Metacognition: Writing about Jane Eyre

Writing about Jane Eyre was a grueling experience. I was forced to think about things that I don't normally think about. I had to think about themes in Jane Eyre that related to themes today. More seriously, it forced my mind to go through hoops and think about how people can relate to issues that people cared about hundreds of years ago. I saw how things have changed in the past several hundred years, and how things have stayed the same.

Writing about Jane Eyre made it crystal clear how conversations that were had during Academy class time translate into a product. In other words, I saw how points that were raised in class could be used in a discussion that was not taking place in Academy. As you can imagine, this was an eye-opening experience. It was cool to be able to reference and use ideas in class in an assignment.

It was also interesting to think about something from various points of view. I was forced to see how different people approached different problems. The publisher was concerned with making something that sold well. The Academy student was interested in learning. And Bronte was concerned about preserving the integrity of her creation. That clash of minds was interesting to recreate.

Metacognition: Jane Eyre

I don't want to read this. This is so long! This is so boring!

Those were my main three thoughts I was thinking when reading Jane Eyre. I tended to put off reading it until the last minute, so I'd be suffering through it at 2 am telling myself it would all be worth it if there was a reading quiz. Hindsight being 20/20, this was probably not the best idea. I can look back and realize that the parts of the book I remember the most and enjoyed the most were those I read at more reasonable times of day. When I was actually awake to notice what was going on, it was a considerably more pleasurable experience than when I was torturing myself to read it. So I will focus on what I was thinking when I could comprehend what was happening.

I noticed I would try to relate Jane Eyre to people I know now. I think I did this because it is easier for me to understand things when I can relate to them. For example, chemistry is hard for me because I have no framework for understanding the concepts. However, debates come naturally to me because I understand how most of the arguments interact with each other. Relating Jane is just another way of creating a framework that I can use to visualize more clearly what is going on. The thing I relate it to will add new depth to the plot for me, and help bring the emotion's of the characters to life.

I noticed I tended to think of Jane as someone in her 40s. This probably has to do with sayings like "40 is the new 30," and things like that. A 20 year old then was probably considerably more mature than one now. Also, their way of speaking and mannerism made Jane seem particularly older than her age. Thinking of her as much older and visualizing her as much older made it easier to follow the flow of the book, even if it created a few awkward situations. For example, as a result of this, I thought of St. John as being in his 60s, even though it becomes abundantly clear that he is at least a little younger than that later in the novel.

I also noticed that my mind would tend to wander as I was reading. This has to do with the slow, long, drawn-out pace of the novel. Jane will go on for pages talking about the surroundings and her feelings. She could spend a chapter on a single scene and brush away years with just a few words. There is the point in the novel where Bronte makes it clear that the longer version is better. This is when Jane's story is recounted in a few paragraphs, and Jane becomes upset because it ignores every emotional aspect. Even though is a true argument, that did not stop my mind from thinking about other things while reading.

360 Degrees: Illegal Immigration

Illegal immigration is a highly contentious issue.  Almost everyone has a deeply-held ideological belief on the issue.  Some say we need to allow the immigrants to come into the US because we need to keep up the American dream.  Others say that we should kick them all out and build a fence because they are stealing American jobs.  

The people who say we should allow illegal immigration say that those people deserve to be able to come to America.  America has been a land of hope for quite some time, there's zero reason to change that now.  The United States represent a unique opportunity to get a job and raise a family.  They are coming from terrible conditions, and are just trying to do something positive for the people they love.

The people who say we should not allow illegal immigrants to come to the US say that those illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs.  They come to the US and work for far less than the average American is willing to work for.  They say that Americans would be doing those jobs, but then when the immigrants come and take them, that uniquely hurts America.

I personally think there's no harm in smoothing up the citizenship process.  Legal immigrants will take jobs away just as quickly as illegal ones, the only difference is how long it takes the individual immigrants to become authentic citizens.  My dad has a friend who has had a team of professional lawyers trying to make him a citizen... for nearly a decade.  If they can't do it, it's completely unreasonable to expect your average immigrant to be able to do it.  There's zero harm in allowing them to become immigrants faster, except for they will now be paying taxes (which is a positive anyway).

