Mentor Article Influence

Pavel Nunez

3/14/19

English 1121

Dr. Carrie Hall

 

Based on the mentor article, what influenced me about it was what looked like a disclaimer said “Before reading the article” and from there it explains what is the event and what’s occurring about it and the effects of it, it basically gives all the important details in the beginning so you have an idea what the rest will be about.

 

I will probably add this to my essay because the author is aware of what people will think right away so they try to get all the facts out in the beginning before reading the actual article and won’t develop a bia’s of some sort.

What I will try to avoid though is the amount of questions being asked, I don’t want the reader to go off topic trying to answer questions, I want them to focus on the article and summarize it

I will try to engage a normal middle class people audience since that’s the majority of the people here in the U.S. I will try to use statistics and data to engage the audience, like the amount of people killed by drugs(since that is my topic) and also use  a formal type of writing so that it will be easy to understand for everyone.

 

I see some of the mentor article elements  going into my essay because some of it fits well with the topic that  I’m going to talk about (which is drugs). It also use information from another source and writes it in quotes as evidence to talk about the topic and its impacts, So I’m going to use this in my article as well

Draft(pop culture)

Pavel Nunez

English 1121

3/11/19

Dr Carrie Hall

Drug Addiction

 

Every day,  a lot of people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious crisis in the United States that affects everyone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total  cost of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States was 1 trillion dollars since 2001 including the costs of healthcare, addiction treatment, and criminals. Before the 90’s this wasn’t even happening and everybody was fine, So what happened?

 

How did all of this began? “Well In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. This subsequently led to widespread diversion and misuse of these medications before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive. Opioid overdose rates began to increase. In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.That same year, an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 652,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder”. Based on the text you can see that drug overdoses are a huge problem in the United States, you can easily get addicted to it, Most of the drugs mentioned can easily be accessed by going to the doctor and getting prescriptions for it, while doing so they also recommend more than the safe dose you’re suppose to get so that is another unfortunate cause, Another is how potent the drug is. Some drugs are stronger than others and can make you develop cravings for it which prevents people from having a normal life without the drug(which they are addicted to).

 

The government overall is not doing a lot to help prevent this epidemic from getting worse but instead chooses to do other unimportant things like getting involved in another war that has nothing to do with us, increasing taxes, and increasing the military budget which is more than the 7 next countries budget combined . Even now the amount of people getting killed by overdoses of certain drugs just keep increasing and there seems to be nothing being done to help prevent this tragedy.

 

Mentor Article:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/learning/learning-with-nine-key-questions-about-the-green-new-deal.html

Source:https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/3/16079772/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdoses

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/13/585199746/cost-of-u-s-opioid-epidemic-since-2001-is-1-trillion-and-climbing

Pop Culture Response

Pavel Nunez

Basically  the writer is saying about  how “Lemonade” made use of explaining the black female’s body. The author explains how Beyonce’s album attracts people of black females(and make them the norm) and how the black female body comes in all sizes, shapes, and textures with all manner of big hair and also  to challenge the devaluation and dehumanization of the black female body The writer makes me have an understanding of the picture of a black woman’s life which was interesting. The author also portray black women to always be the victim and explains why.

What I learned from the article is that “Lemonade”  is showing a clear message to the readers of what black female goes through in this time and the history of it .

Also based on their writing, I would like to use the element of meaning in my own writing because in this article it gives more meaning of Beyonce and how black women are portrayed as the victim. One bad thing I wouldn’t add is how long the story is. To me it simply would make me lose interest if  an article has a lot of pages unless it has a good title that is eye catching. Another is 3 different things that relate to each other just like the article, which was Beyonce herself, black women and lemonade.

My Luck

Pavel Nunez

Dr Carrie Hall

2/6/19

English 1121

FINAL DRAFT

                                                            My  Luck

 

Sometimes in life I always get lucky and that’s just how it is . But it wasn’t the luck that helped me , it was the effort that lead me to that luck .A quick example of this would be the time Where I was walking upstairs to my next class which was in the 8th floor, I refuse to take the elevator that day because there was a lot of people in. But as I was going upstairs I saw a 10 dollar bill below the staircase where almost nobody could see it unless u looked a certain angle. I picked it up… I felt like the luckiest person in that staircase, It must have been a coincidence that day because I forgot my money at home.Going to the main story of my luck, the time this happened to was actually recent, When I passed my  Computer System Technology class. So it was the beginning of the semester of 2018 and this class was required for my major so I said to myself “ This class should be easy”. I was wrong(like really wrong) ,but that didn’t stop me from having doubts. It was an 8 AM class so that wasn’t really a good choice but I wanted to get out early so that was the trade off. At first the class wasn’t too difficult the following 2 months because we were doing basic stuff. But after that it was complex and there was a lot of rules to cover when coding, and I noticed people around me were far worse where I was. Some people would look over my screen after showing the professor my program that runs correctly. Sometimes they would ask me for help and I helped them but it was still difficult for them( I don’t blame them). But overall i knew what I was doing even though it was difficult to comprehend the material being given to me. Sometimes I would leave early because I already did all the classwork which was a good thing. Fast forward to November 6(which was the last day to drop a Class), I was debating whether or not to drop the class because I didn’t really like my major anymore(Computer Science) because I don’t think I would like sitting behind a chair just typing 100’s of lines of code for a complicated program while also being behind a computer screen all day long, I should’ve thought of that sooner but it didn’t come to mind until it was too late. I decided not to because that would’ve been a waste of time and money. The next day out of the original 30 students that signed up for the class only 8 people remained. But my friend that was in that class actually dropped it since it was too difficult for him. It was sorda disappointing that my only friend in that class decided to withdraw but it was his decision. Furthermore I had a test coming which I didn’t know about because I was too lazy to check the syllabus, I didn’t know what was going to be on the test so I just accepted my fate that I was going to fail the test. The day I took the test, I didn’t expect it to be almost the same exact things we had to as classwork, So I dodged a bullet on that one and I passed the test for it.So finally it was near the semester and I had to take  my final. Suddenly this person who I thought supposedly dropped the class showed for the final after nearly being absent for 2 months, My professor was actually quite mad at him but he couldn’t do anything so he just let him take the test, When the test started he only took a couple of minutes it finish it and left the class, even though there was around 15-30 lines of code that you have to write down for a few problems. One was about making a program that is able to calculate the GPA of your classes by entering the amount of classes, the grade for each class, and the amount of credits each class was worth. Another was typing the Radius and the Height for a given shape and putting the formula for each shape to find the volume of all the shapes, all of this was basically impossible to write under 20 minutes). Some people had to resort to cheating( No names) by looking up the program for the specific problem, the professor was just using his laptop and actually caught someone using their phone, He gave him a warning instead of giving him a 0 ( which was generous.), I said to myself “Wow, he was lucky”. So after finishing I just went home to sleep and hoped I passed the class. Then I checked my grade and I got a B+ thinking I would get a C or maybe lower. But in the end I passed.

