Literacy Blog 8

http://news.yahoo.com/pills-made-poop-cure-serious-gut-infections-150405405.html#

I personally think these pills were a great idea. It sounds gross, but when you think about it, what other kinds of pills to people take? Fish oil and other things can be a part of a person's pill list. I would much rather take the pills, which I'm sure is tasteless and is a quick and easy process, rather than getting a fecal transplant. The phrase 'fecal transplant' just FEELS painful and nasty. I definitely wouldn't want to undergo something like that. I think it was very clever to design the pill with three layers of the gel like substance so that it wouldn't dissolve until it reached the intestines. This is very important because if the pill dissolved in the stomach, the fecal matter would be in your stomach and can cause further infection, I assume. And also, if you had gas while taking the fecal supplement, your burps would taste pretty much how your farts would smell... in most cases, pretty foul. I think that scientists will definitely be able to "test freezing the stool, which won't kill the bacteria, so it could be stored and shipped anywhere a patient needed it." If they have accomplished this much, they can most likely make these fecal pills shippable.

Literacy Blog 7

Evaluate the current SAT process based on evidence from this article.

Based on this article, how prepared do you feel you are to take (or retake) the SAT’s writing portion? What practice or instruction might you still need?

I feel that this writing essay is a bit unfair. Many people probably don't understand that the accurateness of their information isn't being evaluated. I feel that there should be two different writing parts, one on time and one on accurateness. I feel that testing a student while under pressure in a good thing, so that you can see how they perform under those circumstances. However, I feel that accurate information is important as well. I feel that if dates and names aren’t right, then the student has no idea what they’re saying. The whole essay is basically about improvising. The one quote that grabbed my attention the most was “There’s really no concern about factual accuracy,” says Gere. “In fact, the makers of the SAT have indicated that in scoring it really doesn’t matter if you say that the War of 1812 occurred in 1817. The complete lack of attention to any kind of accuracy of information conveys a very strange notion of what good writing might be.” I just couldn't quite believe that this is how they actually graded the tests. I also couldn't believe that they typically only spend two to three minutes reading and evaluating the essays. I honestly think that these essays may give a false sense of greatness about the students writing them, because someone with a 2.5 GPA may be more persuasive than a 5.0 GPA student. But in that twenty-five minute period, that difference in intelligence level might not be noticed. Overall, I think that the SAT is a good way to evaluate which colleges you can get into, but it may also need to be tweaked a little bit in order to become more positively affective to students and their futures.