An Inconvenient truth: ObamaCare

To start off, I am very democratic.  I believe deeply that there is something wrong with America's health care system.  Costs are spiraling out of control and if nothing is done to contain them it will hurt families, businesses of all sizes, and devastate the economy as a whole.  This is because health care is currently roughly 18% of our GDP, and costs are rising faster than wages and inflation.  People who really study health care costs predict that it is unsustainable.

ObamaCare does a whole lot to ensure that people get insurance.  It is undoubtedly a monumental piece of legislation.  However, I still find several faults with it.  

First, none of the actually good reforms come into effect until 2014.  The individual mandate, which I will discuss more in-depth later, begins in 4 years.  Insurance exchanges, a central component of common dreams's "public plan choice" doesn't take affect until 2014.  If you have a preexisting condition, private insurance industries will not have to give you insurance for another 4 years.  And I would be fine with all of that, if it weren't for the fact that the delay isn't based in common sense, it's motivated by politics.  

The 4 year delay is a desperate attempt to gain political clout because it creates a skewed estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).  It does this because when the CBO does their 10 year estimate, it will be taking into account 10 years of taxes (the taxes start immediately), but only 6 years of actually giving out benefits.  That is it.  That is the sole reason.  The delay allows democrats to wave their arms and say "look!  We save money!"  When the reality is that they will be doing absolutely nothing to prevent a rise in healthcare costs and actually devastate the federal deficit over the long-term.  This bring me to my second point.

It does nothing to keep healthcare costs from rising at the rate they are now.  I consider myself relatively knowledgeable about this fiasco, and of all the provisions I know of, not one keeps the cost of premiums down.  They start taxing immediately, that's for sure.  Anyone who was hoping they could pay a 10 percent tax when they go to tanning salons has their wishes fulfilled.  But there are literally zero measures that attempt to contain costs.  Sure, there are shenanigans like the high-risk pools, employer mandate and the aforementioned individual mandate, but they won't do much.  I'd go through every provision I know of and disagree with it, but that would make this post unnecessarily long.  It will have to suffice that I take down the mantlepiece of the reform, the individual mandate.

The individual mandate has so many flaws it's almost humorous.  But before I discuss those, it's funny to point out that the idea originated with the ultra-conservative heritage foundation.  They also thought that Americans needed more choice in the health care market - but that was 10 years ago.  Now that Obama's president and actually trying to pass these things, almost all you can find on their website is reasons why his reforms fail.  However, there are specific reasons why the individual mandate, the glue that holds the reform together, will ultimately fail when it's enacted in four years.  Here are a couple of them:

Lack of compliance.  There is an excise tax that is the government's method of enforcing the mandate, which could ultimately be cheaper for individuals to pay than health insurance.  Any lack of compliance magnifies financial pressures because the private industry needs large numbers of healthy people to offset the costs incurred from sick people.  And the individual mandate on its own does nothing to control costs.  It is likely that people will say Massachusetts proves it will work, however the Massachusetts plan just proves the above argument because they currently allow 20% of sick people to go without insurance through exemptions.  There is zero reason to believe the same problem will not exist with the federal mandate.  The theory is that if everyone has health insurance, then the sick people will comprise a smaller percentage of healthcare costs because there are more healthy people in the system.  However, this falls prey to the fact that the government pays for 85% of uncompensated care right now.  This means that there will be a miniscule effect on private insurers, who are the ones that need cost reductions.  

It's impossible to define a minimum benefits package.  Like with auto insurance, the government will be forced to define how much health insurance people will have to buy.  This is another area of weakness.  Every single special interest group will want their type of care to be included in the minimum requirements.  And if the last year has taught us anything, it's that Washington is great at listening to special interests.

Now, I think a public option is a great way to solve these problems.  When there's a government run healthcare coverage program that can use taxpayer leverage and bargaining power to force reforms in the private industry, healthcare costs will go down.  This post is already too long, so I don't really have space to go into specifics, but I advocate an immediate public option as a solution to the problem.

All of the problems above bug me because Washington has spent over a year debating, thinking, and arguing about health care.  The best thing they can come up with is a politically motivated piece of garbage that will be worse than nothing.  And I'm certainly not the only one who thinks this reform will fail.

