TOW #28 - Waiting For "Superman" by David Guggenheim Analysis

American public education system is clearly failing. David Guggenheim gives his insight to fix this modern day dilemma 

             In the documentary Waiting for "Superman", David Guggenheim takes his audience of American parents, teachers, and students on a journey to examine the different aspects of the American public education system. Throughout the documentary, Guggenheim goes through the "good" and the "bad" of the way schools are run, and looks into how these factors may impact the way receive their educations. One of the problem that he discusses is the ease in which a school teacher is able to achieve tenure and how even a poor teacher cannot be easily replaced. Guggenheim claims that having an efficient or an inefficient teacher can make a world of difference to the students, and yet both kinds of teachers have the same kinds of privileges. He mentions how teachers unions are making this problem even more difficult. Guggenheim also looks into the outdated system of "tracking" and argues that while this system worked well in the past, it does not go along very well in the modern world. He then suggests the use of good charter schools as a solution to the problems of the education system, arguing that charter schools allow some students in poverty to receive higher education, even though this is done by lottery. Throughout the film, Guggenheim establishes connections with students and provides different statistics in order to emphasize that American public education system really needs to improve.

            There are five important students who are interviewed throughout the video: Anthony, Daisy, Bianca, Francisco, and Emily. These students all have a dream and a passion to learn, but they are constantly struggling with the harsh realities of the public school systems around them. Both Anthony and Daisy seem to be destined to fall behind their grade levels and fail to graduate their neighborhood's failing high schools. Francisco may be held back a year because of his weak reading skills. Bianca's mother is struggling to pay her daughter's tuition at a neighborhood parochial school, and Emily will most likely be placed on a lower track that can deter her from reaching her academic goals if she attends Woodside High School. As time goes on, the audience members start to establish connections to these students. Almost at the end of the film when each students enters a lottery in order to get to a charter school, I was relieved for Emily and Anthony for getting into Summit Prep and getting on the waiting list for SEED respectively, but I was also heartbroken for the other families who were crying because the students did not get into their school of choice. Guggenheim establishes pathos by giving frequent interviews with these students, and this ultimately makes the audience feel sorry for the families whose dreams are crushed when they lose the lottery. This feeling then allows the audience to question the effectiveness of the American public education system because it just does not seem fair that these students who do not get elected will have to continue receiving poor education and will have a slim chance achieving their academic goals while others would have the opportunity to get out of poverty through high level education. This sense of pathos allows the audience to believe that America truly needs a public education system that all students can benefit from.

            Guggenheim also includes numerous statistics and facts about the overall education system that establishes the credibility of the film. He analyzes the American public education system in the viewpoints of politics, foreign countries, and individual schools to reveal is weakness. At one point of the film, Guggenheim mentions how the spending per students grew from $4000 to $9000 and yet the reading scores stayed the same. The scores in math are no better, because only 18% of 8th graders in Alaska are proficient in Math, 40% in New Jersey, 30% in New York, so on and so forth. Internationally speaking, U.S. is one of the lowest in education for it ranks 1st out of 30 among in self esteem, but 21st science, and 25th in math. Even the good test scores in suburban schools are nothing to be proud of because the low scores of the bottom 50% gets masked by the top percent of students. All these cold hard facts show that no matter how much money the government puts into education in U.S., the standards are not getting any higher, meaning that U.S. is wasting its precious dollars for a seemingly futile cause. They also show that despite being a strong country, U.S. cannot compete effectively with foreign countries in terms of brains. This would be detrimental to our country, considering that in modern world, societies depend on people who had high education. In order to continue thriving, Guggenheim warns that U.S. must improve its public education system so that all students may have equal opportunity to learn in high standards.

TOW #27 - TOW Reflection

Thank you Mr. Yost for giving me this opportunity to improve my writing.

            When I look at the very first TOW I wrote in last summer, it is difficult for me to believe how much I progressed throughout the year. Up till my TOW #18, all of my TOWs were almost identical to each other like they were created from a same template, and looking back now, I think that was exactly what have been doing all along. I am satisfied to know that my TOW style have changed so that all information is not crammed into a single 350 word essay. At first, I tend to summarize all the books and the articles I read, but I soon learned to focus on the rhetoric devices that the authors were using and to decipher the message they were conveying. Of course, this meant that I had to break away from the single 350 word paragraph norm, but I am glad that I experimented with my style of writing because although my TOWs became longer, I was able to write more freely and more in depth about how the authors' techniques influenced how they revealed their purposes.

