Unit 1 Revision: Red Envelopes
On the night before Chinese New Years there is an important tradition to follow just before a parent’s child sleeps. I hear a knock on my door. I opened the door to see my dad with a red envelope out, he said, “Take it and put it under your pillow before you sleep, gives good luck.” This was a tradition that always happened just the night before Chinese New Years, my siblings and I would receive a red envelope to put under our pillow before we slept, the red envelope would contain money-but the importance of it was the essence. I got interested one day about why we would receive a red envelope to put under our beds before Chinese New Years even begun, after some research I found out that there was an old Chinese legend about a Chinese demon that would come after sleeping children on New Year’s eve, the money you get before you slept, would suppress the ghost/demon off if he came after you. Which relates to giving red envelopes, because giving red envelopes became a way to keep children safe as well as bringing good luck.
The thing about Chinese New Years and red envelopes, is that you have to say the phrase, “Gong Hey Fat Choy” when receiving a red envelope on Chinese New Years, it is because of manners and respect. The red envelopes would contain money, varying on who gave it to you, you would get more money if its from your parents/grandparents and they will never give you the amount that ends in 4, due to the number 4 being an unlucky number in Chinese, it is extremely disrespectful to open the red envelope in front of the person who gave it to you. You the child do not have to give out any envelopes. Once you get married is when you start giving out red envelopes on Chinese New Years, which means you can even be 20 and you still will receive red envelopes. Your parents give out to your relatives as well, not just you. They give red envelopes to your cousins that aren’t married and the cousin’s parents do the same.
One thing about Chinese New Years is that there will be a lot of talking. If you were not up by 12 o’ clock in the afternoon, you would be forcefully awaken because of the conversations between families. Usually for me, every Chinese New Years began like this: I would wake up due to the laughter and commotion going around in the living room. The first thing I did after getting ready in the bathroom was head towards the living room, where all the activity was happening. As soon as I stepped out, I say, “Gong Hey Fat Choy!” To my older relatives and family members. They shout back, “Gong Hey Fat Choy!” They got up from their seats and all headed towards me with red envelopes. Each of them gave me 1-2 red envelopes that contained money. However, the most important part is the phrase “Gong Hey Fat Choy!” Which is a Chinese greeting which means, “Happy New Year!” If you do not say this greeting and instead, you say something like, “Hello!” You would not get the red envelope, thus this greeting is very important on this day. On some occasions you won’t have to say “Gong Hey Fat Choy” when receiving a red envelope, for example if your cousins come over and you are still sleeping, your parents will hold onto the red envelope for you until you wake up. You would say “Gong Hey Fat Choy” when you see them again, however.
One thing to note about the red envelopes is that only the people who are not married or are under the age 25 get the red envelopes. The process of preparing red envelopes take a long time, as a parent you had to think about how much people you are giving it to, how much money in each one, and who is receiving how much. Some times you could get 2 dollars in a red envelope. This took my parents around 3 days to complete. The amount you get usually correlates to your relationship with the person who is giving you the red envelope. For example if its your parents, you could get around 50 dollars, if it’s your cousins you would usually get around 5.
As night approached, my family and I were getting ready to have dinner at our Grandfather’s house for Chinese New Year. I help out my dad with loading the food in the car trunk while the others get ready to leave. Soon enough, we entered the car and my mom carries the most important thing on her, more important than the food-the red envelopes. We arrive at my Grandfather’s house and ring the door bell. The door opens, we see our relative on the other side and we all say, “Gong Hey Fat choy!” They let us in and we arrive into the living room, as soon as I step into the living room I see a crowd of people, either sitting down or huddled around the dinner table looking at all the delicious varieties of food. My family and I shout, “Gong Hey Fat Choy!” The crowd turns around to us and then shouts, “Gong Hey Fat Choy!” As they all approach us. My mother who is carrying the red envelopes, makes her way towards the other young relatives to hand out her red envelopes. While my father and I set the food down onto the dinner table and my mother gives out red envelopes on our family’s behalf, my siblings and me get approached by our aunts and uncles, they stick out their hand to give us red envelopes, we then say, “Gong Hey Fat Choy!” And also, “thank you!” To each of them for the red envelopes.
The reason why Chinese New Years is so important to us is because the older Asian generation loves being around family, family is number one. In America the only Asian holiday we can celebrate is Chinese New Years, which is why we take Chinese New Years to the next level with our traditions and our feasting. In China, Asians usually wouldn’t celebrate holidays like Christmas, however because we are in America, our family and our relatives celebrate almost every holiday. We use these holidays as an excuse to come together, talk, eat together, and have fun.
