The relationship between technology and the human brain have expanded throughout time. Cell phones are an example of improvement to the human brain because of the amount of brain activity being used. Having cell phones help brain activity by bringing our attention to what we use it for; this helped enhance research in schools, transportation and work. The majority of people in our generation who have phones could cause others to feel a variety of emotions. In classrooms, if we do not understand a topic, we could pull out our phones and search ideas up. Many forms of transportation has created apps to help their customers manage their time or prices to help them travel. Lastly, the work field has also reinforce technology to help communicate with employees, managers as well as customers.

Nowadays in our classrooms, we are expected to have an email address in order to receive either news from our teachers or from the school itself. Since technology has been expanding, cell phones are the one electronic we carry on a daily basis. Because of this, we are able to do research in class using the phone’s Internet. According to the newspaper article on LexisNexis, Cellphones in schools: Toys or Tools? Principals say they can be both, which explains varying rules on their use, it has been stated that “Parents and kids rely on it for communication. Some use it as their clock, camera, planner, entertainment system, news source and encyclopedia. The phone is only a tiny component of this high-tech palm-sized computer. Which is why schools eventually will be forced to rethink cell-phone rules.” Schools are now changing the way the rules are set up because of new advance technology as well as the idea of having a cell phone with you at all times helps both child and parent to keep in contact for emergencies or other purposes. Since child and parent aren’t with each other during these hours, parents would want to know where their kids could be or how their kid is doing without them. For the child, they could be in a position where fear could happen and need to call for an emergency; this goes for anyone who is in need for an emergency depending on the issue. Books and textbooks are now evolving into ebooks and PDFs which also could be used during school hours if a student can’t purchase the printed version. Due to this new way of reading, schools are bound to use electronics in their lessons. Our attention is usually focused upon our phones so if books are now online, we start to read more which can help us build up our learning. Also communication has become stronger since we are able to give any form of communication such as a number, social media site or an email to our classmates either for help or for what the homework was if you missed class.

Trying to get to one place to another in the city can become difficult so we usually take either the bus, train or car. Since trains can unawarely become delayed or if you are running late and need to know when to catch the bus, there are now apps for these things. Many other transportation systems also have apps such as Ubers, Taxis and airplanes on when they arrive as well as how much they pay. Cell phones help us know right there what to do when a train is postponed by looking for the nearest train available; same goes for buses. An interview with Destiny Perez has had her share in use of her cell phone and feels it depends on how we use our phones for transportation use. “They are useful because it could be used for emergencies such as what if you get lost and need someone to help or use it to help get directions,” Many teens/ young adults face these issues the majority of the time they need to travel to school or work. In order to get to school/work, we need to think and memorize frequently. We first need to think about time, what I mean is that we need to first ponder about how long will it take to reach our destination. Will there be delays? How long do I have to wait for the [insert transportation system] to get to this street? What if I am late? Well, this is where memorization comes in. We need to look at our phones then go to Google maps and figure out the approximate time. After that, our brain starts to rethink over and over what we researched and try haptic visualization.

Although transportation has its pros, there are cons to the use of phone on this. “The fact if someone is driving its not useful to use it [cell phones] while driving because that will distract them and it could lead to an accident.” (Perez 8) Using cell phones while we are in control of the type of transportation system such as driving, riding a bike, etc. can obviously cause some sort of mishap. Sometimes apps or websites on our phones can have malfunctions and can cause us to struggle finding an alternative to our destinations. Our attention is focused on our phones occasionally that we don’t look around us and never know if we are in danger by waiting for the bus, train or just crossing the street. “The people who are more willing to frequently engage in cellphone use are higher-risk drivers, independent of the phone. It’s not just a subtle difference with those willing to pick up the phone. This is a big difference.” (Rick 2) This demonstrates the idea of multitasking which can lead to many catastrophes. Lastly cell phones can cause us to be late to school or work by giving us wrong directions to where we need to go if we find another way to reach our location.

The work field are now requiring cell phones in order to be able to work because “technology today makes us have it mandatory.” (Gil 6) Since technology is advancing through our time, cell phones have also been starting to be apart of our daily lives. Marisol Gil has a mixed feeling about cell phones being a distraction in her work field, she says “It is actually a distraction when people allow it to be.” This meaning that phones can be useful at work, but it’s our choice to use it wisely or not get anything done. Although she says this, she feels cellphones “make us more savvy, which means it makes us more alert and aware.” Having a cellphone in the work field helps us with new ideas of how to communicate with customers, managers and employees. Depending on where you work, cellphones could be used differently for instance, working in retail. There are cellphones that have new ways to pay for your items as well as fast food areas. Many customers use a new technique of paying for their purchases by using their phones to help. There are now these devices you can install on your phone called the “card reader” which helps customers pay on their phone if you are doing online shopping.

