Class in America

Money is a very important aspect of the "American Dream" and of living life in America.  We are said to be a very materilistic county, and that money is one the most important things in our lives. Because of the importance of money in our society, it is said that we will do anything to get cash in our pockets. From things such as cheating the justice system, engaging in filmed sexual interaction, and going to college. According to the Componets of Class in the "New York Times" it is said that in order for a person to be more in the upper class it is neccessary to have a great deal of college completed.   I am not meaning to step down on the "New York Times," but I do not see this as accurate.  I do not believe that one needs to attend college just to be financially successful in life. There are many examples of people that do not go to college and are still successful; people such as artists, musicans, and businessmen. These occupations are seen in our everyday lives and it seems important that they be apart of this statistic.
In the matter of connecting this to "The Great Gatsby" I came up with the example of the character Gatsby and how he did not attend college.  We all know that he worked his way around the system, and that his money really didn't help him too much in the end.  We do know that he was very successful man financially.  He had a lot of money and truely wasn't afraid to show it. " On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains". This passage from the begining of Chapter 3 really shows how much money he has and how he uses it.  It prooves that even though Gatsby did not attend a great deal of college he was financially successful and really showed it off, similar to how we do in America.

Robo- Readers YUCK

When it comes to the growing population in the United States,  the Educational Testing Service has all of our testing grading handled.  Robo-Readers have been introduced to our society as grading machines.  They are able to grade 16,000 essays in the time span of one minute, and some may say has accuracy to a living human being.  With our rapidly increasing population it seems to be the only way to aid teachers with the more essay based learning that President Obama has proposed, but the main question is , is it accurate?

 According to a study made by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation the human graded essays and the computer graded essays had very similar grades. On the contrary, Les Perelman, a director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the machines have many flaws.  She states that they set a very limited and rigid standard of what good writing is.  She also adds that they do not know what truth is.  The machine is not going to know if your facts are wrong. A student's fact could be 200 years off, and the machine would simply not notice or even care.

Like Les Perelman said these robo-readers are going to have a very specific guideline for what all writing should be like.  They are going to prefer longer essays, longer sentences, longer paragraphs, and larger words.  It would be simple for a student to make there paragraphs longer and use grandiose words just to achieve a better score.  The substance of an argument is quite irrelevant, the more "sophisticacated" a person sounds the better the essay will score.

Are these Robo-Readers going to replace our teachers? Will our younger generation eventually be solely learning from teachers? With most studies and therories completed, the answer seems to be no, but only time will tell...

Maps

In this map I notice how large the description/title is for the map. In comparison to the whole state of Carolina it really is the exact same size as the most southern point of Carolina.  I’m not sure exactly why the artist of the map decided to make it so large, but I was thinking it was maybe just to emphasize how important  Carolina really is and exactly how excited the new settlers are to live/ or discover this area.  I think that this map narrates the story of how English settlers were hoping that Carolina was going to be a valuable piece of land, which is similar to how English settlers felt about the rest of the undiscovered land.  In Babb’s writing she says “this map is particularly significant for its revelation of how colonial powers saw themselves in relation to the lands they sought to conquer.”   In this quote she isn’t exactly talking about this map, but I feel as if it is very relevant.  In this map there is a picture of a crown right in the middle of Carolina representing ownership and money.  Also like I stated earlier the description is quite large representing how valuable this land could be for the settlers.

http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps/1676s6.jpg