segunda-feira, 26 de novembro de 2012

How Barack Obama being Elected Effects my Life and the Rest of the World´s

Barack Obama, the first black president of the most powerful country in the world has been re-elected for a second term, winning from his republican adversary, Mitt Romney. It will affect the world basically, since most of the countries in the world have some sort of relationship with the U.S. Most, if not all of the nations in the world, agreed with Obama´s re-election, with the exception of Iran, since the bombardment there made Iran's conflict with the U.S increase. Therefore, this means Obama has a worldwide aproval to be where he is. Personally, I agreed that Obama should have been re-elected, like he was, since his strongest opponent was completely unprepared to mosst of the debates and kept making remarks that were completely wrong (like his wise Geographical remark of how Iran had only one connection to the sea).

terça-feira, 23 de outubro de 2012

Blog Post #3- Time Management


Many strategies have been discussed throughout the class, but the strategy that I have most been using is writing down my work in the "reminders" app in the iPad. The field that I can most improve in is how to complete my work in the due time, which would mean to end one of the major causes for teens not to finish their work, procrastination. Since 11:30 I have been on the cell phone with this blank blog post page opened in front of me, and only started working now, 23:50. If I could work on this procrastination issue, my work would be much easier to be done in time.
I have basically not achieved my goals yet, since they are long term. I wish to have at maximum only 2 late assignments this quarter, when in the last I have had plenty. If I can achieve this goal, I will increase it to only one next year (second semester) and be able to say I have accomplished my time management goals. Today, another thing that affected my time management for this blog post was the server shortage of Edmodo. I should also work on the fact that there might be things that I can’t predict happening around me that would greatly decrease my grade.

domingo, 9 de setembro de 2012

Post 2

In the last International Studies Classs, we met the college advisor from a college in Ohio. From what I heard from her, their college is weak in therms of Med courses and Law courses. The college appears to show support in terms of accepting International Students, and seem to be willing to shape their expectations to the students level. From what I could see from the Advisor, she was trying to make her college not sound so bad other than making it sound a good college. She kept pointin g out the downside of the colleges and how we could make up to htem, like how we could take pre-med at their university and then switch schools. The way she showed that they don´t have a fixed requirement to enter, like a GPA of 3.0, can cause you to think that grades aren´t important at all to enter a university.
Some fears and concerns that I have are how do they manage the International Students scholarships, and if we are double agents (in case we were born in another coutry, in that case, the USA, and live in Brazil) are we still counted as International Students?
Also, in this conference, I learned that SATs don´t count much in some Universities, and they take the TOFEL to analyze if a student can join or not.

domingo, 19 de agosto de 2012

"In our first two weeks, you have read two articles, seen several videos and been engaged in several discussions related to the concept of academic leadership. At this point, and in your own words, what does the concept mean to you? What subjects or interests do you have a sophisticated, intellectual understanding of that you may want to turn into a major academic project in this class? How do people sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others? How would you feel if someone used your work to manipulate others (as Jared Diamond claims Mitt Romney has)? How can creating academically sophisticated, intellectual leaders help prevent such people from taking advantage of others the way they do? How can this create a stronger democratic society?"     


Academic Leadership to me means on how you can lead your own learning to success. It´s how you can make your academic life easier. Also, it teaches us a little bit about our other classmates, as well as shows us what is good for us to do in life. For example, in the last class, Mr. T showed us his life story. Not his life story, more of his school career. He showed us that he learned what he had to learn with life experiences. He also showed us the Challenge-Happiness graph, which teaches us how the level of the challenge influences on how well we feel about it. An interesting intellectual subject to be used in class would be the requirements to enter in universities in the U.S.A (besides the GPA and the SATs). People sometimes abuse of knowledge to manipulate others by distorting information, for example, Al Gore, that used his influence to explain the Global Warming, which scientist say isn’t true. I would be mad, because I worked hard on a work for someone to disclaim it as easily as that. Creating academic leaders will help because they will be able to show people which type of information is right or wrong. Which information should be trusted and which shouldn’t. If the society has strong academic leaders, than people will be more democratic and have a more reasonable sense of choice about their political leaders.