   These electronic devices might progress overtime if we let it to be. Maybe in the further future a new device might overthrow cell phones and our brains will start to adjust to that device. Our brains will become stronger due to the amount of attention we start producing towards our phones and using it in our daily lives.

                                                      Work Cited

• Lincoln Journal Star (Nebraska), August 31, 2009 Monday Correction Appended, THE (402); Pg. D1, 1579 words, ERIN ANDERSEN Lincoln Journal Star

• Nelson, Rick. “Drivers, Cell Phones, And Smart Cars.” EE: Evaluation Engineering 51.10 (2012): 4. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2015.
• Perez, Destiny. Personal Interview. 24 Nov 2015
• Gil, Marisol. Personal Interview. 27. Nov  2015

Sandra Gil
Prof. Ellis
Eng101
07.November.2015

My name is Sandra and I attend New York City College of Technology as well as wanting to pursue a career in teaching grades k-6. I am in the School of Professional Studies trying to receive my bachelor of science. My major is the career & technology of education, but I am planning to transfer schools in order to focus on teaching elementary school.This career will suit me because I always had a passion for teaching ever since I was young and I admire the curiosity, imagination as well as creativeness of children. In high school I was in a program dedicated for students who wanted to become teachers. Since I was in this program, I was able to get experience from teaching an elementary school for a whole day and encounter how kids behaved. I really enjoyed helping others as well as appreciate seeing kids learn something new. I feel that getting a degree can also help me get a step further in order to pursue my profession.

I chose to attend City Tech because they provide a teaching program, but when I attended a class for that major, I was taught mainly technology which wasn’t what I wanted to aim for. My major only helps us become technology teachers, but my ideal of what I wanted to focus on wasn’t technology, but rather early childhood education. According to the City Tech College Catalog 2015-2016 my course work will prepare me for “a comprehensive hands-on program to enable students in kindergarten through 12th grade to develop technological literacy” ( College Catalog 131). Since the major I am in now won’t really help with my career path, I could use the information I am learning to help me with my occupation by learning how to communicate with kids the proper way. Becoming a teacher in New York State requires a bachelor’s degree.

To become a public school teacher, I would need to be certified or licensed in order to teach. In the Occupation Outlook Handbook, “In order to receive certification, teachers need to undergo a period of fieldwork, commonly referred to as student teaching. During student teaching, they work with a mentor teacher and get experience teaching students in a classroom setting.” ( United States Par.3) I would need to take a course that could be referred in the City Tech College Catalog to take EDU 2601 ‘Internship in Classroom Teaching’ and EDU 3601 ‘Internship in Classroom Teaching.’ Both internships are “designed to expose the pre-service teacher to the classroom environment and to the daily routines of classroom teaching.” (College Catalog 134) Meaning that I will be able to observe how a teacher from any middle school functions and I would try to gain experience for “6 hours of classroom experience spread over two days per week.”(College Catalog 134) I would need to arrive at the middle school only two days of the week and write reports, reflective essays and I would need to be able to schedule meetings to discuss what I have learned during my time there.

In my program back in highschool, I was taught a variety of useful tips to help me when it comes to my occupation. We learned how to create objectives, mini lessons, class activities as well as questions to give to the class and used laptops to create powerpoints. After we created a whole lesson plan, each one of us would be scheduled to present for a whole class period. Being able to teach my classmates in a professional manner will help me get acquainted in front of a classroom. If I want to pursue a career in teaching, Public Speaking is a major quality I would need to be able to do. Referring back to the City Tech College Catalog 2015-2016, I would need to take “COM 1330 Public Speaking” ( College Catalog 132)  in order to reach my requirement for certification.