Dialectics: diet coke and renewable energy

I do not believe anything I'm about to say, but it's an interesting idea, I think.

Diet coke soothes the conscience of fat people because it let's them think they're doing something about their health.  In reality, coke represents everything bad about the American lifestyle - low cost, readily available, and just awful for you.  We're scared of calories, carbs, and type 2 diabetes.  The American economy solves things like over-consumption not by reducing consumption but by increasing safety - we remove the sugar, put in preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and keep on eating.  This merely eases our heads but doesn't do anything to help the root cause, and so you find people at the movies eating tubs of popcorn covered in artificial butter, twizzlers, and half a gallon of soda - but never fear: it's diet.   We ignore that the artificial sweeteners lead to cancer and get us addicted because we only think about sugar.  

There's no difference with renewable energy - where the energy we use comes from is just a fraction of the problem of over-consumption.  Using alternative energies to reduce our carbon footprint or eliminate our dependence on imported oil merely solves a minor problem on its own not for a noticeable physical benefit but to sooth our conscience.  No longer bound by concerns of dirty energy we keep guzzling everything the energy produces.  Even if you believe 100 percent that renewable energy is a good thing, reject the flawed motives because they don't solve the root cause of the issue and because nothing tastes worse than diet coke.  

Blogging around: Mary and Connor

Mary's blog

Mary wrote about how the large number of extracurriculars high school students are involved in detract from things like homework and sleep:

I liked this post a lot because it's a problem that plagues not just me, but several of my friends as well. I definitely feel that extracurriculars suck up a large portion of time from the day, and when you get back home at 9 o'clock and still have several hours of homework to do, it can be tough. I also notice that when I do well, my parents like to take credit for it. But when I don't do so well, it's something I've done wrong, something I need to fix. But I guess c'est la vie.

I also agree with your point that we create pressure for ourselves. college is looming and it dominates a lot of our thoughts. We need to get good grades to get into a good college to get a good job and make lots of money. That one bad test will ruin our lives because it will lower our gpa. A break from that kind of thinking would be nice, but once again, c'est la vie.

Connor's blog:

Connor wrote about how the roles of business and government are completely different.  Government's power to intervene in the economy should be limited to where they are no longer allowed to take the role of a business:

Yes, I agree that business and government are very different entities. However, I disagree that government should never intervene. There are surely some instances where government intervention is a good thing; You cannot say that the post office, police station, or firemen are bad things. Additionally, there are some places where the free market has failed. To use a current example, over 46 million people lack health insurance because they either can't afford it or get turned down because they have a preexisting condition. I agree with you that businesses do not make good governments. A drive for profit should never be the primary motive for anything in charge of the lives of millions of people. They're just primarily not democracies.

Best of Week: Cathedral

In class this week, we discussed the apparently unsatisfying ending to the short story Cathedral.  The main character finishes the story with a rather bland line, despite him having an epiphany with a blind man in his house.  We talked about how this is particularly fitting for the story because the voice the story has been told with is bland, and thus it would be unfitting to have a miraculous finish to the story.

I agree with the conclusion we reached in class.  Despite the emotional and spiritual grandeur going on inside the main character, he deals with events in a matter-of-fact, blunt, and passive way.  To put together a creative speech that artfully depicts everything that's going on would rob the reader of everything the author had so strived to create in the main character.  So yes, maybe a really cool last line would be nice aesthetically, but the advantages pretty much stop there.  Although, in hindsight, the ending was like a short-sleeve magician; you can see what's coming.

I think that this has massive potential utility for me.  This is a wake-up call to check my story for consistency in voice.  Not only a coherent plot-line, but also a voice that the reader can follow and that adds meaning to the story.  Even if I forget the details of what happens in Cathedral (I probably will), the message will stay with me for a considerably longer time.

Connection: Rejecting and Global Warming

I was perusing other blogs and one of them reminded me that at the beginning of the year, Mr. Allen asked us to ask ourselves "To what degree do I understand that which I am about to reject?"

Now I, like most of you, assuredly, had completely forgotten about this question.  I also had a project in chemistry with a few other people where we had to prove that the United States should continue to use fossil fuels, as opposed to renewable energies such as solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal.  A large part of the project was debating and clashing with other team's arguments, which meant we had to answer the main arguments against fossil fuels.

