In her article, "Cultivating Failure," Caitlin Flanagan argues that gardening in schools is taking away students precious time from actually learning new things in the classroom. Flanagan stated in her essay that having gardens in schools will not help students increase their test scores. She wants the students to learn as much they can in a school day; so they can further their education later on in life. In this essay, she is explaining that going outside and planting plants during school hours will not get graduation rates up.
Flanagan starts by describing how important it is for students to learn as much as they can in a classroom because gardening is actually "robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might
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Building gardens in schools can only distract the students from getting important information. Students need to learn as many subjects as they can in school. Students should not focus on what plant they are going to put on the ground because that is not going to get them a degree in college. Flanagan feels like there are much more important things to build the students intelligence so they can have a successful future. Using the strategies of pathos she uses many negative words when describing the usefulness of students gardening in school. Flanagan is persuading the reader that having school gardens will not improve students academic grades. She also explained in her essay how easy it would be for students to pass if schools had gardens: " students ' grades quickly improved at king, which makes sense given that a recipe is much easier to write that a coherent paragraph on The Crucible" (Flanagan …show more content…
Several students would learn the value of working hard by gardening when they are at school. The Edible Schoolyard program is an example of what positive thing can come out of gardens in schools "experience-based learning that illustrates the pleasure of meaningful work, personal responsibility, the need for nutritious, sustainably raised, and sensually stimulating food, and the important socializing effect of the ritual of the table" (Flanagan 420). She uses multiple Informal fallacies in her essay; hasty Generalization is one Informal Fallacies because Flanagan is jumping to conclusion by saying all school gardens waste students time by gardening during school
From the beginning, Steinberg paints a biased picture of lawn culture that puts the reader on guard. It is clear that is he is going to be critical, indeed mocking, of those who care deeply about lawns, sometimes as an environmental offense and sometimes just as an absurdity. One must assume that the history he writes about lawn is accurate, but when he begins to interpret the history, he makes it seems as if grass is a much bigger deal in the mind of every American than it actually is. As someone who has spent his entire life living in the suburbs surrounded by houses with respectable lawns, I know that my lawn occupies a minimal amount of my conscious thought and perhaps only a marginally higher portion of my neighbors thoughts. Steinberg is telling me that I care more about lawn that I do which I know is false. With Steinberg’s fundamental assumption that Americans are obsessed with lawns under question, one must question the appropriateness of the examples he uses to prove his point. Therefore, Steinberg would have to provide concrete examples that demonstrate a superior understanding of lawns...
Gardening is Finley's graffiti and art. He believes that the gardens are meant to be shared with all and used as a tool to educate and transform his community. The gardens help change and develop the lives and future of children and young people. He believes to make change, you have to focus on the community and change the composition of the soil. The people are the soil. Finley’s plans for the garden include getting people to grow their own food, open farmer's markets, and make healthy cafes out of shipping
Gatto begins his article by explaining that boredom is an everyday issue in modern schooling. Teachers struggle with boredom due to the attitudes and behavior of students and find it exhausting to teach kids when they behave in an immature manner. However, students also become frustrated with the repetition of useless information, as well as being forced to fit society’s standards. Gatto shifts the focus to his thoughts on the importance of mandatory schooling. He thinks that the lengthy school days are completely unnecessary.
The average human would think that going to school and getting an education are the two key items needed to make it in life. Another common belief is, the higher someone goes with their education, the more successful they ought to be. Some may even question if school really makes anyone smarter or not. In order to analyze it, there needs to be recognition of ethos, which is the writer 's appeal to their own credibility, followed by pathos that appeals to the writer’s mind and emotions, and lastly, logos that is a writer’s appeal to logical reasoning. While using the three appeals, I will be analyzing “Against School” an essay written by John Taylor Gatto that gives a glimpse of what modern day schooling is like, and if it actually help kids
"By increasing the fertility of the land, it increases its abundance. The improvements of agriculture too introduce many sorts of vegetable foods, which, requiring less land and not more labor than corn, come cheaply to the market."
