Death by Highlighter
I woke up Tuesday morning with a strange sense that I was not alone in bed. Something was jabbing me in the left hip. I opened one eye tentatively. It was 8:47 a.m., and I did not want to be awake. I investigated the source of the jabbing feeling to discover, to my horror, a florescent yellow, uncapped highlighter that I had let slip after falling asleep while reading a report on science and engineering at Duke. I shuddered, moved the higlighter to a more innocuous location on the floor, and went back to sleep.
The perils of highlighters, however, extend well beyond my now-fluorescent-yellow sheets, nightgown and left hip. Having highlighted my way through three years of college, four years of high school and a few years of junior high, I have reached the shocking conclusion that highlighters have undermined my education.
Before the days of transparent yellow markers, readers took notes on reading, or wrote in ball-point pen in the margins, forcing themselves to transmit information from words on a page to coherent thought to at least somewhat coherent squiggles on the page. The highlighter offers a seductive shortcut--the reader can bypass the "coherent thought to squiggle" step of the process and simply smear interesting passages with fluorescent ink, no analysis required. Particularly impressive phrases may merit an emphatic mark in the margin, and, on rare occasions, the holder of the fluorescent wand may even add a note in blue or black ink.
Regardless, however, the marker-wielding reader generally smears large tracts of text with ink, never bothering to summarize or paraphrase information.
I know the pathological symptoms of highlighter-addiction because I am a victim. I shouldn't have turned out this way--I had a strictly traditional fifth-grade history teacher who required us to take notes on our reading in outline form. But something happened in high school, I think in European History, when I realized I could never write down every iota of information in our menacingly dense text book--so I grabbed hold of a highlighter and started marking interesting facts in bright yellow. I meant to make notes in the margins, but there wasn't time . . . and so I launched myself down the highlighter path to mental oblivion.
Highlighters should shoulder at least as much of the blame as MTV for Generation X's short attention span and anti-intellectual leanings.
Books today are everywhere. We find them in many households, libraries and schools all around the globe. We find many different types of books; from stories to educational textbooks, we regard them today as sources of knowledge and amusement. But it wasn’t the case before 1455. That year, one of the greatest inventions in human history was revealed to the world; Gutenberg’s printing press. This press allowed printing in massive quantity, spreading books all around Europe and the rest of the world at a fast rate. The printing press had many positive consequences on society. At first, it standardized grammar and spelling, and then introduced the mass production of books. It finally inspired future printing technologies around the world.
Of these 31.8 million are Mexican origin. Despite the large presence as Rodolfo Jacobo, professor and Department chair, Multicultural Studies at Palomar College recounts in his article Chicano Cultural Space: It’s Roots, “there exist a vast lack of knowledge of the political, economic and cultural significance of the Chicano cultural nationalism” (Jacobo 4). In the search of acceptance Mexican decedents had look and still looking for spaces that they could encounter a sense of home, but through the entire search Mexican Americans find themselves in a territory and a society that denies and discredit their experience and contribution. However, through all the different situations and experiences that Mexican Americans had faced and still face help them to take a step forward, and become leaders of the communities in order to speak out and proclaim their
Van Iersel, Bas. 1989. Reading Mark (translated by W. H. Bisscheroux). Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.
The first significant Latino immigration to the US took place during the California Gold Rush, right after the US-Mexican war ended and the new boundary between both countries was established. Approximately 10,000 Mexican miners entered California and were used as workforce.
Multiple groups across the United Stated advocate for abstinence-only sexual education including: “Concerned Women for America, the Eagle Forum, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the Heritage Foundation, the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, the National Coalition for Abstinence education, and STOP Planned Parenthood International” (Collins). These groups principally argue that involvement in sexual activities before marriage “is inappropriate or immoral and that abstinence is the only method which is [a hundred percent] effective in preventing pregnancy or STIs” (Collins). Such groups emphasize that all contraception techniques have a risk of failure and believe that comprehensive sex education programs provide misleading information that safe sex techniques provide “foolproof pregnancy and d...
Schakel, Peter J., and Jack Ridl. "Everyday Use." Approaching Literature: Writing Reading Thinking. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 109-15. Print.
The text was written with reading out loud in mind, that can not be recommended; but it is suggested that the reader attend with his ear to what he takes off the page: for variations of tone, pace, shape, and dynamics are here particularly unavailable to the eye alone, and with their loss, a good deal of meaning escapes. (87)
Richardson, J. (1995, May 14) Talking about Sex Education: New Generation of Parents Still Tongue Tied About Sex. Maine Telegraph (Portland, ME) 1C+ Sirs Researcher
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” SparkNotes LLC, 2007. Web. 26 May 2011.
Yellow: A powerful attention grabber and indeed, a dangerous one too. If the message you are conveying has a defect, never ever use yellow.
Browning is particularly well-known for this above-mentioned technique. On the surface level, his writing is trivi...
Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literary Technologies.” Writing Material. Ed. Evelyn Tribble. New York. 2003. 35- 52.
Over the years the topic has gone through various changes in the public school system. The first generation taught sexual anatomy and the risk of pregnancy, but soon was criticized for not showing knowledge of reducing risky sexual behavior, which soon lead to the second generation (Rodriguez, 1). The second generation approached sexual communication, values, and making personal decisions in one’s life; although students made smarter decisions in the areas taught, it failed to introduce teens to all contraceptives, therefore risky behavior was still being shown. Following the failure of the second generation the program of “abstinence only” began. The problem with this was it not only made students aware of the contraception available to the children, therefore encouraging risky behavior. The most current generation, the practice being taught in schools today, is known as “comprehensive sexuality education”; it not only encourages young adult...
The long debated issue of teaching abstinence or contraception awareness is an inevitable topic that has and will continue to linger in school board meeting rooms for years and years to come. Parents are not talking to their children about sex because some deem it as awkward or uncalled for, leaving it to the schools to teach the little education they have. “This take on sex education is known among educators as the "abstinence-only approach," in which totally refraining fr...
So many scientists have argued that online reading doesn’t help people. Their research found out that people were just glancing through each page they are reading, picking out individual words and pr...