Ryan's Site

Kwame Anthony Appiah answers question about how identities affect on a daily basis and what is an identity. I was surprised that Appiah said that identity is a lie because I am a person that likes to find out more about people, so I can “identify” who they are as a person. Then Appiah explained that identities can bring people together but also push people way from one another. I can agree with that, every day we put people in categories based on what they wear, talk, or look like. I think that no matter how hard we can try we will always do that. I find myself every day seeing people and looking at what they are wearing and putting them in categories like if someone is wearing a UNE hockey hat I put them in a category or give them an identity of being a hockey player. One thing people think of when I say I put people into categories is that I make snap judgements about them or others. This is not the case, I judge people off their character and how they interact with me and others. I can usually tell if I’ll like someone in the first few minutes of talking with them. Talking with people and finding out where they are from and who they are and what they like is very interesting to me. I love hearing their stories from childhood and what they have been through to get to this point in their lives. I use my dad as an example because he is one of the hardest working people I know and one of the humblest people as well. I truly look up to him as a father and as a person.

My father grew up on the South Side of Chicago in probably the roughest neighborhood in the country. He jokes about how the music that put him to sleep was the sounds of the streets… gunshots, crying mothers, and police sirens. He enlisted in the marines and fought in the Vietnam War. While on his tour he was struck in the neck by a blunt piece of shrapnel that almost killed him. He then declined the Purple heart which is an award given to soldiers or their families that were a causality of war. I asked him why he did that, and he told that he felt his injury was insignificant to the marines that lost limbs or their lives. He then comes back and gets his master’s in project management and worked for companies like IBM, General Dynamics, Keene Inc., Global Foundries, and Boeing. I found all of these things my senior year when I was writing a speech for public speaking and we had to choose a person that has had a large impact on us. When I learned these things my opinion of my father changed because at the time I never would have thought my dad was that tough and determined. If someone asked me who he was I would tell them he is “harder than life, kinder than love.” This quote came from a man named Nick Yarris that wrongfully convicted of a rape and murder of a woman and went through hell and back being victim of sexual abuse as a child, struggling with drugs and alcohol problems, facing police brutality, horrible conditions and beating in prison.

While Nick was in prison he didn’t had a stutter from getting his “head bashed in” by the police after he was arrested for having drugs on him. He was angry at the world and wanted to get out of jail. He was in for drug possession, resisting arrest and attempted murder of a police officer. He sees the morning paper and sees that a woman was raped in murdered a few days ago and he told the police that he knew who raped and killed the woman and he would tell them if they let him go. He then gives them a name of a man that he thought was dead, but the man wasn’t, and he also had an alibi and Nick didn’t. The police charged him with the rape and murder of the woman and he gets the death penalty. He then spends 22 years in the prison system in the hardest prisons in the country. One prison that he was in for five years if you made a noise the guards would come in and beat you senseless. During those five years he decided that he was done being mad at everyone and everything and decided that he would learn to love. He would wanted to read and to speak beautifully so the day he would die he would be able to speak with authority and articulate words with utter passion and beauty. When he was convicted of rape and murder of the woman discovering the and using DNA evidence was just a distant dream. But after 22 years in prison he was exonerated on all charges after a doctor figured out the best way to match the DNA with another. Nick is now an author and speaker and has spoken in front of the UN about human rights and now lives a peaceful life in Oregon.

I think these examples of people that you can identify as hard working or mentally tough people. Not many people make it out of those situations. End of 60min

I look at mistakes as learning opportunities. It’s nice in the sense that you make a mistake and you can learn from it but then again you made a mistake. I made quite a few mistakes this semester ranging from grammatical mistakes to missing assignments. I remember back to writing my first essay about how eating animals is comparable to racism and how in my first draft it had grammatical errors and sentences that didn’t make sense. I also didn’t really know how to quote sources yet. One mistake I remember was embarrassing, I was stating the title of the book that peter singer wrote about killing and eating is comparable to racism and the title is Animal Liberation. But instead of writing Liberation I wrote Libertarian. Thankfully when I was reviewing the essay with Meghan she caught my mistake. That mistake wasn’t a huge deal, but it was just embarrassing. That mistake was me not paying attention to what I was reading now I always double check on what I’m reading and writing down.