            With this in mind, I believe that I truly mastered distinguishing a summary from an analytical essay. This means that I now know up to what extent I am to describe  the background information of a source so that I can focus more directly on the author's purpose and the unique rhetorical devices the author used as a vessel to get his point across to his specified group of audience, where as in the past I would take up more than half of the entire TOW to simply write about what the source was about and then cram the analysis in as last two sentences. This does not mean that I completely mastered analyzing sources to the deepest extent. Although I have been practicing, I still have to recognize the complexity of every issue by  addressing the questions "so what?" and "why?" properly. I feel like that I touch upon the surface of the topic, but I never seem to go deep into it to the point where my audience would derive any new perspective from my TOWs. I do hope that that will change once I practice my writings more in the future.

            I am very well aware that TOWs were designed to help the students with their analytical skills, and I think they really did help me with the essay writing during the AP exam. Although the TOWs gave me only a sense of how deep analysis can go in an analysis essay, they taught me other very valuable lessons: They opened my eyes to a variety of rhetorical devices that I would have easily overlooked (heck, I did not even know the term "rhetorical device" at the beginning of the year!) and helped me understand how each rhetorical gives off some kind of unique feeling to the audience. I realize now that with all the different combinations of different rhetorical devices, the author can portray the same message in many different ways ("many" would be an understatement...more like "limitless"?). In a very general sense, I think TOWs were really helpful simply because they forced me to write every week so that my writings would never be rusty. Although they really were a pain sometimes (they still can be), I am glad that I put my time and effort into them.

TOW #26 - WWF Advertisment

Somewhere out in the world, there is are species of animals that are slowly dying off. WWF puts this into perspective with a simple advertisement.

                            

                Pollution. Global warming. Animal Extinction. These are the biggest threats to the natural environments of the world and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century. While there are numerous environmental groups throughout the globe, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF for short) stands out from the rest with its five million supporters from more than a hundred countries and its clever ads. One of these ads is a very simple black and white ad lacking any kind of complex pictures or symbols. Actually, it is the simplicity that makes the ad so defining. The only picture the environmental group uses is the well known Metro Goldwyn Mayer logo, but as soon as one views it, he can tell something is amiss; the famous lion that proudly roars before the movie begins is nowhere to be found. A small message can be found in the upper right corner of the ad that reads "Wildlife is disappearing." Utilizing a popular reference and exaggeration, WWF effectively warns the viewers about wildlife extinctions with its unembellished advertisement.

                Using a well known logo was a smart move on WWF. Metro Goldwyn Mayer produced numerous films, so it is most likely that the person viewing the ad is familiar with the usual triumphant roar of the MGM lion before the screen fades to black and the movie starts. However, without the lion, the entire media company seems to give off less majestic feeling. When I saw WWF's version of the MGM, I realized for the first time how significant the big cat was to the company; without it, the logo looked so empty, sad, and weird, considering that something that I took for granted was simply gone. I am sure that this is the kind of the feeling that many other members of the audience feel  when they see the advertisement for the first time. By using the famous logo, WWF not only managed to connect me to the environment group, but also to connect me with other people who saw MGM movies as well.

                But the whole message of WWF seems to be exaggerated. How can environmental problems actually get rid of the renowned beast from the beloved movie producing company? The answer is, they can't. Unless MGM decides to change its logo, the feline is going to continue being the mascot even if the entire lion species goes extinct. However, this exaggerated idea allows people to consider a more realistic idea: what if the lion species does go extinct? It's quite possible, considering that lions are already endangered. When I saw the WWF logo, I first thought, 'Okay...it's not like I actually go to see wildlife animal other than on screens,' but then it occurred to me that in the future, lions and many other animals might not be seen anywhere other than on screens. That's a scary thought. By utilizing an exaggerated message, WWF creates a powerful essence of fear for the audience members to make them recognize that animal extinctions are real and daunting.

                With the use of a popular reference and exaggeration, WWF convinces its audience that animal extinction is a serious threat that often goes unheeded. WWF first cleverly connects all the audience members who know about Metro Goldwyn Mayer and then plants fear into them to warn about what would happen if the problem is not addressed properly. The message lingered in my mind for a long time, and I'm sure this ad will have the same effect for many other people as well.