Overall life isn’t mostly about luck but how much you effort you put in to get that luck. It something like this:You just don’t go in a store and expect to win the lottery ticket after buying a scratch ticket, you have to work and get money, then walk to the store and spend your hard earned money on a ticket which you will likely not win but it’s basically a  risky gamble

Draft Pavel Nunez

Pavel Nunez

Dr Carrie Hall

2/6/19

English 1121

 

Sometimes in life I always get lucky and that’s just how it is .But it wasn’t the luck that helped me , it was the effort that lead me to that luck . The time this happened to was actually recent, When I passed my  Computer System Technology class. So it was the beginning of the semester of 2018 and this class was required for my major so I said to myself “ This class should be easy”. I was wrong(like really wrong) ,but that didn’t stop me from having doubts. It was an 8 AM class so that wasn’t really a good choice but I wanted to get out early so that was the trade off. At first the class wasn’t too difficult the following 2 months because we were doing basic stuff. But after that it was complex and there was a lot of rules to cover when coding, and I noticed people around me were far worse where I was. Some people would look over my screen after showing the professor my program that runs correctly. Sometimes they would ask me for help and I helped them but it was still difficult for them( I don’t blame them). But overall i knew what I was doing even though it was difficult to comprehend the material being given to me. Sometimes I would leave early because I already did all the classwork which was a good thing. Fast forward to November 6(which was the last day to drop a Class), I was debating whether or not to drop the class because I didn’t really like my major anymore(Computer Science). I decided not to because that would’ve been a waste of time and money. The next day out of the original 30 students that signed up for the class only 8 people remained. But my friend that was in that class actually dropped it since it was too difficult for him. It was sorda disappointing that my only friend in that class decided to withdraw but it was his decision. Furthermore I had a test coming which I didn’t know about because I was too lazy to check the syllabus, I didn’t know what was going to be on the test so I just accepted my fate that I was going to fail the test. The day I took the test, I didn’t expect it to be almost the same exact things we had to as classwork, So I dodged a bullet on that one and I passed the test for it.So finally it was near the semester and I had to take  my final. Suddenly this person who I thought supposedly dropped the class showed for the final after nearly being absent for 2 months, My professor was actually quite mad at him but he couldn’t do anything so he just let him take the test, When the test started he only took a couple of minutes it finish it and left the class, even though there was around 15-30 lines of code that you have to write down for a few problems,which was basically impossible to write under 20 minutes). Some people had to resort to cheating( No names) by looking up the program for the specific problem, the professor was just using his laptop and actually caught someone using their phone, He gave him a warning instead of giving him a 0 ( which was generous.), I said to myself “Wow, he was lucky”. So after finishing I just went home to sleep and hoped I passed the class. Then I checked my grade and I got a B+ thinking I would get a C or maybe lower. But in the end I passed.

Overall life isn’t mostly about luck but how much you effort you put in to get that luck.

Gilyard’s Story

Pavel Nunez

Dr. Carrie Hall

English 1101

2/2/19

Well after reading  Gilyards story I’ve noticed that  he writes similar/differently than any other people that also write stories . Similarly he did a type of writing called a “autobiography” which is basically a person talking about his/her life(not all stories  do this).But what he did different was making the reader feel mixed emotions for him(I almost never see this). For example, he first told us that he did drugs(which is bad thing obviously), then he told us that he scored an average above the 80’s which is impressive and tried to discouraged his family from doing heroin, then proceeding to tell us that he steals other people cars…. This was easy to read because I didn’t know whether I should feel bad for him or just hate him, Although he did keep the story entertaining by keeping me interested on seeing the outcome of his life which was that  he “was out of the drug life” and ended up passing most of his classes. Also I liked the imagery he used on pg 157 which says” the truth of that proposition was as clear as the bright caps of angry oceans wave hurtling toward a shore in clear darkness. But he did use a lot of foul language which I’m not really use to when it comes to reading a normal story.

Planning ahead, I think I might add a chain of good or bad events in my story because it seems to keep me interested on what is going to happen and I’m going to use imagery to express feeling.