I think most of my mistake that happen are a cause of lack of focus. Early in the semester I realized that I couldn’t do work in my room because I would get distracted by other people, my phone, the internet, and a bunch of other things. Making this mistake thinking I could focus on what I was doing in my room was a mistake. I look back and I remember when I was doing homework one day in my room and I had a thought about football came into my mind and I stopped what I was doing and immediately looked up “how Ohio State football players went on to the NFL?” Next thing you know an hour later and I’m watching news segments on Urban Myer’s scandals and I haven’t got any work done. At that moment I said I can’t do this anymore. I got up and went to the second-floor commons and went into the private study areas and finished the assignment. I realized that being in that environment that was private but open enough to where if I started to get off task I could quickly bring myself back because I would think that people were going to get mad at me for not doing my work. After I made that change my productivity doubled, maybe even tripled. I found myself getting work done fast and the quality of my work went up too. Those lack of focus errors decreased and I found myself getting more into what I was doing and having more fun doing it. Because I made that change everything got better. From that experience I learned that being around people, not people sitting with me but people around me, helps me stay on task. This was the first time I learned something new about myself and how I stay on task and improve the quality of my work and improve my productivity.

For me writing has always been a weak spot in my academic career and this class challenged me to expand my thoughts beyond on what was asked for through creativity and having least amount of structure as possible. The first big essay was the Pollen-Singer piece. Right away I was intrigue with the morals and I really indulged in what the argument. I find myself putting a lot of work into things that I find really intriguing. I find discussing things on a moral basis is a lot of fun. Even at night sometimes I think of something that would conflict with some morals that I have. I think of that analogy of you being a train operator and who’s lives would you spare. You are a train operator there is a fork in the tracks one going right and another to left. One person is on the tracks to the right and then the tracks to the left there are three people were on the tracks. You are in control of who lives or dies by a flip of a switch. I would choose to flip the tracks, so the train would go right. Now the situation changes and that one person on the right side of the tracks is your mother. Now my morals are conflicted would I want to kill my mother or save three people’s lives that I have never met? Or do I spare my mother and kill the three people? Everyone that ponders this scenario wants to be morally right but is this possible? This analogy relates to the Pollen’s article on eating meat. Is it morally right to eat meat?

Pollen, though out the article is at this moral conflict when reading what Singer has to say about eating meat. Pollen wants eating meat to be ethical and fit the argument that every organism’s life is valuable and should not be killed for humans. Pollen takes you through his thought process and what he discovered. Pollen at the end finds a farm that kills its animals right where they lived. He asks Singer if this was morally right and ethical to eat meat that was killed this way and Singer says that he could not have argument that would be good enough to prove that not being morally right. In other words he would not be able to condemn some one that eats meat from these places. While writing this assignment some challenges I encountered were, not knowing what I was doing and have no idea what exactly Eric was looking for. Even though he had everything laid out in rubrics I still didn’t know how things were going to go. After that assignment and the conference, I knew what to expect and what I needed to do to be successful. In the writing to a question assignment I knew exactly what to expect and the best part was is I got really into the article and the questions it posed.

The writing to a question assignment I chose and article that was based off a question of what do you do if medicine can’t save your life? I found myself questioning what my decisions would be towards the end of my life. I felt like everyone could relate to something like this because no matter what, whether it ourselves or a loved one, we would need to make a decision or see a decision made regarding the quality and the longevity of your own life or someone else.   The challenge here was finding what I wanted at the end of my life.

In high school I struggled a lot in English class. I would write papers with really good ideas, but I struggled communicating my ideas and advancing my writing from just a stream of thoughts to detailed ideas or an endless conversation. I would write and write for hours going back and rereading things and changing things, but I never had a way of changing the direction of the paper. I always liked that five-paragraph essay because it felt like it was template and I would think on first paragraph introduction followed by three body paragraphs, then a conclusion. Coming into college I didn’t have any rules other than focus on grammar, the five-paragraph essay, use words that could paint a picture for the reader (words like strolls instead of walks). Before my first college English class I was expecting it to be Eric going up and telling us to write a big essay on who we were and where were from. Instead we kept it low key and wrote how we felt about felt about this class and how we felt about English. Then after that first class I was thinking alright well now I don’t know expect.

I guess that it was kind of a good thing I didn’t come into college with lots of rules for writing because it made learning in class about general things we should be aware of when we are writing. One thing I learned was to have more thoughtful thoughts. Meaning when you are thinking find something that is interesting to you then find questions that will take you to different things that relate. Trying to write with my old rules didn’t fair out all that well I always thought that five paragraphs was sufficient when there were still a lot of things unexplained. This goes back to the thoughtful thought I should be having. If there were unanswered questions I obviously was not having thoughtful thoughts.

