Junior Theme- Part 1: The Search

    I don't know if any other high schools do this, but NTHS has this thing called the "junior theme" which is, essentially, a big research paper that every single junior in the entire school has to write.

    Now, there are different ways to go about doing said paper. Some teachers assign specific topics to children, some just have set boundaries, and some just make it a free for all. My teachers, for whose class I am writing this blog, decide to come up with their own criteria as well. 

   They said that we had to pick a current issue, relate it to a historical event, and come up with a proposal in the form of a "why" question. We also have to read an entire book and interview an expert in the area of our reproach.

   It's a lot, and so this week, before our spring break, my entire class is in the library researching potential topics, which will be due Wednesday. 

   I was checking out some online databases that the librarians provided and I found a couple of cool topics. I looked at the page on minimum wage, but I wasn’t able to come up with a "why" question for that. I also checked out the page on marijuana, which was cool, but again, it was hard to come up with a "why” question since the facts were already so laid out for me. 

    I then clicked onto two pages about mental disorders/illness, which intrigued me, for personal reasons. I also found a page about the Obama Administration and I looked up the wage gap in terms of gender, which I thought could make an interesting paper.

    After I had found these topics, I had to come up with potential "why" questions.

       The wage gap was pretty easy. I have tentatively deiced on asking "why do women in the U.S. still make 18% less than men when we are supposed to be the epitome of independence and equality?” The Obama administration intrigued me because it mentioned how Obama had been accused of of being socialist after he instated Obama care and the stimulus package. So, after I mentioned it to one of the teachers, he gave me some suggestions, and I decided on maybe asking "Why is it such an insult to call Obama a socialist when, in fact, countries that follow socialist economic policies tend to have better welfare and education?” 

      The mental health question stumped me am little because I find the subject so fascinating, but it’s also so broad and complex. I am still debating, but I think, for now, that my question is, "why do some kinds of mental heath treatments get covered by insurance and not others, why do insurance companies have the standards they do?"

  Sorry for this monster of a post, there’s going to be a lot more about these, but hopefully none this long. Also I apologize for any typos I may have missed.

To Speak or Not To Speak

   I don't know how many of you have ever gone out of the U.S. and visited a country where English is not spoken natively, and of course vice versa, but I've noticed a sort of pattern that appears between English speakers and non-English speakers.

   Laissez-moi expliquer: it seems, at least to me, that whenever someone from another country vistas America, we elect them to speak English, and they expect to speak it as well. And yet, when we English speaking Americans visit another non-English speaking country, we speak English to the people there and expect them to understand at least a little bit.

    I have two examples to support these claims; the first is that over the summer, when I was working at the Botanic Gardens, we had a lot of tourists from all over the world. There were tourists from Southeast Asia and India and Japan and Eastern Europe and Western Europe and no matter where they were from, we always spoke English to them and they spoke not back. But, when my mom travel dot Italy on business last year, she came back and complained to me about how hard to was to get around because "nobody spoke any English."

   I wonder then if these sorts of assumptions are the reasons why America has the reputation that it does. I’m not saying everybody is like this, but the overwhelming majority of Americans seem to think that English is so important that it's nearly impossible for there ego be a place where no one speaks even a little of it. And again, what does that say about us as people?

Unknowing

      It's been all over the news these past couple days that Flight 370 from Malaysia Airlines went missing. And they mean missing. It's been days and there's been absolutely no sign of the plane or nay parts of it despite a huge rescue initiative.
      CNN posted an article titled "Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: What we know and don't know". The things that they did know were mostly basic: how many people were on the plane, who the crew was, and where the plane was headed. But, after it vanished in southeast Asia, people are growing suspicious. Family members are terrified, and there is nothing but speculation to give them.

Family members of passengers are hounded by the press

   I think what makes this event especially difficult for the passenger's families and frightening for others is because of the uncertainty. The unknown is scary sometimes, and fear can induce many different reactions in people. Take a very trivial example: I used to be terrified of bees. When I was little, I was in Arizona in 80 degree weather in a yellow sundress. But, when we came near some flowers, I panicked thinking the bees would see my dress and I put on a fleece and didn't take it off all day. Then, in 4th grade, a bee stung me. After that, I wasn't so afraid.
   That example is a mere scruple compared to what's happening with Flight 370, but I think that in any sense, fear of the unknown is one of the most difficult fears.

Steven Moffat Makes Me Mad

    The title of this post pretty sums it up but basically I'm going to go on a tiny little rant. Just a tiny one.
 Lots of people I know have issues with Steven Moffat's views and how they are shown in his writing.
  There are two complaints I hear about Moffat the most consistently: the first is that he writes terrible female characters, which even before the new season of Sherlock I could vouch for. The second was that he was a bit of a homophobe.
    Now this I wasn't so sure about. After all, he wrote Doctor Who and whilst there weren't anything but heterosexual relationships on that show it wasn't really a show based on relationships anyway. However, there is the whole partnership between John and Sherlock in the series Sherlock that had many fans wanting the two of them to get together in a more, how do I put this, intimate way.

Can You Feel the Gay Tonight?

  I completely understand if Moffat and his writers did not envision John Watson and Sherlock Holmes as a couple, that is their choice. However, in season 3, when the fan excitement began rising, Moffat went to extreme lengths to display both John and Sherlock's heterosexuality, even going to such lengths as to change their character's behaviors which I find appalling.
   There is a way to show that your two characters are not romantically interested in each other without randomly changing one of their behaviors and tossing both characters randomly and without much background into relationships with other people.
   I don't know precisely why it bugs me so much but I hate to see well-written characters ruined simply for the sake of one man's prejudices.