Qualities that I would need to be able to have in order to successfully become a teacher would be communication skills, Creativity, patience and resourcefulness. Communication plays a huge role as in “Teachers must collaborate with teacher assistants and special education teachers. In addition, they need to discuss students’ needs with parents and administrators.” (United States Par.4)  This implies that as people who deliver education to students, we would need to talk amongst each other as well as the student’s parents in order to help a child’s needs.Creativity is when “teachers must plan lessons that engage young students, adapting the lessons to different learning styles” (United States Par.4)  which brings me back to when I was learning how to create lesson plans for my previous class and how to come up with creative ideas to keep the students engaged. If I am going to be teaching an elementary school when I am finished with school, Patience is a must. “Teachers must respond with patience when students struggle with material.” (United States Par.4)  Many kids will feel as if they are pressured to rush into getting an answer instead of taking the time to understand the problem themselves. Lastly, Resourcefulness is a “need to be able to explain difficult concepts in terms that young students can understand.” (United States Par.4)  When I was teaching my old classmates, I had to teach them in the same level I was in, but with children, I would need resourcefulness and try to clarify any response in a child’s level.

I really don’t know how I got into teaching, but it naturally happened when my sisters were able to start talking. I was around the age of 6 when I started getting into teaching. When I went to school, I was aware that I would mimic some techniques from my teachers in order to get an idea of how I should corporate towards my sisters when I do teach them. I realize that since my sisters and I are family, maybe I treated them differently than what I actually thought a teacher should have which can relate to an article on Professionalism of Early Childhood Teaching( PECT).

In the article Teachers’ versus parents’ perceptions of professionalism of early childhood teachers, Teachers convey their students differently than how their parents would regarding their child. Due to this concept, many children pick and choose who to treat better depending on how the other adult corresponds. “The purpose of this study is therefore to understand and identify the differences between teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of the various characteristics of PECT.” (Tzuo 118) Meaning that a kid’s behavior and personality could be the result of either teacher or parent. When becoming an educator, I would need to understand each child’s preference and try to work with it since they are learning to grow up. Usually in elementary school, students are being raised by their parents and “the study also indicated that parents perceived as less important than teachers the factors of ‘understanding a child’s needs’, ‘skills of interacting with children’, ‘professional development’ and ‘valuing of ethics’.” (Tzuo 125) The significance of this shows that parents rely on teachers to educate their children and help them learn new ideas. Parents aren’t trained to do what teachers were taught; Teachers were taught courses like “ EDU Child and Adolescent Development and EDU 2455 Methods and Materials for Special Needs Students.” (College Catalog 135)

My plans to excel in my major is to earn enough credits to make a transfer first. Once I finish, I could then focus on general courses because I could never know if I would want to switch careers. After I finish that, I would probably make a decision and try to go for an early childhood education major. I would try to find a job within internships and see if I do enjoy my career path. I will try to balance my schedule since I sometimes can’t seem to manage time well.

           Work Cited

New York City College of Technology- College Catalog 2015-2016 (City Tech)
New York: New York City of College of Technology, 2015. PDF

United States. Department of Labor.Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Early Childhood Education Teaching.” Occupation Outlook Handbook. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012. Web. 26. Oct. 2015.

Pei-Wen, Tzuo, et al. “Teachers’ Versus Parents’ Perceptions Of Professionalism Of Early Childhood Teachers: A Mixed-Methods Study.” Australasian Journal Of Early Childhood 40.2 (2015): 117-126. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Sandra Gil
Prof. Ellis
Eng 1101

    My name is Sandra and I was born and raised in Queens, New York. I attended school all my life in Queens and I am 18 years old. When it comes to what my interest are, a variety of thoughts either come up or I’m completely blank. For a person like me, it takes a lot of self evaluation to realize what I do or don’t enjoy. I am into art, photography, writing, travelling and cooking, but what has the most meaning to me is fashion. Fashion can be a broad topic, but for me it has much more meaning than just putting on clothes or trying to put fabrics together. For me, fashion is how you show your clothes to express who you are as a person as well as be creative with what you own.

Growing up as a middle child with 4 other siblings, money has become a major milestone in our lives. Although my mother makes enough money to buy what we want, there was always a saying she used that I still follow up to this day. She would say:

                        “ I only buy you things you NEED, not things you WANT”

By that she meant that if you want something that was used for entertainment or was unnecessary such as electronics, toys and accessories, we had to either earn the things we wanted or save up and buy it ourselves. Now most of us remember that time when our parents or guardians took us back to school shopping as a kid and forced us to try on clothes from department stores. My mom took me to this store called ‘Kid City’ and I wouldn’t really understand what suited me. I think as kids we don’t really care how we looked or whatever we wore would have a meaning behind it later on in life. Usually once you hit puberty and all the kids around you start to change, its when you start to realize not everyone is going to stay the same. I started to find myself through clothes and also YouTube; there were many YouTubers who had their own videos on how to create either a shirt or a hat and change it into something else. For someone who is finding themselves at a very young age, seeing other people take a simple piece of clothing that anyone could own and changing it into something new was mind blowing. I got inspired and it was hard for me to experiment new ways of wearing clothes since I had to wear uniform to school. One day I saw my mother sewing my dad’s shirt and I asked her to teach me so I could fix my baggy uniform pants. There were times when I failed, but to be honest, I wasn’t upset because most of things we want to do has to fail first in order to motivate us to get better.

