Blogging Around

Dana's post about Education


Dana, I really like this blog post. I completely agree with what you're saying about education turning into a "forgotten issue". This video effectively demonstrates the important cause-and-effect changing the face of education can have in the future of our country. I've been focusing on education for our election coverage, and one of the major problems I've noticed is that it's pushed aside too often. Politicians tend to focus more on issues that they can change with direct results, things that help problems in the present. And while I'm not saying other issues aren't important, the value of education tends to be overlooked. Changes in education aren't something that can have results appear a year or two later; they're changes that take time to develop. If we want to be able to continue to grow as a society, we need to have the enrichment necessary for our future generations to reach their full potential. It's a bit of a cliché, but what if the person who has the ability to cure cancer was part of one of the 1.2 million that drops out per year? My cousin's wife started working as a teacher as part of a program of college volunteers set up to work in charter schools. She fell in love with teaching, being able to inspire kids every day, and now works fulltime for a charter school in Nashville. She sees how important education is in these children's lives, how she sees creativity growing every day. Every child should be put in a learning environment that allows them to grow as much as they can. And Dana makes a good point: it really is up to us to stand for education.

Kara's post about Poetry

This is a really interesting post, Kara. I love the line, "Words were not meant to be wasted on those who are unable to see past their surfaces." There's a craft that goes into poetry that's unique in it's own sense; words have meanings further than anyone can see. But there's also an aspect of poetry found in everything we see, especially music. Kara does a good job of really showing the poetry in music, how it utilizes all the aspects of poetry both in lyrics and in the actual music: rhythm, repetition, variation, imagery. And beyond that, our perception of poetry really doesn't have a great divide from our perception of the world. In retrospect, poetry isn't the usage of words in a certain form, but it's the way things connect, it's the way things are ordered, and it's the way things are interpreted.