Blog 5- Steroids= Cheating

When I first saw this video I was a little shocked because I thought steroids caused a lot of problems because that is what I heard from other people. When the old man who had been using them for 40 years started talking about how he was in such great shape because he used them caught me off guard. The video fails to address how seeing success stories like the old man influences young boys who want to be in great shape and be muscular. The weak argument in the video was the anabolic steroids show no great side effect to healthy adult men, but they never mentioned the effects on healthy women. I think the video does a good job at suggesting that the steroids could be used responsibly, but then again any drug could be used responsibly.
From the UIL Anabolic Steroid Testing Program site I was surprised to see that within a year the number of positives went from two to seven, and that was just Texas alone. I know high school students take steroids because some are too good to just have talent, but I thought there would be one superstar athlete in a state, if that. I personally think that all high school students should be tested for steroids no matter the sport or how great they are. If they are amazing off of talent only they should not have to be accused of taking steroids, and if they were taking steroids then they should not be allowed to compete. I think if you are taking any type of steroids in high school or professionally then you should not be able to compete because I think that is cheating. You are taking a substance to get better while the person you compete is training harder than you and you become better than them is unfair.
I know America’s culture pushes people to work harder than ever and exceed being the best, but taking steroids defeats the purpose of being the best. That makes you a fraud in my eyes: Being the best thanks to a substance.

GU Drinking

Georgetown University enforced more rules to try to stop excess drinking on the campus and in housing owned by the campus. Once news of the new rules spread around campus students became outraged and began to protest (qtd. in Kinzie). Although I'm not big on under aged drinking or getting drunk every weekend, I don't think that Georgetown University should suddenly enforce strict drinking rules and expect students to follow them. Dan Castrigano, a student at GU says "Eighteen-, 19-, 20-year-olds are going to drink. You just have to be smart about it." which is completely true to me (qtd. in Kinzie). Since students between the ages of 18 and 20 have been drinking on the campus before the strict rules, they will continue to drink afterwards, but they will just be more secretive about it. I think the university should continue to have events on campus that are not focused on drinking, but at the same time accept the fact that excessive drinking will happen on or off the campus and try to set rules that ease up to the strict rules enforced now. One student says that the university “can't just suddenly clomp down, put all these rules in after letting people do whatever they want for so long" (Brown qtd. in Kinzie) which is understandable and many students would agree with her.

Georgetown University created new rules to limit drinking on the campus and I think that was a very smart idea of them to do (qtd. in Kinzie). I do not like under aged students to be allowed to drink on a campus when it is illegal and get away with it. Students are still allowed to host parties on campus as long as there are two 21-year-old people registering for it and know that there is only one keg allowed per party (qtd. in Kinzie).

Portfolio 2 Thesis

There should only be designated smoking areas 20 feet from buildings and no smoking while walking on the George Mason University campus.

Paraphrasing

James D. Lester thinks students use too many quotations in a paper instead of paraphrasing. He says final papers usually turn out to be just quotes instead of their own ideas. Lester wants students to try to paraphrase more than use direct quotes when they take notes.

Blog 4- Toys

The first article's argument is about children's toys becoming less life-like as the years go by. They used examples of the GI Joe toy having more ripped abs, thighs, and biceps from 1982 to 1998 to show that unrealistic body image portrayed to children. The Luke Skywalker action figure changed from an average man to a man with unusually broad chest and shoulders. The writers’ tone of the article shows that they disapprove of how the toys are portrayed in society. The style and language of the article affectively support the arguments because they give the measurements of action figures from two different years to compare how the action figures grew in specific areas. The audience for this article would be teenagers and up because there is so much detail in it, and children would not understand it all or pay attention to it.

The second article’s argument is about how people thinking that action figures make kids want to look exactly like them are not true. The writer says that when she was a kid she liked looking at her brother’s toys and seeing that they were mutants instead of looking like a real person. The style and language of the article ineffectively supports her argument because it is just her opinion and does not have specific numbers like the first article. The audience for this article is all ages because it doesn’t have big words in it for children to get confused with.

When I was younger I played with Barbie dolls all the time, but I never saw them as what the perfect girl should look like. I just saw them as dolls to play with and keep me entertained for a while. My parents did not have a problem with me playing with them and did not mind which ones I played with. My favorite doll was the teenage Barbie doll; I think her name was Skipper. She had a smaller chest then Barbie and longer hair, but I think she was my favorite because she had pierced ears. I was never really into GI Joes or boy toys that were violent, but I also was not into Barbie dolls because they were really feminine. I just liked Barbie dolls because I liked to change her outfits and change her hair styles.

Blog 3- Eating Disorders

Pro-ana websites and blogs should be shut down because it lets young girls who are just surfing the Internet read about these older girls and women who are happy being as thin as supermodels. The women who are anorexic usually have low self-esteem or a false sense of beauty, because they may be underweight, but they still see themselves as fat. Wanting to be as thin as supermodels is an unrealistic goal because not every girl was meant to be that small. Some women are angry with themselves because they feel as if they will never be the weight they aim for and decide to punish their bodies and then write about it on these sites. When young, impressionable girls read their stories, they might look at their self in a mirror and think they, too, are not as small as they would like to be. If a young girl reads the blog of Chaos they would see she is an overachiever and skip over the fact that she has an illness. With the school, job, and musical talent, they could think in order to achieve as much as Chaos, they need to be thin like her.


Pro-ana websites and blogs should not be shut down because it is an outlet for girls with eating disorders to come together and support one another. Some girls develop eating disorders because they feel out in school and think no one likes them because they are not thin enough. They look at supermodels that are well liked and decide in order to be well liked; they have to be thin, too. Some women on the sites or blogs give advice on how they are trying to get better and develop healthier lives, and that could help someone who wants to become healthy also. In Mim Udovitch's, "A Secret Society of the Starving," one of the girls she spoke with told a doctor: “Show me a coping mechanism that works and I’ll trade my eating disorder for it in a minute.” A girl who has found a way to get better could upload it to a site or blog and others could follow in her footsteps.


Pro-ana websites and blogs should not be shut down, but at the same time should be carefully posted with many blocks that make it hard for under-aged surfers to get to them. While the sites and blogs form an outlet for anorexic girls to talk to one another, it could also influence a young girl to pick up those habits and become ill. If the sites and blogs remain on the internet, ads for clinics that help girls with eating disorders should remain on a side at all times. That way, if a girl is fed up with her life revolving around her anorexia, she has a solution for the illness.

Principal

Oversimplification

If all the principals in elementary schools in the district get rid of recess, the children will do better on the state tests.