My aunt also showed me how she knits, but I didn’t own any knitting equipment to follow her steps. She came over for christmas and stayed the night; when I woke up the next morning I saw her knitting and she saw that I was interested. She gave me one of her red yarns and she also gave me the sewing stick that only required one because I just started. After she left, I honestly had no idea what to make, but then I thought of a sweater. Looking back, I don’t know why I thought it was possible for me to make a sweater because I didn’t have that much yarn. The yarn was probably the size of an apple. I remembered the technique was really quick and then realized I was going nowhere with this because I ran out of yarn. Then I just eventually gave up because my mother wouldn’t buy more for me.

After knitting didn’t work out for me, I went back online a year later (I was just beginning high school) to search up what I can do with sewing. What I got out of it was recycling old material and reusing it to create something new. I realized that I had a lot of old clothes I could use to do all that. I would start with something I definitely didn’t need to use and used my old uniform since I went to a uniform free school. I took some fabrics such as cutting an old pink shirt into any shaped I liked and sewed it onto my old white uniform shirt. I took my uniform pants and transformed them into shorts. I always watched Youtube videos in order to help me get the gist of how to cut lines on the pants or where to draw lines in order to cut the legs of the pants. I had to put the pants inside out and fold the cutted parts then sew all around the folded parts. The left overs from the pants I would cut them to sew onto a hat or something, I honestly can’t remember.

Since I was just a freshman, I started to become interested in shopping for my own clothing. It was nice creating my own clothes for a while, but I started to run out of unwanted clothes and didn’t want to use the clothes I already used to go to school with. I was already getting paid to babysit my sisters and saved enough money to go to the mall with my cousin. We honestly had no idea how to control our spendings and bought a lot of expensive items such as shoes, shirts, pants, jewelry and food of course. I would end up saving money just to buy clothes, which isn’t a good idea, and then I got interested with buying band merchandise. I use to be into bands a lot that I would save money to buy their magazines, bracelets, CDs and mostly their shirts. After I realize I was spending too much money, I started to budget on how to spend and made sure I was really going to wear whatever I bought. When I was younger, sometimes I would buy clothes just because I thought it would look cool. When I got older, I realized that I should start buying what I liked and what made me happy, not what type of brand a clothing was.

As the years went by, there was a time where name brands became everything. I think up to this day, name brands still and will always seem important to usually teenagers. Kids in high school are still trying to find themselves and even when we grow up, I still believe everyone tries to understand who they want to be or what they want to be. It becomes difficult for most teens who want to experiment with what they wear because of the fear of getting judged or picked on. I didn’t realize the way someone dressed could play a big role until high school almost ended for me. There was a debate in my senior year of high school on whether we bought necessities just based off of name brands or the quality of the item, Many said yes to brands and a few said that it was based off of quality. The way I saw it, many of the students were just following what their friends were saying because in society, we are shown that if you wear brands, you are presented as a well dressed person. It took me until that year to realize that we should be able to wear whatever we want whether it was an outfit to express our cultures or expensive clothes from a high quality store. Culture also plays another role when it comes to expressing your rights as a person to wear what makes you happy and also shows that you could be proud of where your family is originated from.

My father came from Mexico and my mother was born in Brooklyn but is Mexican and Puerto Rican. Clothing in my culture are generally hand made. I do tend to wear mainly the mexican clothing out in public sometimes because I love expressing who I am and where my family came from. When I was younger, I would visit Mexico with my family for the summer, there would be flea markets and would have handmade bracelets, bags, hats, clothes and necklaces. I was taught how to make most of the items I’ve listed by the workers who were selling them. Growing up in an environment like New York City where people are exposed to other cultures besides their own, many of the kids in school would show me or teach me a thing or two about where their families came from. I would question why most of the people in my school would have common clothing and I learned that it was also based off religion.

As we grow older, life just becomes harder trying to find where our places should be whether at the workplace or still in school. With fashion, I hope in the further future that I could be able to create more clothings and learn new skills. Also I could learn a way to teach younger kids how to knit or sew simple items and help expand other minds into finding themselves.