Persuasive Essays by Ms. Zubiri's Period 5 English class - December 2010

                                          Why Is Headgear an Issue at Venice High?
                                                                By Edgar Gutierrez

        Wearing hats, beanies, or any type of headgear shouldn’t be an issue at Venice High School. Staff assumes that hats are gang-related, but not all students are related to gangs. Just because a student wears a specific hat doesn’t mean they are in a gang.
    People believe this issue relates to gangs for the reason that members wear these type of  caps. It’s true that certain gangs do wear certain hats, but it’s not right to judge a person by the way they dress. Most of the students at Venice High don’t like the fact they get their hats taken away and are made to bring their parents to pick up the hat. In the winter season many students get cold and decide to wear beanies. Same with the summer, many students wear baseball caps for prevent sun burns. Staff should be less strict about this hat issue and more strict on other problems like drugs, alcohol, bullying, and violence.
    Most of Venice High School fights are started by gangs not by hats. Wearing hats or any headwear doesn’t mean you gang-related. This rule should change and only be applied to those that are gang-related. Many students would agree on banning this rule, but its up to the school board, and district.
                                                                                          

                                             More Students Should Graduate from High School
                                                                By Yadira Castaneda
                               The Los Angeles Unified School District should make sure that more students are graduating from high school.

A View of Standardized Testing by a Test Scorer

Teacher Dennis Danziger passed along this eye-opening article that starts like this:

Standardized testing has become central to education policy in the United States. After dramatically expanding in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing has been further enshrined by the Obama administration’s $3.4 billion “Race to the Top” grants. Given the ongoing debate over these policies, it might be useful to hear about the experiences of a hidden sector of the education workforce: those of us who make our living scoring these tests. Our viewpoint is instructive, as it reveals the many contradictions and absurdities built into a test-scoring system run by for-profit companies and beholden to school administrators and government officials with a stake in producing inflated numbers.

 

Read the rest of it on the website Truthout: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer 

Posted Wednesday 01 December 2010

by: Dan DiMaggio 

Making a Sports Video

This lesson will address:
Calif. English Language-Arts Standard L&S # 2.4:
Deliver multimedia presentations:

• a. Combine text, images and sound by incorporating information from a wide range of media, including films, newspapers, magazines, CD-ROMS, online information, television, videos and electronic media-generated images.
• b. Select an appropriate medium for each element of the presentation
• c. Use the selected media skillfully, editing appropriately and monitoring it for quality.
• d. Test the audience’s response and revise the presentation accordingly.

Goal: In this lesson, journalism students will create a 1-minute video of a sports game to be placed on the school’s newspaper website.

Microsoft Office Training for Faculty

Here are simple-to-follow instructions for training yourself on numerous Microsoft Office programs like Excel, Word and Powerpoint. I also include a link to LAUSD information on how to best use your school e-mail.

Helpful Links for English and Journalism Students and English Learners

Helpful Links for Venice High ESL, English and Journalism Students and Teachers

Ms. Zubiri has created this very useful page of links that will help English and journalism students and English learners. It includes links to many journalism topics, info on discovering your reading level, Photo of the Day from world-famous photographers and the Scholastic Press Law Center. It will also take you to reliable websites for topics you may be writing about, such as sex, pregnancy, medical topics, art.

Descriptive Memoirs

Students will choose a moment in their lives that they remember specifically and write about it. Students will write at least three drafts of their paragraph, which should be at least 8-10 sentences long. The final draft will be typed into the comments section of this post. The teacher will then grade it and post it online as a public comment. Students do not have to identify themselves by name in the online comment. They can use a pseudonym.
See examples of other students' memoirs. (National U. Classmates: See examples of other students memoirs, and make a comment on them on this post. Follow the instructions at the bottom of the assignment. Or just comment on my blog. Thanks!)

Brainstorming and Initial Drafts:
This assignment will begin in class. Your teacher will help you choose three such moments, and then you will pick one -- the one that resonates the most with you and which you can write about with the greatest detail.  Use strong, active verbs and adjectives. Include lots of sensory details, such as how you felt, what the scene looked like,  the sounds you heard, and tastes and smells if there were any. Your first draft will be written longhand, double-spaced, in class. You will show this draft to another student for peer editing.