First They Killed My Father: One

What can I say, the moment I started reading the book I couldn't stop. Every night I would read for a good hour or two, get through a lot of pages. The way author Luong Ung illustrates her experiences as a child in the book allow me to create vivid images in my head. Only adding to the fact of how well she describes her environment. I have taken a nice liking to memoirs, especially after reading Night. Reading about other people's hardships make me aware of how lucky I am to live such an easy life compared to those who suffered.

As the book starts, Luong describes her luxurious life as a middle-class child in Phnom Penh. Her life was better than most of the people in her city, but she was a troublesome child. Her mother would always scold her but her father would back her up, often complimenting her actions instead of punishing them. She describes her large family one by one, using as much detail as she can so the reader can create their own image of the person. Luong assures us that she takes a higher liking to her father compared to her mother. It's a shame that this story of living a good life ends so fast. By the third chapter, things already start getting bad.

The transition to the jolly and happy-go-lucky feel of the book to a cold, ruthless feeling comes quick. The smoothness of the transition is pretty astounding too. I wonder why she chose not to go into much detail about her childhood at the beginning of the book. Maybe it's because she was so young? I don't know for sure, but that's plausible. She describes the situation the Khmer Rouge put her in as a "What will they do next?" kind of way, which leaves a somewhat mysterious feeling around the book. It always has you thinking of what'll come up next.

sandyduong: fly high!

If you haven't known already, my favorite animal of all the animal kingdom is the bird. If I were to describe them in one word, it would be majestic. A lot of their characteristics make me like them a lot. The way they scour the world around them when they're still or just chillin' with other birds, their flawless ability to fly, and overall their faux-or-not curiosity. I guess you could say I'm jealous of them. I don't know where or how my liking for birds developed, but I can take a few guesses. It could either be back in the Philippines, where I was told my brother had a coop of pigeons he took care of. I don't remember that, but I can still consider that a possibility. Another reason could be because I had about four or five Parakeets when I was really young. I always used to just sit down in front of their cage and watch them live their poor, restricted lives. Man, I made that sound really sad but it's true. Anyways, I would always just poke a finger inside the cage and let them nibble at me. I would get sad when they stared at my finger and didn't nibble on it. At that point I would try and provoke the smallest nibble. Haha.

If I had the choice of, and if it was possible, I'd jump to the choice of being reincarnated as a bird. I don't care what kind of bird, just a bird. My jealousy of birds gave me the desire to fly as high as I can. Up in the sky, I could see my world around me a lot clearer. No ugly buildings or streets to look at, because the only direction I could look at is down. Not a care in the world, flying over cities and towns observing whatever is going on below me, only swooping down if I see something that interests me. I could choose whether or not I would fly alone or with a really big group of birds who want to share a flight with me. Come to think of it, and sorry for ruining the flow of this paragraph a bit, but haven't you ever wondered HOW birds fly so.. cooperatively in the skies? When you look up and see a group of birds flying in the high skies, it's like they're putting on a show for you. It amazes me how they're able to fly together in unison, not one bird breaking their pattern. If one goes left, they all go left. If one goes right, they all go right. If one of them decide to go batshit crazy and fly around in some cool ass patterns, the rest follow suit. It's just AMAZING.

To be more specific, my favorite bird is the pigeon. They're probably one of the most smartest birds. But hell, every bird is really smart in it's own way. There's the woodpecker who figured out how to use its beak to get food, the crow and it's problem solving abilities, and much more. Still, the pigeon fascinates me unlike any other. It's evolved and became smart enough to actually live in cities, with humans. Most of us refer to them as a big nuisance, which may be kind of true, since they crap everywhere. But hey, to me they're still some awesome little creatures. Little flying scavengers huddling everywhere for food, scurrying away when someone walks by. I can't help but laugh when they walk, too. It's so funny watching their head bob with each step they take. Hahaha. I'm so weird. Those are only one type of pigeon we see, too. Another amazing thing is how we can raise messenger pigeons. They grow to be intelligent enough so they can deliver messages when it comes to a particularly long distance. All of these characteristics make me favor the pigeon more than any other type. It may not be colorful or flamboyant like other birds, but for its intelligence and curiosity.

