Zach's Blog

I made this wordle from all the posts on my blog before Thanksgiving.

For Thanksgiving my mom’s family goes to a different person’s house every year. We have a big potluck dinner and the sweet potatoes my aunt Pat makes are always burned. After dinner we play board games like balderdash and risk and sometimes card games like phase ten or five crowns. My dad’s family get together at my Aunt Janice’s house in Fort Wayne, IN every year the saturday after Thanksgiving. My dad has 5 brothers and 5 sisters so the house is always packed. We have a big potluck dinner and the potatoes are always the first things to go. Of the two I prefer my mom’s family’s Thanksgiving because we do more games and less talking, but that’s just me.

First trimester this year I had Mr. Moore for technology. I learned a lot in his class such as how to make a glog and a doppleme. I also learned all about the features of Mac like grab and drag and drop. I had lots of fun learning how to make and maintain a blog and a website. My favorite thing we did in Mr. Moore’s class was making Animoto videos. Overall I am sorry to see it go because it was a fun class.

My Information came from this article from the Lansing State Journal.

According to MSU experts the job market for college graduates has hit bottom and probably won’t improve anytime soon. Luckily, the market is at rock bottom and can’t get worse. It might take some time but as long as the market stays stable, experts don’t think it will get worse. That’s not to say this won’t be hard year for everyone, because it will be. Michigan is hurting and everyone knows it. ”
While large and midsize companies continue to downsize, many business with fewer than 500 employees are poised to grow and hire recent graduates,” said Phil Gardner, director of MSU’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, which conducted a study. The best thing for a college grad is to check your contacts, Employers are more likely to hire someone they know then having to go digging through resumes. Michigan has one of, if not the, the highest unemployment in the country. This makes it difficult for students like Jennifer Orlando.
“It’s difficult because I would like to stay in Michigan because I’m from here,” she said. “It’s kind of sad to see all these great minds leaving the state, so I’d like to stay here and contribute to our society.”

I am not a fan of school uniforms. I feel they restrict a students freedom of expression a right given to students in the United States. I also feel it would be a financial strain on the less fortunate, it would make them buy almost a whole new wardrobe just for school. In my opinion uniforms take away from student individuality, it makes them feel part of a “system” instead of being independent. That would crush student creativity I think. In compromise I think schools should be allowed to say what students may not wear. That is called a dress code, and I think that would be better then a uniform because it still leaves room for creativity and individuality while still preventing inappropriate clothing. All in all I believe uniforms should be required only for private schools where people have to pay money (other then taxes) to go, dress codes provide a less strict option while still leaving some breathing room.

Retrieved from pics4learning.com

I choose this picture because it’s a castle. My favorite time period is the Middle Ages and castles were quite popular then. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a castle. I always imagine that it would be full of secret passages and rooms. I would love having the whole place to myself. Castles were the best line of defense for any king/warlord, except for possibly a lake or a large desert. Castles, while easy to siege (a siege is where the enemy surrounds the castle and doesn’t let anything in or out ) could hold out for a long time. Other then that the only threat to castles are battering rams and siege ladders both of which could be easily repelled.

Overall I think I enjoyed my time at Hayes better then at Delta Center. There was a lot more to do and while at times it seemed I had too much going on, I always found a way to make it work. I also enjoyed middle school because switching classes meant if you didn’t like a particular teacher you were only with them for an hour each day, and if they were an encore teacher only for a trimester. From middle school I have learned how to better manage my time, how to have fun on but still be safe with the internet, and I have learned a lot about every core subject things like my constitutional rights, the properties of matter, or even what the quadratic formula is. I find it hard to believe it is the end of the trimester already. It feels like just yesterday it was the last day of 6th grade, when it’s really been years.
It’s scary how fast life moves sometimes.

If I were President for a day I would take the funds Obama used in the stimulus and use it to convert the U.S. to more green fuels instead of oil/gas. I would also launch n investigation of state educational budgets and how they are cutting. I would make the governor(s) cut percentages per student instead of set dollar amounts because it’s not fair when one school district gets cut 50% and another only 20% (that’s only an example, I can’t imagine anywhere cutting that much). I would also make a plan to slowly remove troops from Iraq slowly so that they become more self dependent and stop relying on us for everything. (Not that they do now, but still). Finally I would advertise that I thought we should not drill for oil in Alaska and instead start switching to greener fuels. If we drill there we destroy an animals habitat and for what a little more oil that will just pollute the air more hurting even more animals as well as ourselves.

Baseball “command” is split between the pitcher and the umpires. The pitcher starts the play when he throws the ball and the umpire ends it when he/she makes the call. Personally I would rather be an umpire because they do the same thing every play even if every play is different. While a pitcher has to know what they want to throw, how fast to throw it, and how to throw it an umpire only needs to read the rule book, which the all the players, pitcher included, should read. The Umpire also only has to watch and remember while the pitcher, after throwing the ball has to watch and wait for an opportunity. To me that seems really boring. An umpires works just as hard as a pitcher though. While an umpire doesn’t do much physically they are always watching and thinking and making calls. They are also some of the most disrespected people in baseball. Despite this I would still prefer to be an umpire then a pitcher.