Obviously, one of the biggest arguments against fossil fuels is that they lead to global warming.  I tasked myself with coming up with answers to this argument.  The best response to it, in my opinion, was that global warming doesn't exist.  Without any further thought, I went found an abundance of articles, people, and journals that disproved global warming.  I had no conception of what the other teams arguments would be.

And that is about to run is into real trouble.  We presented fossil fuels yesterday.  Today, our main opponents, solar and wind power, will be presenting.  If they have a strong, well-researched argument for global warming, there is a strong possibility that we will lose.  Why?  Because I did not understand the argument I was rejecting.  I did not understand all of the nuances and caveats that come with the global warming argument.  For example, it's not really global warming, it's climate change, and they have ways of measuring global warming that take into account the urban heat island effect.

I know that Mr. Allen meant the question in more of a "don't be so quick to reject it" sense, but it definitely applies here.  Knowing the other sides arguments, particularly in a head-to-head debate, can only help.  And if you know their arguments better than they do, people will notice it, when you embarrass them.

It Matters: Hegel's Dialectic Approach to Problem Solving

Hegel's thesis was that for any problem, you could take the best parts of each side, and combine them to form something that will satisfy everyone.

This approach does not seem to be working for health care.  Obama has spent nearly a year pushing for a major health care overhaul.  In his latest push, he's trying to start a bipartisan summit on the issue, which would give him a chance to use something like Hegel's concept of synthesis.

A major obstruction in Obama's path so far has been the apparent lack of unity.  Republicans are ideologically opposed to any health care reform, and now that they have sufficient votes to filibuster, this is a major problem.  Combine that problem with blue dog democrats who are opposed to government spending, and it's next to impossible for Obama to compromise.  

Structural differences meant that the house was able to pass a health care bill that contained more of the provisions that democrats liked.  The Senate bill did not contain key provisions that were in the house bill, such as the public option.

This is really an example of Hegel's process of synthesis.  Both parts of congress do the process on their own.  The house has debate and creates a synthesis of the ideas of the two opposing sides, and so does the house.  Then, they both get together, and do the process over again, using the product of house and senate discussions as the starting point.  This is the part that has our current congress stuck; Pelosi can't convince enough democrats in the house to approve the senate bill, and the Republicans have too much power in the senate to pass anything more than they did.

Hegel's dialectic approach to problem solving would work great in the example above, except for the fact that votes are ideologically based, not logically based.

Metacognition: First Semester

Sophomore English has substantially changed my thought process in a few ways:

1) Rhythm - Before this year, I didn't think very much about how words sounded when you combine them.  I thought of them simply as independent beings that need little to no correlation to one another.  As the year has progressed, however, I am starting to see that rhythm matters.  It matters to the style and quality of the writing, not to mention to how well it entraps the reader.  If there is one thing I could take away from this year for the rest of my life, this would be it, because it's something that's used every single time we communicate with another person.  

2) Philosophy - I had heard of some of the philosophers, and was familiar with some of the bigger ones, like Plato and Aristotle, before the year began.  However, post Sophie's World, I have a much better understanding of the course of philosophy.  The time when both History and English were covering the renaissance was particularly useful because we could see renaissance ideas, such as humanism, from two different points of view at once, which is a rather unique opportunity.   This philosophical study, even if it's not complete, is very useful, particularly in debate, because there tend to be lots of philosophical questions we have to debate out various questions that are often rooted in the philosophers we studied.  

3) King Lear performances - I tend not to enjoy reading plays.  There.  I said it.  It's out there.  Reading King Lear, and having to think about it to the point of understanding it, is something I am not used to.  Having to go through and sift through difficult language to get at ideas that shape someone's reality really forced me to use parts of my brain that are usually dormant.  Then memorizing more than 80 lines forced me to really get at what my character was trying to say, what motivated him, and what he stood for.  That was what topped it off.  Pacing around my bedroom, confusedly repeating lines of Shakespeare was the zenith of my lateral thinking.  That, more than anything else this year, reshaped my thinking by forcing to me to see deeper into what I'm reading (or memorizing, in this case).