Mirror of Thoughts

This post is a reflection on my blog since I started blogging! It was something new for me a whole other way to share my thoughts in a better way. I learned a lot from my experience and I hope that I taught someone something as well. It was like being in thought mode another whole new mode in a game that you are playing the game of life. I’ve always spent a lot of time think of what to write about and I always wanted something new; something that no one else has done before so that I can enjoy my blogging experience to the maximum. I achieved a lot of stuff through my blog that I never expected myself to be able to achieve and I was successful in what I achieved that is why i’ll try as much as I could to keep blogging at least twice a month even if this school year is over.

What did I learn from my blog?

I learned how to write to an audience that can reply to you with their comments and thoughts on what you wrote and interact with you and this is my first time actually writing for an audience because all the essays we do in school are just directed toward no one and the feedback we get on them doesn’t really help us improve as writers, in my opinion, teachers just check them but they never tell you what you need to work on. On the other hand, blog posts can help you get better feedback from a wide community. I also learned how important pictures are, how to choose pictures to put on the blog, various styles of writing and techniques to improve posts #thinkingtuesdays. I also learned patience as many times I made posts that didn’t get views at all but hopefully they would someday. I learned how to think in a broader way rather than focusing on addressing a specific audience, I learned how to use the right tags and a lot more and More and MORE.

What worked for me is what I expected to work the least I wrote this one post about evolution of communication, it was one of my first posts that i thought was horrible, and i still get views on it until this day. I never expected a post to get that much views alone. Like seriously this post gained more views than all my other posts combined for some reason. I think it is luck. People say it because of my last name that I get views from all over the world, however, I don’t have my last name on the blog and I never posted it. I’m really proud that all these countries decided to visit my blog. Currently I have 80+ countries that visited my blog thanks to that one random magical post that I once made. I’m really curious to know though are the rest of my posts worse than that one? or is it just that the audience interested in the communication topic more? I really don’t know.

What I would do differently next time is probably share my blog out more and try to improve my topics to make them more interesting for people that is what I’m planning on doing for my very next post to find a topic that interest people a lot. My advice for next year bloggers is to ALWAYS TAG their posts that is how they get the views because no tagging equals no views. I tagged every single post since I started blogging never missed one. That is why I started off strong by receiving eight likes on my very first post. I would also advice them to share more and do something interesting that people at school need for example I made a resources page for my fellow classmates of AP European History before the AP test and they were actually useful resources that led people to check my blog more often during this week of AP testing. It was a very smart move, I need to confess it.

I think maybe for next year Mr. Theriault you can have like a day every two weeks where the whole class just brainstorms ideas for blogging so that when they go to the computer lab they wouldn’t be stuck in thinking like I was. I really think discussing several ideas where each student adds an idea would be awesome because the students would be more eager to check their Reader more often and visit each other blogs as well. 

At last I would like to thank you for giving us that blogging experience during high school as it might help us now and later in our lives where we can enter the global conversation!!

Technology For Children: Is it good or bad?

Throwback to childhood whenever I was bored I used to play Lego and pick up my nose, no just kidding. When I was young I actually used to love watching Tom and Jerry that I can almost recall every single episode if I watch like the first five minutes. I also used to play with Lego, make puzzles, or mostly play with my sister random board games or do any activity outside the house. It wasn’t that bad. We had fun together and enjoyed our time in a simple easy way. They were good days, however, now all that is gone.

What does the life of a child consist of now? All the parents nowadays should know specially those who work because their children are not provided with enough supervision. The child’s life consists of Video games, eating, TV and maybe some studying. I got a phone, used by both of parents before me, when I was in seventh grade and I was as happy as a clam until I realized I was so behind in technology that as soon as I got a Sony Ericsson phone the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and it spread so quickly. I remember seeing my friends playing the game Subway Surfers, which was popular at the time and I couldn’t play it because my phone was not smart enough. Although I was sad at the time, I’m happy now.

Enough talking about myself and lets take that to another perspective, a worldwide perspective. Is technology beneficial for children? I don’t think that technology is god or bad but it depends on how each individual uses it, for how long and for what task. These days children are just given ipads with like 70+ games and subscription to a Cable TV including cartoon channels and that is all what they need to survive. This is extremely dangerous and when it is time for the child to enter school they will be inactive, unsociable and won’t be able to use their brains properly because all what they are going to be thinking about in class is “I can’t wait to show my friends the new high score I got yesterday after playing for four hours straight!” Well hopefully that is not what they are thinking about. I know some kids that are so obsessed with their ipad that they need to take it with them even to the car. That is getting too common and extensively unhealthy.

There are several alternatives to using the ipads as a tool of entertainment. I understand that it might be hard for a lonely child to have fun by themselves in the house while their parents are busy with work, however, I believe it would be easier for a lonely child to have more fun by himself rather than a child who has siblings because if we suppose that they didn’t have their ipads, I know it is hard for them but let’s just suppose they had a tool consisting of a set of colors paper and other materials this is going to open their imagination and opening imagination leads to creation and there is nothing better than having your own creation that makes you proud of yourself and your abilities. What are you going to benefit from getting a high score in a game. Nothing. This is not something that you created as a child that you should be proud of because someone is going to beat this score and you are going to forget about it before your friends do. 

