My favorite website

I know this is going to sound totally unoriginal and very expected but my favorite website would have to be........Facebook. It's definitely the website I go on the use the most. I'm not one of those people who has a thousand friends on their account, I just like to make sure I have everyone that I interact with on it. It's a great way to communicate, better than email for multiple reasons. You can post pictures for friends to see, update your status to let people in general know what's going on and send friends public as well as private messages. You can also get updated on friends' lives within fifteen minutes by just browsing. In fact, Facebook is so good that many people become addicted. I have multiple friends who have shared concern that they are so obsessed with Facebook and spend so much time on it that it has taken a toll on their grades in school. I don't think it will stick around for many more years though. There have been a number of websites before it such as MySpace, Msn and Aol messenger, which are all no longer popular. It's just a matter of time before someone creates a more advanced version of Facebook under another name and that is what everyone will switch to.

Do your zodiac sign traits describe your personality?

Woah! "Life Pursuit: Emotional and financial security. Secret Desire: To have a secure, happy and wealthy marriage." So far, very much like me, but who doesn't want that? Basically my sign says that I look calm on the outside but inside I'm running with emotions, that I am a very social person but in reality let very few people get close. That I am stubborn, and hide my true self and that is why I may be considered snobby or boring. It says that separate myself from the world around me and am closely associated with "feeling good" so like comfort, pleasure etc,. I especially enjoy all of the senses like touch, smell and taste, am an outdoorsy person and like to plan for the future. I guess some of this is true and some isn't. It's actually very hard for me to hide my emotions, even if I try my face somehow betrays me. People know when something is wrong and it's just hard for me to hold feelings in for long. I am social, that part is right, and as long as I see that you are a good person I let you in easily. I treat people they way they treat me. I used to be very stubborn and was told that a lot, but I have learned to open my mind up more and realize that I am not always right. I have had friends who have admitted to thinking that I was snobby before they knew me, maybe it's because I am not super outgoing when I am surrounded by people I don't know well, but the zodiac got that right. I do enjoy comfort very much, I enjoy relaxing and having slow bummy days where I don't do anything. I also absolutely love food, perfume and nice clothes. And finally for the last trait that says I am an outdoorsy type of person, that is definitely wrong. The only outdoors activity that I like is going to the beach, and that's because you can just relax and lay there soaking in the sun.

Something that changed my thinking.

It wasn't any one event or experience, it was more like a series of events and experiences. I guess it started once I entered high school. I had new friends and old friends and was surrounded by a lot of new people. As time went on I lost some friends and it wasn't a peaceful kind of separation, normally it was b/c of something really stupid that left us both angry and hating each other. There was also drama with people I wasn't close to, over things like boys, rumors and just calling each other out on things. I always felt like it was never my fault, people just felt like fighting and being catty and it happened to be with me. And honestly I still feel like that about a lot that happened, because I am not the type of person to start something unless I absolutely have to, but I am the kind of person to finish something. And that's exactly how my attitude developed. When someone would come at me unreasonably or disrespectfully, I had to make sure I let them know that I didn't take that lightly. I would make a huge deal, get into a fight (not physically but verbally) and made sure to put that person in their place. It didn't always work out of course, but basically the outcome was always the two of us becoming enemies. But I felt like I had pride and principles and if those people weren't going to respect them I wanted them to know that I wasn't cool with them and didn't like them. So roughly five years later I now realize how much better and less stressful life is when it's enemy free and when you don't hate anyone. I have to say, for a person with my personality it takes huge effort to be nice to someone that I am having a conflict with instead of just telling them off, but you feel so much better at the end if you made a friend instead of an enemy that it is totally worth it.

Films or text? Why?

I've known the answer to this question for many years already, it's nothing that I have to think about. I prefer films simply because I learn faster when I have something visual to demonstrate the information to me. I think a lot of people are that way. It make sense, our world is a visual place so when we have to learn new things we are probably going to learn faster, better and overall more efficiently when it is actually demonstrated to us. Also, oftentimes films can somehow give a message or a feeling to a person that is very hard to express in words, like the saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words." But there is also another difference that I have noticed between the two different learning styles. I pick up visual information faster but the information that I take out of text sticks with me for longer. I think it's because when you read you have to figure out what the text means and how to retain that information yourself, but in a film you have someone else already explaining all the info to you. Because you understand it right off the bat you don't worry about remembering it as much. So the less effort you put into learning material the faster you will forget about it. But that's just me, it is probably totally different for many people, as we all know we are all very unique.

