Adora Speaking

Adora says that, most of the time, adults do not listen to kids. They think their own ideas are better, or the children's ideas are too childish. Since they are older, they think they have more wisdom, which makes them think they are better. And, I, think her argument is true except when she says that only people that do bad things are adults, and she never talked about the good things adults did. But it is true that most of the time, adults don't take us seriously, or just don't listen to us. You can't even argue with them; they think their ideas are so much better and they they always say the truth; they are totally closed to argument. Adora is the perfect example of why adults should listen to kids. She is confident, what she says is true, and no adult can say that she is childish. Adults should listen to her and think about what they do. And, finally, change how they act towards kids!

Global Mall

How did it feel to have more or less money than other people in the class?
It kind of annoyed me because it is unfair. They can have a better health than me just because they had more luck.
How did it feel to see what you could and could not afford at the Global Mall?
Same thing as above, I felt unlucky because some people could afford it.

How many of you could not afford education? What would your lives be like if you could not go to school?
I was in the $1000 group so I could afford education, but it is in a bad school so my life could be ruined.

How would it feel to have to choose between food and health care?
It would be awful because either I die of malnutrition or I die of any small disease. Even if it might be better to choose health care. By choosing a good health care, if you don’t have enough food they could give you some so you don’t die.

How many of you have ever been very sick or gone to a hospital or had friends and family who have? What would your life be like now if you had been unable to get medical care?
I already have been very sick when I was a baby and if there wasn’t any hospital around, I might not have been living today. If there hadn’t been a hospital around when I had small diseases they might have turned into big diseases and I might have died again.

What were the impacts caused by people with fewer Global Mall Dollars, and what were the impacts caused by people with more Global Mall Dollars?
They hardly did any environmental impacts, but I don’t think they can survive till the end of the month. They don’t have a choice and since they are poor they cannot use any non environmental-friendly products.

Discuss the fact that roughly one-fifth of all people worldwide survive on
less than $1 (U.S.) a day – how does this limit their choices, and what are the environmental, social, and global security implications of this?
I think it is impossible to survive with 1 dollar a day because the people that gained 200 dollars a month had no choice and could hardly survive. Imagine if you only won 30 dollars in a month. You can’t afford for health and food. You can only buy things that have no cost. How can a human survive with no food and no health?

When you were choosing what to buy, did you think about the environmental impact? For those of you in the lowest income range, did you have a choice about the environmental impact you produced? If not, how did it feel to
not have a choice?
I was in the $1000 group and I’ll be honest… I hardly thought about the environmental impact. I mostly thought about what way I could survive best which is already hard. To me the most important is how I can survive, not the environment. The $200 group didn’t have a choice for anything and it must have felt awful. They didn’t hurt the environment, but they hurt themselves a lot.

Amy Goodman

In Citizenship class, we saw a woman named Eve Ensler being interviewed on DemocracyNow. She was talking about how girls in the world were being treated badly even in our days.
Eve Ensler is a global citizen because she is going all around the world to see the problem. She went in Asia, in Africa, in America, and in Western Europe. She is trying to show all around the world how badly girls are treated and she tries to help them.
Girls can end up in bad situations because a girl might not want to do something a man asks, but if it is to not make him feel angry or something like that, she might do it anyway.
The connection with the Story of Stuff is the production part. It shows how poor the people in the production part in the factories are and they make things for us. It is an example of externalizing the costs. We are not paying for what we buy since we hardly pay the people that are making it.

Avatar Questions

1) The humans are destroying the Navi to get the small mineral that can be sold thousands. They don't care about if they have to destroy the whole civilization to get it. It is like before with the Americas. The conquistadors came in and killed all the natives for the land and the good things they could find on it.
2) As I said in question one, the similar conflict is the conquest of America, where the Europeans came in and destroyed every other civilization.
3) Something that is happening today is the war in Iraq. The Americans are fighting against the local people to gain control over Iraq and gain the oil that is in the country.

The Navi have extreme respect for nature. They have to sing a ritual before killing and don't hurt any plants. They are even linked to nature by their hair. They can connect with it. Nowadays, we totally don't respect nature and destroy it, by cutting rain forests, polluting rivers, Global Warming, and many more nature unfriendly things. If we adapted even a little bit of the attitude of the Navi, like respecting it for example, the Earth wouldn't be warming, and it would be a more pleasant place to live in.