Technology can harm young children by damaging their eyesight from a young age, causing them to be socially awkward when they grow up because of their isolation at home and making it harder to focus on studying when you are so addicted to a game, I mean not only young kids do that but also high school students and sometimes even adults are addicted to games. It is how much control parents posses over their children that determines a child future because I see some parents that just give their phones to young children so that they can play whenever they are bored or whenever they start crying. It is just so sad how children are regretting nature more and more often. It is the earth that grows a man:

If you had never tried digging in the sand how are you going to plant,

If you had never fixed a toy how will you be a skillful boy,

If you had never tried playing basketball how are you going to get tall,

If you skip your chance, you will never have it again.

These lines may sound stupid but they actually make a point if you never participate in any sports, events or activities and just stayed at home setting your mind on laziness mode you will never achieve anything and will just stay like that your whole life so that is why i’m addressing children because they still have a chance to change. Don’t feel like you are going to be super bored without phone, you might be bored a little bit but there is always something for you to do.

Living without a phone until the end of sixth grade actually taught me a lot of lessons like patience because I wanted the phone impatiently that i kept bugging my parents with it at least twice a week. They just wanted me to focus on studying more than playing and wasting my time and they did the right choice. I learned that nothing is necessary except when it is needed some people think that if they didn’t buy this shirt or this jacket today that the store is going to run out, close forever or disappear, maybe even if they don’t need it now they just but it for their friend’s birthday coming up in nine months. New things will come out fashion comes out and spreads too quickly and I learned tons of lessons that I might know or might not know about because sometimes we learn thing but we don’t really know where we learned them from. 

The Language World

C’est incroyable. It is amazing how we can learn several languages and use them easily although they are not our mother languages. Learning languages is very important. I can imagine myself now standing in front of someone whom I don’t understand because he is speaking a foreign language. My first impression would be laughing at him and at myself. At him, because what he is saying sounds funny in my ear and at myself because of the shame realizing that I don’t understand him. I just don’t want to be like that guy in the picture and have people tricking me because I don’t understand them.

What really makes me sad is when people lose their home language because they could have worked hard to keep it and they didn’t. It is their fault and their parents fault that they didn’t try as much as they can to keep their home language. People think that if they migrate to another country then they don’t need their own language but it is your roots, it is your identity and where you came from you just leave it behind carelessly instead of being proud of where you came from. For me i’m very proud of where I came from and I would never deny it like other people that I met. I always like it when people ask me about where I came from because I get to tell them about my country, our traditions and our awesome language. It is great.

So remember that before learning a new language your home language should be safe and well known by you because why would you learn a how to write in a different language when you can’t write in your own? It just doesn’t make sense. Back to learning a new language a lot of people don’t want to learn languages because they think it is not important since they are not going to use these languages,and because they don’t have enough commitment to sit and learn for long time (maybe about 1 year of daily practice to master a language) so my advice to everyone who wants to learn a new language is to make a schedule which is easy and follow it which is harder and practice daily or at least weekly because if you forget a language that you have YOU FORGOT IT and it would be nearly impossible to learn it again.

There are a lot of reasons and benefits for why you might want to learn a language and I find this source very helpful because it has detailed reasons about why you might want to learn a language. For me as a high school student, I currently have three languages which are Arabic, English and French. I really enjoy that experience of having these languages and when I went to high school in the United States, I was able to skip two french levels out of four and go directly to the third level. This was a great advantage for me because I was required to learn french when I was young in my school and I’m glad I was. You are not going to lose anything when you learn new languages but you might not benefit at the moment as well. This or these extra languages you have are going to be useful later in your life not immediately but I’m pretty sure you will get to use them one day.

I don’t understand why they don’t teach children foreign languages in the United States and other countries from a young age because the language should stick with you the most and stay with you when you love it which is very important to love what you are learning and when you learn it from a younger age. I think public schools should start taking this step of teaching an extra language because as you grow older your tongue grows heavier and it becomes harder to pronounce some vowels or even whole words in different languages so start now when you are young. My last and final advice is please, please, please if you are a foreigner never lose your home language. Your language is your IDENTITY.

 

Evolution of communication

The best way of communicating actively is sharing your ideas. Ideas are everywhere around us but we don’t think of them or try assembling them except when we have a task to perform in a group. Individually we tend to perform the tasks we are required to do without thinking further than that to solve the daily problems. All of the people have problems, however, they tend to hide their issues because they are either personal or they don’t want other people to use their problems against them one day and many other reasons that I can’t think of right now. It happened to me once that I told someone a problem that I faced and then he kept asking me about this problem every time and shared the problem with others. Communication is starting to evolve slowly as more people are using social media than actually talking to each other because people aren’t courage to face each other any more and social media is easier for them when they don’t want to waste efforts explaining things.

Communication is evolving quickly now. One word answers are the trend nowadays, people are tending to use the least effort they can because they are so busy everyday from work to studying to researching, etc. The world is changing quickly without us realizing, and unfortunately we are affecting it negatively. Technology is surrounding us everywhere and affecting the pure natural environment which is hard to find these days. The problems that everyone faces can always be corrected in several ways directly or indirectly. People try to keep upgrading communication in a way that makes people communicate with each other less frequently. For example, the photos people used to take for a long time were printed and digital photos, now the “selfie” concept is the most dominant everywhere. We like to improve ourselves as this is the human nature which tries to be as comfortable as possible in this world where comfort is hard to obtain. However, improvements ,specially in technology, are going to affect communication negatively as time sprints through the track of life.

The topic might be hard to understand because I like putting all the ideas that are related to or form the concept that I am trying to help the reader get and fully understand.