And to end it with a cute little video: http://www.wimp.com/pigeonsubway/

Actually, there's been other instances of pigeons riding the subway. Look it up, haha.

hey, did you do the homework?

Oh really? Can I see it? Yeah, if you can't tell already, my topic of choice for this week's post is cheating. Inspired by Sutherland's recent blog post on the topic. I'd have to admit, a lot of cheating goes on in Alameda High. There's usually a lot of bickering between friends finding out whether or not they can or can't copy some homework. It's not just homework either, it could be classwork, tests, quizzes, and maybe even more. The amount of cheating that goes on around school is probably staggering, but not exactly surprising. With the 'fill-in-the-blank' type work, cheating would probably be more common, because it's the easiest to copy. Could you really call it cheating though? Could it be just students working together?

Why do we cheat in the first place? It's probably because we are too lazy to do it ourselves, or a person has done the work already and the cheater just wants the easy way out. No matter what, there's always a circumstance. Whether it be a person didn't have the time to do it, or if they were just too plain lazy, that person will always have two choices: Get no credit for that assignment or copy the assignment, but sacrifice the knowledge. Most of the time that person will try and find a way to copy, just because they don't want their grade to be lowered. But even if they aren't caught cheating, the consequences show up later when you're tested on the material and don't know how to do it. Because they copied it brainlessly.

Another idea I got from Sutherland's post was the awareness of our very own teachers. Are they really aware of how extreme the degree of cheating is around the school? I asked Sutherland that question when he posted it up on his blog, and a couple minutes into the conversation he asked his colleague the same question. He said that he was pretty aware, but he has took his own measures to minimize the cheating that goes on in his own class. But he raised another point. If the teachers are aware. what can they really do to stop it? I personally don't think teachers would actually take the time to crack down on every single cheater in their class. It would be too time-consuming and it would ultimately result to no benefit.

In fact, the above paragraph reminds me of an idea I was introduced to not too long ago. Natural consequence. A teacher would know who was cheating based on the test/quiz results of a student. Let's say a student has 100% on his homework, but his test grades are down the toilet. That has to be an obvious sign of cheating. It wouldn't make sense for a student who does all of their homework to do bad on a test. So I would also consider that an option as to why teachers don't exactly do anything about cheating even if they are fully aware. It would take too much time to crack all the cheating down, it would have little to no benefit, and natural consequence would take its course. It all makes sense.

power of failure.

I hate spacing out when I have blog posts due. I just end up being crunched up to the deadline or a little bit after when I realize what I need to do. Anyways, beside the ramblings of being late, I've chosen to talk about failure.

We often see failure as a bad thing. In general, if you fail at something.. you shouldn't exactly be proud, right? It means you have to improve and do something different next time to better yourself at whatever you failed at. So, when do you fail? Often times it's because you didn't try hard enough, or in physical cases, you're incapable and unskilled. But again, what does this tell you? Improvement is necessary.

When you fail, it's not just a horrible 'Aw shit.' kind of thing. It's also a learning experience as well. Every time you fail, you can look back, trace your steps, and see where you went wrong. By doing this, you know what you need to change or work on. This is basically the concept of learning from your mistakes. And we all know that already, don't we?

I'll give an example with an anecdote. Recently, I've been doing pretty bad in Math. Failing a few tests, slacking on homework, etc. I found out my grade and it was a shock. I knew I was failing, but by that much? Yeah. It hit me. I needed to reform my study habits in that class. I already knew what I was doing wrong; that was sleeping, not paying attention, and honestly, copying homework. I never learned the material, so when it came down to tests, I would just blank out and have an unwritten piece of paper by the end of the period. Upon realizing this, I was determined to make an extra effort taking notes, do my homework myself, and all the other things I was doing wrong. Hopefully things get better by the end of the quarter.

In a nutshell, failure is a learning experience. Fail and know what you did wrong, and better yourself for next time.