Nickel and Dimed Review

Thomas Randall, Allison Young, Emily Coon, Reilly Johnson

10/27/11

            Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist, undergoes a social and economic experiment to evaluate the conditions and life styles of low wage workers around various locations in the United States. She goes under-cover as a low wage worker herself in order to gain information and inform her audience about how employees survive on low wage salaries. By the end of the book, Ehrenreich’s purpose extends to increasing awareness on the low wage work force and the rights they deserve. This started off as an assignment for her job, but turned into a personal challenge to survive.

            Ehrenreich’s book is primarily directed toward middle or upper-class working adults who are unaware of the conditions of low wage workers. It is apparent that this is her intended audience because she uses common jargon and colloquial terms so the majority of her audience can understand it. This audience is appealed to by Ehrenreich’s conversational tone and her authentic portrayal of her thoughts.

            She does a good job giving information to the audience about the logistics of low wage workers. It is clear and easy to understand and she also provides a good balance of personal experience and general trends so that it isn’t solely an opinion piece. She includes qualitative and quantitative observations that provide more information and a clear image. The clarity aided her in revealing information which was her original goal; to express the conditions of low wage workers.

            Although informative and eye opening, Ehrenreich’s disrespectful attitude and stereotyping distracted from the overall issue of the low wage workers conditions. She provided a clear depiction of the lower-class lifestyle but included unnecessary and rude comments along the way. These comments make the reader less compelled to empathize with her.

            We would recommend this book to working adults over teenagers and low wage workers. It will be informative and eye opening to working adults who haven’t been exposed to this kind of lifestyle.

Halloween!

Halloween. The biggest thing I remember is that my best friend/neighbor, Kasey, would get a new Halloween costume every year. That's what every kid does, right? However, she didn't do what every kid looks forward to the most...trick-or-treating!! She was too frightened of everyone else's costumes to go outside and get candy around the neighborhood. She would put on her costume and hide under the table every time her doorbell bang, for fear of seeing someone in a "scream" mask, or more specifically, my brother, who decided to be Darth Maul one year. I swear, I don't think she came trick-or-treating with us until late elementary school or middle school. Kasey, her older sister Kaylee, my sister Natalie, and I are kind of a bff quartet, but every year on Halloween we would just have to be a trio!

When I was little, I remember being the following:

A Bride (with very messy lipstick..I obviously wouldn't cooperate with my mom)
A flower
Jasmine (every girl has to be a disney princess at some point in her life!)
A random pink princess

More recently...
Hannah Montana (I'm really hot as a blonde)
A siamese twin-I wore a XXX large jacket with my sister!
Thing 1 and Thing 2-again, with my sister of course
An angel accompanied with my sister, the devil!

Every year I'm always stunned to see what people come up with for their Halloween costumes. That's my favorite part-people watching on Halloween!

Blog Response: 2 Million Minutes, For Once, Blame the Student, and "I Just Wanna Be Average."

In the article, "For Once, Blame the Student," Patrick Welsh claims, "What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign born kids." After watching Two Million Minutes, this makes so much sense. The students in India and China were already decided on their careers in highschool. They had their highschool courses based around their career choice and were applying to some of the most prestigious schools in the world. Knowing their career path in highschool is probably a huge motivator for them. They are taking classes that interest them and will help them with their careers later in life, whereas most American students are undecided at this point in their lives, and are taking standard math, science, english and social studies classes that are required to graduate. The movie showed the Indian and Chinese students studying for multiple hours everyday, and then showed an American study group-they were preparing for a test while watching Grey's Anatomy.

Although I do agree with Welsh that teachers are not entirely responsible for the motivation of their students, Mike Rose describes his incompetent teachers in "I Just Wanna Be Average." His civics teacher was a football coach who could hardly read the textbook, and his English teacher was barely even trained in English. It would be difficult to be motivated when your teacher doesn't know any more of the subject than you do. I don't think student motivation even applies in a situation like that. There are strong teachers, however, who connect with their students very well and teach effectively. In prime situations like these, students are responsible for motivationg themselves. I think there needs to be motivation from both ends (student and teacher), but it is mostly on the student.

Free Blog...Class not trash! Plus a dash of celebrity too.