Education in the US: are we falling behind?

I myself don't know any statistics on education differences between U.S.A. and other countries. But I do know that the U.S. economy is doing way better than the economies of many, many other countries, so we must be doing something right. I also got the chance to attend school in Ukraine for almost four years so I can use that experience to reflect upon a little. What I remember was that I started out first grade (which in Ukraine you start at seven years old) by making very good grades, all A's I think. As I went up in grade levels the material became harder and gradually my grades declined. The teachers were very strict, I remember being terrified of being called on by the teacher every day because I knew that I couldn't give a perfect answer. I would sit with my mom behind my desk at home and have her try and tutor me in math for hours and hours before I could go outside and play. When I mentioned that my grades declined I didn't mean that they were bad, I meant that they weren't all A's anymore so I was still OK, it was just getting difficult. Also, in Ukraine everyone skips the forth grade (I have no idea what the reasoning behind this rule is) and jumps right into fifth. So the school is divided into two parts, grades 1-3 with all the little kids and grades 5-11 with all the older kids. Once I started the "older kids school" that's when it really became very difficult and it was also the first time I received C's on my report card. Fortunately, I did not finish fifth grade in Ukraine because I moved to America that spring and jumped into 6th grade the following fall. Throughout my middle school career I got mostly A's and it was a breeze, in high school I had a GPA of 3.2, and honestly I didn't even really try because I knew I could get good enough grades by just doing the minimum. So yes I think that maybe we are falling behind in education but so far we are still ahead of other countries in many aspects so I don't think it should be considered something of immediate concern.

Thoughts on Plagiarism

Plagiarism is cheating, and cheating, just like shoplifting or violence is a question of ethics and moral value. I know that some people consider both cheating and shoplifting as OK things to do. Their thinking is that as long as you aren't hurting anyone by what you do and only benefitting yourself, it's not that bad. For me, I just don't do it because I don't see the need in doing it. First of all you have to spend hours online searching for the perfect pieces to plagiarize, then you have to make them all fit together, and then you have to be worried everyday until you get your grade that you will be caught and kicked out of school. To me it's not worth the risk or the stress that comes along with it. There are other consequences that come along as well, that people don't consider. When we use someone else's material instead of making ourselves analyze a topic we don't exercise our brains in that area. We learn from everything we do and by simply copying we limit the amount of academic learning achieved.

Is there a diffrerence between racism and classism?

Racism is when there is an ascosiation with something negative or prejudice against a person/people that is based totally or mostly on their race. Classism has the exact same idea to it, but you just have to eliminate race from the definition. Although both of these definitions include groups of people being judged solemly from those traits, racism and classism are not the same thing. Race and class may be interwined with each other, escpecially in a very diverse country, but it is still definetly not the same thing. They are two different issues that take similar form when it comes to prejudice. If we classify those two as the same thing, then we could also add many more to the list. I do not know the word for this type of prejudice (all I can think of is "shallow-ism"), but what about people who don't want to associate with someone because they look unattractive to them? Or what about people who don't want to associate with people who don't seem as smart as them? I don't think there are words for those types of prejudice yet, but I am sure there will be. That is why it is important to recognize the difference between the different types of prejudice. All of those are a completely different topic that can each be discussed in depth.

How to end homelessness in America?

I realize that this is probably a very complex question and that many people and organizations have spent years on trying to come up with solutions for this problem. I don't know exact statistics of the number of homeless people in the United States but judging from the visits that I have made to large cities and smaller cities, the homelessness level in large cities is a lot higher and they seem to have many homeless people. If it was up to me to come up with a plan to get people off the streets and back on their feet and I had unlimited funds,  I would first start out by getting statistics on the number of people living on the street. Then I would build shelters, and build enough so that everyone could be taken in. People would receive all services for free at the shelter, such as food, showers and sleeping arrangements. They would also get free employment agency services so that they could eventually save up enough to move out of the shelter and stand on their own two feet. And in an attempt to prevent homelessness, I would set up a program to which a person could go to for help if they felt like they were on the verge of becoming homeless. The program would provide some financial help as well as a plan to get out of the hole. That way the cycle of homelessness doesn't just keep going and I wouldn't have to keep building more and more shelters. 

What is truth?

