Learning new things

In class we watched two videos on Ted.com, one about a man, Sugata who is researching if how children learn and if computers and the internet is a good way to do it, and the other about woman named Jill who had a stroke and is explaining the experience that came with it.

In the video he shows slides and videos from when he put computer in the wall in a slum in India, and how the children use it even if they have never touched a computer before in their live. It also showed how the children suddenly were able to search the internet for information's, it's amazing how fast children can learn to do new things, the guy even made 12 year old girl from India learn little biotechnology in university english in two months, I think that's awesome. ;)
Then he went on with his research and expanded it to more countries, like Africa and England. He but up skype conversations where women in England help children in India to speak english with understandable accent, and working on building centers where children can study together with big screens. He is now working on bigger research that will take time and lot of work, but I really admire him for his dedication on this research and how many children he has helped.

Here is Sugata's video

The other video was about woman Jill who had a stroke, or bleeding in her left center where language, letters, numbers and that kind of things are. She described what it was like and said it was like a hole another world where she could feel the energy and the universe around her, and how she was puled in and out of it. Must have been scary but amazing at the same time, though I hope I wont have a stroke ever.
But I liked how she looked at it as a big adventure or experience, and focused on the thing she discovered and learned.

Here is link to her video

Subject for essay

I have been thinking really hard of topic to write an essay about and couldn't think of anything and it's been driving me nuts all weekend. Finally in school this morning we were talking about hobbies and it came to me why not write an essay about something I love doing?

So my essay topic will be karate, and compare it to another self-defence sports :)

Essays

Today in english class we were assigned to go over how essays are supposed to be structured when you write them.
The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is a very good page to gather informations from.

Essays have a basic blueprint with three main parts: a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The beginning should engage the reader's attention, state the argument, and provide an essential context so the reader has a sense of "so what?" It should do more than say something like this: This essay will look at Amazon.com. A good introduction should pose a problem: Jeff Bezos became a billionaire after founding Amazon.com in 1995, but his company has yet to make a penny of profit. How did Amazon get so big so fast? Can it sustain its remarkable growth? And will Amazon and scores of other high-profile dot-coms ever become profitable—or are they built on a flawed business model?

After the beginning, the middle is where you actually make your argument—where you grapple with the problem you've introduced. Here's where you bring in background material, tell your story in detail, and work through the argument step by step. These logical steps typically unfold in paragraphs or clusters of paragraphs (whole chapters, in a book).

Finally, the ending is where you remind your reader of what you argued, and make some larger point that sends him off with a satisfied feeling that he's learned something worth learning, that he hasn't wasted his time.

The simplicity of this structure is kind of reassuring: it means that you already know how to design good essays. But the simplicity of this standard design also poses a difficulty for you, because it means that to your reader there's nothing immediately distinctive about your essay. The frame—introduction, body, conclusion—is so general that your reader is going to need a lot more guidance to get through your particular argument.

Make sure your essay has a title. It should not be italicized or put in quotation marks (if you are giving the title of a book or essay, or using a quotation in your title, then you use the appropriate style.) The title should be more than a bare-bones identifier (like Essay #1 or Essay on Management). It should signal to the reader what your essay is about (like Deming's Total Quality Management Perspective or Jefferson on Slavery).

Just thought this was both educating and funny:
It's true, for instance, that one should be careful about using split infinitives, simply because most readers have been trained to recognize them as a mistake. But that's not the same thing as saying one should never split an infinitive, or that split infinitives violate some real law of language. Sometimes a split infinitive is just the most graceful and rhythmic way to say something. What if Captain Kirk, cowed by his English teacher, had said, "Boldly to go where no man has gone before." That sounds prissy rather than soaring, doesn't it? 


I found another good page how you are supposed to write five paragraph essay:
BookRags Article