Someone posted this on their facebook page a few days ago. It was late at night and I was finishing homework, but I totally needed a mental break. So what do I do?...facebook.

I was scrolling through my news feed when I came upon this, and i was all, "OMG it's Emma Watson I have to look at this because I love Harry Potter and she's Hermione Granger who is awesome and performs magic and she likes fashion plus she's smart, which is basically the epitome of everything I love."

I didn't think it was possible For Emma to get any higher on my "People I'm obsessed with" list, but I think she did after I read this:

I find the whole concept of being ‘sexy’ embarrassing and confusing. If I do an interview with photographs people desperately want to change me – dye my hair blonder, pluck my eyebrows, give me a fringe. Then there’s the choice of clothes. I know everyone wants a picture of me in a mini-skirt. But that’s not me. I feel uncomfortable. I’d never go out in a mini-skirt. It’s nothing to do with protecting the Hermione image. I wouldn’t do that. Personally, I don’t actually think it’s even that sexy. What’s sexy about saying, ‘I’m here with my boobs out and a short skirt, have a look at everything I’ve got?’ My idea of sexy is that less is more. The less you reveal the more people can wonder.

-Emma Watson

I feel like celebrities today are expected to reveal everything. Not just their bodies, but their personal lives too-who they're dating, what they do in their free time, how/where they grew up, and even their health habits. Paparazzi are constantly snapping pictures when celebrities are just trying to live their everyday lives and do normal things. There is definitely pressure for them to look perfect as well as to show off their bodies in magazines, photo shoots, etc.

It's so cool that Emma doesn't cave in to this pressure! She likes being modest, and she's not going to change herself for the public eye. Child stars are exposed to such an adult-world at such a young age, but she has managed to keep her head on her shoulders and she favors class over trash.

"The less you reveal, the more people can wonder."

That's definitely going on my ceiling. I'll look at it everyday when I wake up in the morning. Kidding!

p.s. She does magic and she's modest...people don't get much cooler than that.

Possible Speeches

I was gone Friday, but apparently it's my job to find presidential speeches! Here are some of my options:

FDR's First Inaugral Address

http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrfirstinaugural.html

FDR's Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation

http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrpearlharbor.htm

JFK's Cuban Missile Crisis Address

http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcubanmissilecrisis.html

Lyndon Baines Johnson's Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Voting Legislation

http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm

Obama's Back to School Speech!

• He wears a suit and tie, indicating that he looks at this as a formal event. He is taking it seriously and wants his audience to know that as well.
• He waves and smiles to the students/staff as he walks in. This puts him on a closer level to the students-he isn't trying to be superior to any of them. This makes him more like he's just one of them.
• He uses emphasis on the word "great" when he says, "It is great to be here", showing he's excited at this opportunity.
• He increases his ethos when he lists some of the students responsibilities (tests, sports, etc.) because he is relating to them. He knows what the average American student goes through everyday!
• Throughout the entire speech, Obama uses a lot of parallelism and anaphora to emphasize his points. He says, "You've got to wonder, you've got to question, you've got to explore", "You'll be the ones leading our businesses and leading our government, you'll be the ones making sure are next generation gets what they need to succeed, you'll be the ones that are charting the course of our unwritten history."
• He pauses multiple times throughout his segment of the girl who taught herself chemistry and is now working with cancer researchers. This really made her story sink in and showed the significance of how hard she worked, and shows how everyone has the potential to do the same.
• He says, "More than sixty percent of the jobs in the next decade will require a highscool diploma. More than sixty percent." He repeats "sixty percent", and uses inflection when he says it, pointing out the importance of earning a highscool diploma.
• He talks about how the proportion of young people with a degree in America has dropped and says, "We now rank sixteenth. I don't like being sixteenth. I like being number one." His inflection here emphasizes the change of our ranks and how he cares about getting the ranks back up.
• Throughout the entire speech, he has slight hand gestures. They don't really seem planned. They are maybe more of a nervous habit/something he's doing subconsciously.
• He had a few "uuhs" and "aaands", but it didn't really bother me for some reason. To me it just made him seem more real. He wasn't robotic and it didn't sound like he was just reading off of a piece of paper!
• I noticed his sentences usually start at a slightly higher pitch, then tend to get lower as he finishes each sentence. I think this helps him to emphasize cause and effect or to compare/contrast things.