I would have never thought in high school that I would want to write more to explain something. I would just leave it the way it was. Another thing that I would do is become so stuck in one thing that I wanted to write about but not be able to because I couldn’t explain it with out making it overly long. So I would try to rush and under explain things because I thought I wouldn’t be ok for it being that long. Now I try to over explain things and the most articulate way. sometimes it I get lost and it becomes just a stream of thoughts all accumulating in my mind and I just move too fast for my own good. That usually happens when I get excited.  I have learned to slow myself down and concentrate on the important things.

The question or problem is and can be Who else is hating tech advances? Is there a point where we should stop? What other tech is there? Who else is chose this lifestyle? Someone that could be interested is just the average joe that wants something to read and someone wondering what he was thinking and what he wanted to get away from. Why did he go to the lengths he did to make a statement? Not really sure which one to pursue.

In society technology is everywhere. Even places that are so remote people have some sort or technology. Ted Kaczynski was very anti-technology. Ted Kaczynski otherwise known as the Unabomber was a domestic terrorist that bombed university’s, airlines and technology businesses, he ended up killing three people and injuring 23. He had a weird motive, he did it because of he thought technology would take over the world. Thought that he we would never be free from being controlled by technology he claimed that “freedom and technological progress are incompatible.” He means that technology will keep advancing even if we want it to stop. When I think of technology taking over I think of Syfy movies like iRobot and Terminator not real life where technology is so advanced that it is smarter than humans and can advance its self. Since Ted was so afraid of technology taking over the world he left his job as a professor and built a cabin in the mountains where he had no running water or electricity. He was truly off grid.

Reading how he ended up in mountains the article “The Unabomber Was Right” it reminded of a book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. In the book it follows a kid named Christopher McCandless on his journey to find a true transcendentalist lifestyle. Much like Kaczynski, McCandless graduated at the top of his class in college then left everything. He ended going all across the United States to get the Alaskan wilderness. No one really knows why he left such a good life. These two young men left society to pursue a self-sustaining life style but Kaczynski did it for other reasons than just that. Kaczynski was an extremist that wanted to bring light to the fact of technology is in control.

Questions I came up with Meghan:

Who else is hating tech advances?

Is there a point where we should stop?

What other tech is there?

 

When I was starting to read the article about how the Una bomber was right I knew very little about the motive and who this guy really was. As I indulged myself on who is was I came upon what was his manifesto. In the article didn’t give his manifesto so I was curious on what he wrote so looked it and it is long. He talks about how technology and everything was ruining society and basically how the world was coming to an end because of scientist and big businesses. I did some research on who he was really was and he was a really smart guy. he went to Harvard and University of Michigan. I thought to myself were there any other genius terrorist or genius murderers. So, I looked up “genius murderers and terrorists”. Found the first site and it was “10 Murderers Who Used Their Genius IQs For Evil” some of the names I already recognized were Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer. And right at the bottom was the Unabomber. I stated to then think well these are all from in the 1900s, what about more current day. I immediately thought for Stephen Paddock. I remember seeing a interview with his brother and his brother saying he was a genius and all of this stuff about how successful he was. The one thing we still don’t know about Stephen Paddock is why he did what he did. With the Unabomber he wrote a manifesto, but Stephen Paddock did none of that. When I thought about other manifestos I thought about Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Back in high school I took economics and my teacher was obsessed with Karl Marx. When I say obsessed she told us she loves Karl Marx and how she thinks his manifesto is the thing that can save world. She would always pull quotes from Marx’s manifesto and tell us. the one thing that Marx and the Unabomber have in common was that they all pointed out flaws of a current system.

Conference Two Report & Reflection

Feedback Report

The goals that I have set are for after Conference Two are keep learning and experimenting and try new things keeping up with homework and other work. I pretty much got goods on everything and I got a couple Oks and Excellent’s here and there. I need to work on introducing new implications or conclusions as a result of reconsidering evidence. I had a few errors in formatting of some of the block quotes and citing the paragraph number when quoting something. Another thing I need to work on is making a habit of annotating in detail of a text. Things that I did good is that my introduction was good, and my pivotal phrases and my transitions were really good too. I also did a lot of work outside of just the comments given I revised a ton of things. I worked with Julian on his paper and I think that went well.

Analyze/Reflect

For the things I’m doing well I am doing them well because I have met with Eric and Meagan and worked on those skills and worked them to becoming habits. The things that are not doing as well are the things I think I am doing at home more and not in class like annotations and the informal essays. Those things I need to work on more outside of class and make them a good habit.