One person's truth in a lot of cases is not another person's truth, that is why it is so difficult to define the "real" truth. But after thinking about it for a little, I came up with the conclusion that truth can be classified. First there is the concrete truth, scientific truth, that pretty much everyone agrees on. For example, that 2+2=4 or that using the quadratic formula on an equation will tell us what x equals to. There are many truths from that category that we still don't know, and often times that type of truth changes changes with time as scientists make more discoveries, but for the time being, everyone agrees on it. The second type of truth is the type that a large group of people believes in. Examples of that are certain religions and cultural beliefs. For example, catholics believe that all the stories told in the Bible are complete truth, but there are many others who don't. Another example would be cultural superstitions, in Japan a lot of people believe that if they cut there toe nails at night they will not get to be by their parents' side when they are dying. And finally the third type of truth is when a person is convinced something is the reality and the truth in a specific situation and another person believes something else is the truth in that situation. It's when each individual has a different view point because of the different things in their life that they have been exposed to, which have influenced the type of person they have become and their thinking process. I guess I would call that type of truth a personal truth, when you might be totally wrong according to many people but in your eyes you are seeing the truth and they just cant see reality.

Is this the end of books as we know them?

I personally really believe that the answer to that question would be no, it is definitely not the end to books as we know them. The video that we watched on that device that can store many books in itself was pretty cool and impressive. It's basically to reading material, what ipod is to music. The ipod did kind of lower the CD sales by ALOT (I don't even own s single CD but have close to a thousand songs on my iTunes) so if we look at previous records one might assume that the Kindle will do the same to books, but for some reason I just don't feel like that will happen. I would much rather read text from a regular book, to me there's just something about an actual paper book that isn't transferable to an electronic device. Books seem to have meaning when you pic them up, they have passed through various people's hands and others have shared what you're about to read. To me that makes the text more valuable. I may be totally wrong about this and people might be carrying Kindles around ten years from now like they do with ipods already, but for some reason I just have a feeling that books will stick around for a long time.

The U.S. and Neocolonialism

At first, not really knowing what neocolonialism meant I had to look it up, and found out that it’s “the economic and political policies by which a great power indirectly maintains or extends its influence over other areas or people”. So basically, in a language more familiar to me, it’s when a rich and powerful country (like the U.S. or England) sees something appealing, or something that could be of use and bring profit, in another, disadvantaged, way less powerful and wealthy country (like Jamaica or the countries in Central America). It’s not something that I have learned about a lot in school, which I think might be for a reason, since U.S. seems to like to neocolonize other countries. I think that U.S. getting involved in other counties can be good, but only if the intensions of that involvement are pure and will save lives and will overall make the life of the residents of the other country better off than what they were before U.S. invaded. And I think that the U.S. invading other countries is a totally bad and abusive idea when it does so to gain more wealth for the country at the expense of others, doesn’t respect the residents and how our actions will affect the quality of their living, and to use that other country as a puppet in order to gain more power for U.S. in the world. Sadly, the second scenario seems to be the more frequent one so at this point in time I would have to say that U.S. getting involved with other countries’ business shouldn’t happen and that I am against it.

Why learn academic English?

I think that the single most important reason to learn academic English is so that you come off professional, experienced and intelligent in a work environment. So that when you have something important to get across, weather it's to your boss or employee, it comes off effectively and your statement sounds powerful. You aren't going to get anywhere with anyone if you can't find the right words for the message you mean to deliver because then you will come off unsure both of your message, and yourself. If you are assertive with your language you will seem like a person who wants and will get things done, and that’s the kind of people there is a demand for out there in the real world. The reason I picked the work place as the most important reason is because none of us really use the formal way of speaking at home or with our friends, when we’re relaxed and not worried about keeping a job. But most of us will be at work about eight hours a day, five days a week, so we might as well learn academic English.

About Me

Hi guys my name is Ilona Gomez and I am 18 and a freshman at Northeastern. I am also somewhat new to Chicago, I moved here from Madison, WI at the beginning of last semester. I am originally from Ukraine and speak russian fluently. I am taking English 101 because it's a requirement and I really hope that it helps my writing and makes me like to write more. I am taking a total of five classes this semester and I only took three last, so I am still getting used to the load. For my free time I like to do activities like taking work out classes, catching up with friends, shopping, eating at favorite restaurants, and watching TV shows. I live with my cousin Ashley only a few blocks away from school so I walk here every day. I love to talk and laugh and yeah that's pretty much a quick summary of my life.