...to understand that we are not the only species that affects the world; we aren’t the only ones that have an impact on what will happen. Plants need to be viewed as a helping species in our world. All of these plants looked at by Michael Pollan are crops; they help us just as much as we help them by industrializing them they continue to thrive while we are able to profit off peoples wants a desires for these plants. They are continuing to adapt to be used by us, to be transported around the world, to feed our families. Plants play a major role in our lives that some people don’t understand and the greatest threat facing all of these plants is the threat of falling out of fashion, once people lose interest the wonder of these plants are lost.
Within the walls of our educational system lie many adverse problems. Is there a solution to such problems? If so, what is the solution? As we take a look at two different essays by two different authors’ John Gatto and Alfie Kohn, both highlight what’s wrong within our educational system in today’s society. As John Gatto explores the concept if schools are really as necessary as they’re made out to be; Alfie Kohn analyzes the non-importance of letter grades within our schools. Although both essays are fairly different, they still pose some similarities in relation to the educational system in today’s society.
efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility of labor,
“The first school I attended was a small building that went from first to sixth grade. There was one teacher for all of the students. There could be anywhere from 50 to 60 students of all different ages. From 5 or 6 years old to in their teens. We went to school five months out of the year. The rest of the time young people would be available to work on the farm. The parents had to buy whatever the student used. Often, if your family couldn't afford it, you had no access to books, pencils, whatever. However, often the children would share” (Interview with Parks).
The discussion of children and school also gives well meaning of an organized and well-balanced village the people have put together, one the average parent would want their children raised in. “They tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands (p.445).” The thought of children playing also illustrates of a positive outlook for the rest of the story, a sense of happiness.
In “Hidden Intellectualism” by Gerald Graff, the author speaks about how schools should use students’ interests to develop their rhetorical and analytical skills. He spends a majority of his essay on telling his own experience of being sport loving and relating it to his anti-intellectual youth. He explains that through his love for sports, he developed rhetoric and began to analyze like an intellectual. Once he finishes his own story, he calls the schools to action advising them to not only allow students to use their interest as writing topics, but instead to teach the students on how to implement those compelling interests and present them in a scholarly way. In perspective, Graff’s argument becomes weak with his poor use of ethos, in which he solely focuses on his own anecdote but, through the same means he is able to build his pathos and in the last few paragraphs, with his use of logic he prevents his argument from becoming dismissible.
Corn is a part of American farming. However, American farming has been changing drastically over the past century. With new technology and greater demands, agriculture has needed to modernize itself. This requires corn to fundamentally change in its structure and purpose. Not only does this change the quality of corn or its usage, but it also affects corn’s quantity. There is a yearly over-abundance of corn yet corn still keeps getting produced. The honesty of genuine farming has been lost over the years. Farming is not a way of life anymore. It’s a business that takes away from the farmers themselves and only focuses on their product.
Although imagery and symbolism does little to help prepare an expected ending in “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, setting is the singular element that clearly reasons out an ending that correlates with the predominant theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing a grim realism from the cruel world. Despite the joyous atmosphere of an apparently beautiful world of abundant corn and cotton, death and hatred lies on in the woods just beyond the sharecropper cabin. Myop’s flowers are laid down as she blooms into maturity in the face of her fallen kinsman, and the life of summer dies along with her innocence. Grim realism has never been so cruel to the innocent children.
Agriculture is not all work and no play. Many advances can be made in the understanding of agriculture by making available a variety of methods to provide children with a hands-on experience and also educating all individuals about the importance of the practice. The ignorance of urban communities can be overcome with the help of organizations and people within the community. School visits, hands-on experiences, volunteers and organizations are just a few examples of the steps that can be taken to educate Americans about agriculture and close the gap between rural and urban populations.
Doing the weekly readings and watching the videos, my mind exploded with possibilities for change - not unlike Raphael’s “brain popp[ing] open” (Senge, 2012, p. 64). Senge brings to our attention that schools were organised due to the necessity of the industrial age. However he also states that it’s time to move on from this out-dated mode, as i...