Action Plan/Adjustments

I should continue to be engaged in class and apply things we go over and learn in class. I need to stop doing not posting picture of my work and I need to have more annotations and a running summery of the text. I need to start focusing on setting a reminder or something to get myself to take a picture of my work and post it. And I hate to using the example of making of making two annotations on every page but I think that is a very valid goal to have for me.

Life and Death

Ryan Sargent

How do you tell someone they are going to die?

How do you tell someone that they are going to die? How do you ask them how do they want their final months or days to be? Does longevity of life matter more than the quality of life? What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? These are difficult questions to ask someone or ask yourself. Atul Gawande sheds some light on what doctors, patients and the patient’s families should do when medicine can’t save your life. Gawande is a surgeon and a writer and in this article, he tells the stories of multiple people all from very different lives and different ages and different types of illnesses. The one thing that all these people have in common is that they all on the tail ends of their life. They all have some kind of terminal illness.

As an example of having a difficult conversation between a doctor and a patient Atul Gawande tells the story of a woman named Sara Monopoli. Sara Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when she found out that she was going to die. Her lung collapsed, and her chest filled with fluid. The doctors tested the fluid to see if it was an infection, but it was non-small cell lung cancer. She had done nothing to have this happen. Never smoked or anything. Her cancer was advanced and spread to lymph nodes and the cancer was inoperable. They tried everything to save her. They tired chemo, new drugs, and surgeries and nothing worked. The drugs she was given was just making her weaker. She didn’t have the strength to walk down a hallway. At some point the doctors and here need to find an alternative to aggressive treatment like hospice care or palliative care

Even though hospice care is one of the better options for patients that don’t want to suffer and go in peace a lot of doctors don’t recommend hospice care for several reasons. One of the most important reason is that doctors are trying to keep patients alive as long as possible in order to either make more money or because they are help save the patient’s life. I feel like modern medicine is so caught up in trying to keep the patient alive for as long as possible. Whether this is due to the fact the more the patient comes in the more money the doctors will make, or the doctors actually care deeply about the patient life and want to cure them I do not know. In Letting Go Gawande discusses ways doctors and patients can discuss “end-of-life wishes”. In paragraph 108 Gawande gives four yes or no questions physicians can ask the patient about end of life.

1. Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops?
2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation?
3. Do you want antibiotics?
4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can’t eat on your own?

These questions and having these difficult conversations about end of life care with patients and their families is very hard for doctors. Someone that has had thousands of these difficult conversations is Dr. Susan Block. She is a palliative-care specialist and is nationally recognized in training doctors in “managing end-of-life issues”. Block tells Gawande in paragraph 120 “You have to understand, a family meeting is a procedure, and it requires no less skill than performing an operation.” Block explains that doctors are so caught up in what people want and laying out the facts. Instead, Block says that “You are not determining whether they want treatment X verses Y. You are trying to learn what’s most important to them under the circumstances.” This brings up the question of what happens when these conversations only happen with patient and they don’t happen with the family.

For example, when I was young, around five or six my grandmother was very sick. My family and I were visiting her, and we had to wear scrubs and insure that we didn’t get her sick because her immune system was weak very. I remember being in the room and she seemed to fall asleep and all of a sudden, we were rushed out of the room. I was so young I didn’t realize what was happening. I stood outside of the door to her room confused as nurses rushed into the room and my grandfather was telling the doctor to do something, and the doctor said no. Then I was pulled away from the room from by my dad on the verge of tears. All I know my grandmother was alive and well two days later. She passed away six months later.

I found out the reason why the doctor refused to do anything was because my grandmother checked the box DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). I didn’t find this out till I was in middle school I never knew why people would ever not want to live longer. Isn’t that something everyone want’s? I couldn’t fathom that she would want to leave us. I then read the Letting Go. After reading Letting Go I then started to understand what my grandmother was probably thinking when she checked DNR. She was in a hospital and she knew that she was going to die soon. She might have wanted to die. She might had just given up and accepted death.  These are all questions that I think any of my family members would like to ask her. I would like to ask I would like to ask is why did she check DNR.

There are so many things she could say if she could answer. I would like to think that she didn’t want her grandchildren see her suffering any longer. Even though she lived six months after that incident her life wasn’t great. she spent those months in a hospital bed. Yes she was breathing and talking and could laugh and smile. But I don’t think she was happy. She seemed sad before we’d walk in. Almost like she was sick of life. Is that a good quality of life? Should she be trying to live out the rest of her life at home surrounded by family? I don’t think that this a good way to be living. I would rather have a short quality life than a long life. Living is much more than just having a heartbeat. Living is going out for dinner with family. Living is doing want. Living is being happy with your position in life. If that is in a hospital bed in your final days, months, or years as long as you are happy. At one point all of us are going to have to make the decisions for a loved one or ourselves and it comes down to what makes you happy.

