Blog post Fredrick Douglass

http://www.good.is/post/a-13-year-old-s-slavery-analogy-raises-some-uncomfortable-truths-in-school/?fb_ref=rightrail

This article was about how a 13 year old girl read a essay about Fredrick Douglass and wrote a very strange response. He statement was that her public school experience is similar to a young Fredrick Douglass's as a slave. This statement is untrue and extremely ridiculous.

In Mr. Douglass's essay, he talks about how his masters wife was cought teaching Fredrick to read and write. "If you teach that nigger how to read, there will be no keeping him," Auld says. "It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master." The girl said that this is close to her school experience because: the overcrowded, poorly managed classrooms prevent real learning from happening and thus produces the same results as Mr. Auld's outright ban. She wrote that her white teachers—the vast majority of Rochester students are black and Hispanic, but very few teachers are people of color—are in a "position of power to dictate what I can, cannot, and will learn, only desiring that I may get bored because of the inconsistency and the mismanagement of the classroom." This is ridiculous because if this was true this would be a much more public issue. What this girl is saying is not anywhere near the reality. The truth has to be so twisted to be like what this girl is saying and it's crazy that she is comparing this to slavery.


 The other reason why this assumption is crazy is because this girl is obviously daloutional. Anyone who thinks that slavery is like Public school is crazy. I think it was wrong of the school to give her a award for her disloutional essay. At most she should of mentioned something about school, and she should of wrote a essay about how the morals of slavery still exist or something. This article reminds me of a video I saw of a girl who had a mental breakdown in her science class screaming about how evolution kills black people and she started threatning everyones lives.


I think things like this happen because people hear about the past of their people and as the issues start to fade away. They act out and make these crazy assumptions to try to remind everyone of what happened cause they think people are forgetting.

Chance poem response

This poem is called 'Old men' by Ogden Nash. It goes like this:

"People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies."

I like this poem because it is meant to be jokey but it has a serous meaning to it. People gain knowledge from just living and that is why old people are so wise is because they know the mistakes they have made and they know how other people can avoid those mistakes in their life; and so they do not morn death.

The part where he said "they do not really morn old men." shows that old men are too wise to morn and they know how to spend their time better sense they are dying and have so much knowledge. It is important for people to listen to old people because they know what is best for everyone. People say that we learn history so we know not to repeat it. Well the old men are the history.

This connects to real life because although most people will grow old, everyone will experience death, and experice people dying around them.