or don’t approve of. These people are oppressing people who are just like themselves. People who are everyday working class people. People come to America because they believe it to be a free land full of accepting people, which is the way it should be. But books such as Someplace Like America may just help open people’s eyes to make America a better place.

Response # 2

Alan Wood

Mr. Benton

ENG 102

8/24/11

Government Aid: Response # 2

            Government assistance was a great idea to help Americans in need of money. But like most things today, it is taken for granted quite often by a majority of those who use government aid. Most people can’t even tell you if they are on any type of government aid because they don’t even know they are on it or they don’t know what constitutes as government aid. Despite the few though that try and cheat and abuse the system, the majority do not. For those people government assistance is the deciding factor between life and death.

            Government aid first started in the late 1800's. The U.S. government was very important in the development of business in America. The government worked with the concept of Laissez Faire, this concept meant that the government wouldn't control business. During the Civil War, the government still followed this approach Laissez Faire but they were starting to be more involved in business. The U.S. government in the post-Civil War period both aided business as well as attempted to regulate it (Rolfe).

When you think of government aid today you generally think of welfare. The United States did not have an organized welfare system until the Great Depression, when emergency relief plans were introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even then, Roosevelt's New Deal focused mainly on a program of providing work and stimulating the economy through public spending, rather than on cash payment (Schram).

The purpose of welfare was to assist people in need. The ultimate goal of welfare is to lift welfare recipients out of poverty and make them able to take care of themselves without any help from the government.  Welfare is a form of social protection, because it deals with overcoming adverse situations that affect people who are needy. Although social protection was made to assist the working classes and to address the poverty problems in America, it has ended up involving a much larger variety of issues surrounding poverty.

A recent study shows the majority of Welfare recipients are white and live in suburbs or rural areas. The findings are contrary to the popular belief that most welfare recipients are unemployed, inner-city minorities whose families have gotten public assistance for generations. Because TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, gave individual states flexibility in making time-limited welfare policies, the new reforms vary from state to state. Under TANF, people were required to actively seek employment while receiving aid and they could only receive aid for a limited amount of time. However, states can choose the amount of resources they will devote to the program. Some people believe this is how we should reform every form of government aid such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Recent studies have found a relationship between the racial makeup of a state’s welfare population and whether the state has strict welfare policies. Essentially, as the percentage of whites and other ethnicities in the welfare population rises, the probability that the state will adopt full-family sanctions increases from 54 to 97 percent; the probability that the state will adopt a family cap increases from 5 percent to 96 percent; and the probability that the state will adopt a shorter time limit than five years increases from 10 to 88 percent (Schram).

Many people believe that government assistance is a bad thing. Those people think that it is just another excuse for the unemployed and the lazy to not work. Though that is partially true because some people do attempt to abuse the system, a majority of people who are on welfare and other government aid programs do not choose to be on them. It is usually just due to a series of unfortunate events and the majority of government aid recipients try to get off of the government aid programs. It has become a common stereotype today that those who are on welfare and other forms of government aid, that they are lazy bums who do not want to work. This stereotype however is not true, more often than not; recipients of government aid are very hard working.

Welfare is provided directly by the government. Welfare is funded by governments out of general revenue, generally through redistributive taxation, or in other words, our taxes pay for their welfare (Schram). Because of this it usually turns people away from the idea of welfare because people don’t want to pay for someone, especially when half the population believes that welfare recipients are lazy. Some opponents of welfare argue that welfare affects work incentives as well as the taxes given to welfare recipients. They also think that their incentives to work decrease because for every dollar the recipient earns, the monthly amount of welfare given is decreased by an equivalent amount (Schram).

Half of the people getting government aid don't think they've ever been a part of any type of government aid. Most people who receive some type of government assistance can’t even tell you what kind of assistance they are receiving, if they even know that they are receiving it. Half of the population couldn’t even tell you what the different forms of government aid are. But forty percent of Medicare recipients have no idea their health insurance is funded by the state. Given the fact that one in six Americans use anti-poverty programs alone, there are a lot of people who don’t even know how much the government helps them out (Arnowitz).

Government assistance is a great idea to help American citizens in need of government assistance. Throughout history government aid programs have always been taken for granted. Half of the time government aid goes to waste on people who do not even know that they are on it. Some people believe that because of these reasons government aid is a bad thing, and that it is just raising our population to be lazy. On the contrary, it is raising our population to be hard working and self-sufficient. Because no one really wants to be on government aid, it is not the kind of thing that people brag about. But no one sees the truth in this, all that people see is what they want to see, which is just something else that they can put the blame on. Once you can work past the overlapping lies surrounding government aid programs, you will see that it is a good thing.

Works Cited

Arnowitz, Nona. "Half of Americans Getting Government Aid Swear               They've Never Used It." 09-12-2011. Web. 23 Aug 2011.    <http://www.good.is/post/half-of-americans-getting-government-aid- swear-they-ve-never-used-government-programs/>.

Rolfe, Andrew. "Homework Help: Social Studies: U.S. History:    Governmental Aid to Businesses in the Late 1800's." 22-8-2011. Web. 23  Aug 2011. <http://www.good.is/post/half-of-americans-getting-government-aid-swear-they-ve-never-used-government-programs/>.

Schram, Sanford. Contextualizing Racial Disparities in American Welfare Reform: Toward a New Poverty Research. (2005). 253-268. Print.

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