How do you tell someone that they are going to die? How do you ask them how do they want their final months or days to be? Does longevity of life matter more than the quality of life? What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? These are difficult questions to ask someone or ask yourself. Atul Gawande sheds some light on what doctors, patients and the patient’s families do when medicine can’t save your life. Gawande is a surgeon and a writer and in this article, he tells the stories of multiple people all from very different lives and different ages and different types of illnesses. The one thing that all these people have in common is that they all have is that they are all on the tail ends of their life. They all have some kind of terminal illness.

When I was young, around five or six my grandmother was very sick. My family and I were visiting her, and we had to wear scrubs and insure that we did give any germs and bacteria to her because her immune system was weak. I remember being in the room and she seemed to fall asleep and all of a sudden, we were rushed out of the room. I was so young I didn’t realize what was happening. I stood outside of the door to her room confused as nurses rushed in to the room and my grandfather was telling the doctor to do something, and the doctor said no. Then I was pulled away from the room from by my dad on the verge of tears. All I know my grandmother was alive and well two days later. She passed away six months later.

I found out the reason why the doctor refused to do anything was because my grandmother checked the box DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). I didn’t find this out till I was in middle school I never knew why people would ever not want to live longer. Isn’t that something everyone want’s? I couldn’t fathom that she would choose to leave us. I then read the article Letting Go. After reading Letting Go I then started to understand what my grandmother was probably thinking when she checked DNR. I started to think if I was in her position in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of her arms and her nose, in constant pain, not around family and friends. Alone with machines keeping her alive. For what the next day to wake up in the same place not having strength to get up and go to the bathroom or go outside and breath some fresh air. I thought a lot about how I would want to spend my final days, months, or years. Would I want to be in a hospital bed when I already know the end is inevitable?

I am a realist. I can tell when its time do stop and find another way to do something. When it comes down to it and you get the news that you have a terminal illness and you know how much time you have left with lots of treatment and how much time you have with no treatment. At one point we all have to face this whether it a loved one or yourself. Without treatment you could extend your life and be in a hospital bed at the end. Or you refuse treatment and be at home at the end of your life.  What one would you choose? How do you want to spend it? Do you want to just extend your life? Do you want to be at home with family? What constitutes living?

Atul Gawande tells the story of a woman named Sara Monopoli. Sara Monopoli was pregnant with first child when she found out that she was going to die. Her lung collapsed, and her chest filled with fluid. The doctors tested the fluid to see if it was an infection, but it was non-small cell lung cancer. She had done nothing to have this happen. Never smoked or anything. Her cancer was advanced and spread to lymph nodes and the cancer was inoperable. There is no cure for lung cancer this far along. Sara tried chemo, new drugs, and had surgeries to drain the fluid around her lung (that didn’t work) so they put a permanent tube in her chest. She went home in between chemo cycles. She then came back to the hospital for and the tumors in her lung, chest and lymph nodes had grown a lot. She then tried another new drug that on average extended life by two months from year. She didn’t have the strength to walk down a hallway. And for what? Two extra months? A month or so after she started the new drug she had a CT scan that reviled that it didn’t work. The cancer had spread to both sides of her chest, to her liver, to the lining of her abdomen, to her spine. This part of life doesn’t make sense. Such a wonderful human that just had a kid and is now in this situation.  What now? Do they try something else or do they quit? They tried so many things and it still hadn’t worked. And at this rate the drugs that they are giving that are supposed to make her better are having side effects are making her weaker. Is this living?

Gawande explains how Sara and her doctors are trying to keep her alive long as possible. What would you do? I feel like modern medicine are so caught up in trying to keep the patient alive for as long as possible. Whether this is due to the fact the more the patient comes in the more money they will make, or they actually care deeply about the patient life and want to cure them I do not know. To me living constitutes as doing what I want to do when I want to do it. Like going out and  It constitutes as having some sort of independence over simple and easy things. Like eating, going to the bathroom, and bathing. Living to me has the most important things around. The most important things to me in order my health, my family, and my friends. If my health is gone I would want my family and friend to be there for me and take me places and not having the medicine that is supposed to make me better is making weak you just can’t move. That is living. Being with friends and family is living.