I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate||Spoken Word

Sam sent me links to some spoken word poetry by Suli Breaks and they are really worth having a look at.

In the first poem, “I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate” Suli talks about how he feels we have been made to think about how education and getting university degrees can give us opportunities to have a better chance in making our dream careers a reality. It also touches on how as individuals we are judged and tested by how well we perform on exams, but not all people perform well in exams so why are they made out to feel like they’re dumb? The inconsistencies of the education system are really peeled open to reveal a deep problem that needs to be addressed and how society’s needs have changed to make this even more apparent.

Suli asks why are we misled into thinking that education is the only way forward for successful means in our work and career lives? He believes we need to open our minds and educate ourselves that exam results aren’t the barometer of success and that we can’t let them decide our fate. We are in charge of our own destinies!

 

 

Why Put a Bumper Sticker on a Ferrari?

Here’s an interesting piece of writing from Lisa Khoury on tattoos.

I get it. It’s the 21st century. You’re cool, you’re rebellious, you’re cutting edge, you have a point to prove, and you’re a woman. Awesome.

Ladies, I know you’re at least at the legal age of making your own decisions, but before you decide to get a tattoo, allow me to let you in on a little secret. A secret you may have not fully realized yet thus far in your life. What you must understand is, as women, we are – naturally – beautiful creatures.

Seriously, though. Your body literally has the ability to turn heads. Guys drool over us. We hold some serious power in our hands, because – as corny as this sounds – we hold the world’s beauty.

But something girls seem to forget nowadays, or maybe have not been taught, is that women hold the world’s class and elegance in their hands, as well. So what’s more attractive than a girl with a nice body? I’ll tell you what: a girl with class. Looks may not last, but class does. And so do tattoos.

Read the rest here.

Welcome to Year 13 English!

School starts this week and we will soon be looking at our writing task. The task involves writing a column. I will be posting examples of interesting writing to help you understand what will be involved.

Why do so many keep up with the vacuous Kardashians?

The Kardashians, I hate that I know who they are and that I follow the latest ‘news’ about them. Kim is divorcing – why do we even care? Emma McDonald ponders why this is.

Kim Kardashian and her clan (or should that be klan?) only came on my radar during the most recent school holidays when I discovered my teenagers glued to the television.

Frustrated by their inertia, I enquired as to what was keeping them indoors. Keeping Up With The Kardashians, I was told (as if I was a complete moron).

Up until that moment in my life, I thought Kardashians were fictional aliens on Star Trek. Now I know they are in fact a family of non-fictional nobodies from Los Angeles called Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, Kendall, Kylie and Kris who have their own reality television show.

Since my recent epiphany, I have come to realise that this family is strangely ubiquitous. In addition to the television show, I now regularly notice Kardashians on multiple magazine covers near the supermarket checkout and this week, pack-leader, Kim and one of her K-named sisters are in Australia to spruik their “fashion” label and attend, among other things, the spring racing carnival in Melbourne. One has to ask oneself, why do these women command so much of the world’s media attention and why on earth are they famous?

Read the rest here.

Time for fusty old Bard to exit stage

Here’s a column from Rosemary McLeod on the removal of the Shakespeare paper at Level 3. She believes that the ordinary people who used to flock to theatres to see Shakespeare’s plays can now suck lollies at home while watching Shortland Street.

I won’t be wailing about the loss of Shakespeare from the school curriculum. I wouldn’t be that precious.

Controversy has flared again with news that a level 3 English test expecting pupils to respond critically to a Shakespearean drama could be terminated next year. The test is already optional, pupils have been choosing easier options anyway, and I don’t blame them.

Fashion in everything changes: yesterday’s hot novelist is already yesterday’s news. I doubt anyone much reads Dickens, the Bronte sisters, or George Eliot, once compulsory reading, any more, and Jane Austen probably only gets read because they keep making cheesy costume dramas out of her wry novels.

I took a Shakespeare course at university years ago, and I’ve done my share of dissecting old faves such as Hamlet and King Lear. It was fun at the time, but to this day I couldn’t really tell you what Hamlet is about, or why it remains up there in the canon of high literary taste. There are some terrific speeches, but there are always less-than-terrific puns and word games in Shakespeare that delighted live audiences when theatre-going was the main entertainment going, but bore the pants off you today.

Read the rest here.

 

Chicken toenails, anyone?

David Sedaris would eat Chinese food – but only as an alternative to starving. So a visit to China was always going to be tricky…

David Sedaris on China and Chinese food, an article from The Guardian.

“I have to go to China.” I told people this in the way I might say, “I need to insulate my crawl space” or, “I’ve got to get these moles looked at.” That’s the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off was the food. I’ll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I’ve never looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me.

 

I was in my early 20s when a Chinese restaurant opened in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was in a new building, designed to look vaguely templish, and my mother couldn’t get enough of it. “What do you say we go oriental!”

 

I think she liked that the food was beyond her range. Anyone could imitate the twice-baked potatoes at the Peddler, or turn out a veal parmesan like the Villa Capri’s, but there was no way a non-Chinese person could make moo shu pork, regardless of his or her training. “And the egg rolls,” she’d say. “Can you imagine!”