What happened in Haiti?

Haiti is located at the south of the USA, in the Caribbean sea. It is on a island shared with the Dominican Republic. Haiti speaks French because it was colonized by the French at the time of the colonization of America. The people in Haiti fought to win their freedom. Lately, there was a huge earthquake where at least 50,000 people died; Taiwan went there to help. Taiwan and Haiti are both sovereign nations, Taiwan being independent from China; Haiti being independent from the US.

Citizenship Exam

A citizen is someone that is legally a part a a community. To be a citizen of a country, you have to be native or naturalized, meaning you have to be native or naturalized, meaning you have to be born in that country or you take a test and reject your old country. You can be a citizen of anything: your house, school, neighborhood, state, country and even the world. Citizens are totally different from subjects. A subject is a consumer, a follower and a victim, while citizens are all the opposite. He is a producer, a leader, and he has control. In a democracy, we elect the president, which means, we are the ones to chose who is going to rule. We also have the right to protest; we are the ones in control. Good citizenry should be practiced in every single community. A good citizen should ask himself “What can I do for my community to create more wealth, knowledge, and justice?” — suggested by Dr. Mike Hartoonian of the University of Minnesota.

To be a good citizen of any small and personal community, you have to do your duties. This is one of the main responsibilities citizens have; do what they have to do. We have duties everywhere. For example, at school, we have to come in time and do our homework. At home, we have to do the chores, go to bad at a reasonable time, and more.
The hardest is to be a good citizen at school. One of the reasons is that we have a lot of duties but the most important reason is that it is easy to discriminate against others.. At school and even in the neighborhood, we easily form cliques, groups of people who share interest and which are really hard to be part of, and enemies or people we don’t like. After that is done, you will close your social boundaries and will start discriminating against others.
Being a citizen of a small community is very hard, because you have few responsibilities and everyone knows you. If you have few duties, it is very easy to tell if you didn’t do one and you easily get a bad reputation.

Being a good citizen of a country is also very hard because you easily start hating a group of people. Our parents, our friends, and the media make us have prejudices by making stereotypes. Then we create a bias or a hidden bias (a bias even we don’t know about), which will give us a discriminatory behavior.
A good way to learn hidden bias is to go to Project Implicit, a website made by Harvard students. Once you discover the bias, either you will reinforce it because of people telling what you think is right, or you will eliminate it with your force of will. If the prejudice becomes too big, then there will be huge acts of discrimination that may reach killing the other race which a genocide like the Holocaust. If you don’t eliminate hidden biases this is what will happen.
At some point, a nation is the same as a small community, to be a good citizen, you have to fulfill your duties and responsibilities. It is easier for students since we don’t have that many, but adults have a lot of complicated ones. Those might include voting, paying taxes, etc...

Next goes being a good citizen of the WORLD. One of our main responsibilities as citizens of the world is to try to stop Global Warming.
Global Warming or GW is, obviously, the warming of the Earth. One of the ways teachers teach us is by using the three Rs, which are: reduce, reuse, recycle.
In my opinion, Global Warming is the most important thing that needs the help of every single citizen all around the world. If we don’t stop it, the human race will eventually be extinguished.

By doing all of the above, you will be a perfect citizen and a great help for all the communities you are part of.
You will also be a boundary crosses like Martin Luther King, a black man who lived in America who crossed the boundary of discrimination, or Gandhi, the Indian man who crossed the boundary of bloody wars. You will have crossed the boundary of perfection.

Resolve

The story I chose is Resolve. It talks about life in Haiti for someone who is dying of tuberculosis and has nothing left: no friends, no family, no house, and nothing to drink. It talks about how people living in the streets have to do small jobs to even have a small thing to eat.
To me this story is important because it shows how awful life in Haiti is. People are dying on the streets without any help. Even before the earthquake, Haiti needed help and now it’s become worse.
Now the same thing is happening, but the only difference is that it became a hundred times bigger. There are piles of people dead on the ground, they are even blocking the roads. Haiti needs way more help than it needed before.
If we don’t do anything, and without a government for themselves, the people in Haiti will all die or live a life full of misery.
It has to do with Global citizenship because Haiti needs the help of any country that can help. They need houses to be rebuilt, they need a lot of medication, and a lot more help.