 

The restaurant didn’t have a liquor licence, but they allowed you to brown bag. Thus we’d arrive with our jug of hearty burgundy. I always got my mother to order for me, but when the kung pao chicken was brought to the table, I never perked up the way I did at the steak house or the Villa Capri. And it wasn’t just Raleigh’s Chinese food. I was equally uninterested in Chicago and, later, New York, cities with actual China Towns.

 

Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I’d had in the US. “It’s more real,” they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.

Read the rest here.

 

Ugly backlash to kids’ beauty pageant

More on kid’s beauty pageants – it looks like they are coming here.

American-style child beauty pageants featuring young girls in heavy make-up, glitzy gowns and big hair styles are coming to New Zealand.

An organisation called Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants, based in Austin, Texas, confirmed that it was planning to hold pageants in several New Zealand cities for young Kiwi girls.

The pageants are renowned for young girls being spray-tanned and made to look much older than their years in a bid to win huge cash prizes.

Read more on Stuff.

Miss Ultimate Sexy Baby

As part of our work on column writing we looked at issues to do with the sexualisation of young girls through such things as child beauty pageants and inappropriate clothing. Many of you were horrified by the antics of beauty pageant mothers on shows such as “Toddlers & Tiaras”.

Australian and New Zealand psychiatrists have backed calls for child beauty pageants to be banned, saying they encourage the sexualisation of children and can cause developmental harm.  The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists says American-style pageants, promote an adult’s perception of “beauty”.

Jaimee wrote her column on the issue. Here’s her opening:

Makeup, high heels and spray tans; these have become necessities in many women’s lives. But they’re adults, not children. Why would a parent let their pre-school daughter be primped, crimped and styled until they look like the toddler equivalent of a glamour model? Why should children be subjected to bright lights and camera flashes before they’ve even been to school? Five-year-old Jayleigh has already entered 100 pageants in the last four years alone.  It’s becoming more frequent for parents to enter their children into beauty contests and show them off and parade them to a panel of judges, but why?

Jaimee wrote really well on the subject and I think she will enjoy Tom Hanks’s parody of Toddlers & Tiaras. Enjoy the“Miss Ultimate Sexy Baby” contest.

You’ve got males

Never a fan of too much testosterone, Paul Chai wonders if it’s time to man up and allow his two boys to be boys.

 

I won at eating yoghurt, didn’t I, Dad?” asked my four-year-old boy the other morning at breakfast. This was a big claim from a kid who takes 45 minutes to eat a sandwich, and was even more impressive considering he was the only person who was eating yoghurt. But right now winning is everything to him; he wants to win at being pushed on the swing and he wants to be number one in dairy consumption.

 

He has also started grunting at inanimate objects when they will not do his bidding, he is at least twice as loud as he was last year, and he can craft a gun out of Blu-Tack. I put all this down to testosterone, which I have made a convenient fall guy for his behaviour for some time.

 

My early years were spent being raised by a single mum and my maternal grandmother. Later, Mum went through a feminist phase where the various pitfalls of male behaviour were outlined to me early and often, boot-camp style: think The Biggest Loser if they were trying to create metrosexuals instead of skinny people.

 

The result was a keen eye for male stupidity – “Such a boy thing to do” was an insult in our house – and I came to view it not so much as a Y chromosome, but a “Why?” chromosome: Why scream at the TV remote? Why light your farts? Testosterone, I thought, was overrated.

 

When it came to having kids, there was little question in my mind that I would have girls – so nature’s hilarious prank of delivering me two boys was a shock.

Read the rest here.

 

Parents Fight To Create Posthumous Grandchild

With all the discussions we have had about issues to do with IVF and surrogacy some of you may find the following article interesting.

Last fall, 27-year-old Ohad Ben-Yaakov was injured in an accident at his part-time job, and he died after two weeks in a coma. Ben-Yaakov wasn’t married, nor was he in a relationship. No woman was pregnant with his child. Nevertheless, his devastated parents believe it’s not too late for them to become the grandparents of his offspring. And because they live in Israel, the world capital of in-vitro fertilization and a country that regularly pushes the envelope on reproductive technologies, they might get their wish.

 

When Mali and Dudi Ben-Yaakov learned their son was brain dead, they had his sperm extracted. Now they’re awaiting the decision of Israel’s attorney general on whether they’ll be permitted to find a woman to bear their grandchild. “If we were entitled to donate the organs of our son why are we not entitled to make use of his sperm in order to bring offspring to the world?” they asked in Haaretz.

 

If their petition succeeds, it will be the latest legal and cultural innovation in a country that has already embraced the idea of posthumous parenthood and come closer than any other to acknowledging a right to grandparenthood. It’s not surprising that Israel, a society that is at once rooted in ancient faith and deeply invested in cutting-edge technology, has pioneered futuristic forms of procreation. The biblical emphasis on fruitfulness, when compounded by the legacy of the Holocaust and the demographic issues shaping the Middle East, have made Israeli society and public policy exceptionally pro-natalist. The country is aggressive in pushing the boundaries of reproductive technology. It has the world’s highest IVF rate: According to a 2006 paper prepared for the Knesset, 1,800 treatment cycles are performed each year per million people, compared to 240 in the United States. Its specialists are among the best on earth, and health insurance there covers unlimited IVF attempts, up to the birth of two live children. Israel was the first country in the world to legalize surrogate-mother agreements.

Read the rest at Jezebel.