Unit 2 Revision: Video Games and Benefits
You come out of your room for dinner after spending a few hours playing games with your friends, you sit down at the dinner table and your mom starts to lecture you about how bad video games are for you and your health. You then start to think about what are the positives and negatives for video games? After dinner you go back to your room and search up, “Impact of video games.” As you read the article, you realize that there are multiple benefits of playing online video games. From motor skills, cognitive skills, social skills, and many more. However, you noticed that some of the video game benefits have one thing in common, social skills. Video games are a great way to improve your social skills. A child growing up playing video games has a likely chance to grow into a built-in leader.
Unlike what most parents think, researchers have found that online video games can lead to beneficial effects. In “Gaming’s Growing Population. Insider Intelligence,” by Sara Lebow she says that playing online video games can improve; manual dexterity, brain’s gray matter, social skills, and many more. This shows that online video games are helpful to people because of the impacts like developing/improving intelligence and perception-we can mainly see that playing online video games develop the brain. Which is important to know because, “gamers make up more than a third of the world’s population, in 2022 there is approximately 2.96 billion people around the world that plays games” (Lebow 2022).
I interviewed two of my friends that played video games for several years. I asked them both the same questions and they’re both the same age. Friend A, played video games for 7 years, and when I asked him how his social skills were before playing video games versus how he currently is, he stated. “When I was a kid, I was extremely shy, I would have social anxiety when talking to anyone besides the people I know. Compared to now, I am less shy and now I’m more confident when talking to people that I don’t know.” I then asked him, “Do you think this is due to aging or do you think video games have an impact on this?” Friend A responded with, ” I think video games has helped me develop social skills throughout the years I have been playing, not too sure if aging had anything to do with my social skills. This is because online video games require team work and communication, communication is key in completing/winning video games which is why I think video games helped develop my social skills, I also felt like video games helped me get out of my comfort zone to speak a lot more.” In essence, my friend do believes that video games develop one’s social skills, he believes that online video games helped him with his social anxiety, pushing him out of his comfort zone to communicate with people he doesn’t know, making it feel more natural for him.
Friend B has played video games for nearly 10 years. I asked him, ” How are your social skills now compared to your social skills when you were a kid?” Friend B, responded with, “It’s hard to remember how I was since it’s been 10 years, but I would say that my social skills are definitely better now, it might not be because of video games though.” I then responded with, “that brings us to the next question, “do you think this is because of aging, or do you think this is because of video games?” Friend B replied with, ” I would say both helped for sure. I felt like online video games developed my leadership skills and my response time. I felt like online video games helped me in maturing as well. When playing online video games you can meet a whole diverse of people, some of them are chill people that play video games for fun, the other side is a bunch of competitive people that will curse you out when you make a mistake and say crazy things, which makes me say that video games made me tolerable.” Friend B explains that online video games has helped developed his social skills, he believes that it developed his leadership skills and made him more mature and tolerable.
According to the article, “Video games may improve children’s intellectual and social skills, study finds” written by Doug Bolton, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York, conducted an experiment with thousands of children around the globe. They found out that, “the team found that high video game usage was associated with a 1.75 times increase in the odds of high intellectual functioning.” They also found, “Children who played a lot of video games were also found to be 1.88 times more likely to have “high overall school competence” (Bolton 2016). This quote states that video games improve your intellectual functioning as well as your school competence by more than 1.5x for both.
In the article, “Is time spent playing video games associated with mental health, cognitive and social skills in young children? ” Published by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016, they have shown a table that tells the audience that kids have a higher score in intellectual functioning as well as in school competence (Table 2). Unadjusted means that factors like their gender and psychological distress aren’t account for, while adjusted means all the factors are. In the graph we can see that children playing games for more than 5 hours have greater numbers in both unadjusted and adjusted, which correlates to my main topic of video games being beneficial.
This table comes from a survey, “SCHME (the School Children Mental Health in Europe)”, it is a survey of European children from ages 6-11 in 2010. Data was collected in Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey for this study. They surveyed about 45-50 schools across the country, randomly picked schools, they also randomly picked approximately 48 children from each school. This data table consists of approximately 3000 young children across European countries, which backs up the fact that, “high video game usage was associated with higher intellectual functioning, increased academic achievement, and a lower prevalence of mental health difficulties” (Springer 2016)
The article also talks about a Japanese study of kindergarten children, in which they discovered that children who played video games had more friends and were more inclined to socialize. About 426 children were asked to complete a self questionnaire to determine this information. One interesting thing about this Japanese study is that on the text it states, “It is noteworthy that one of the boys with the lowest social counts was reported to play the TV game nearly everyday for two hours.” (Shimai and Masuda 1990). I found this quote to be very interesting because it correlates to the evidence about kids with 5+ hours of gaming usage having a higher score in intellectual functioning and in school competence more than the kids that have 1-5 hours of gaming usage. This is because this quote further proves that online video games can be beneficial to one’s self.
Ultimately, with all this information I have gathered, we can safely say that online video games are beneficial to humans. If you are a gamer with parents that lecture you about games, tell them that you play video games because you are improving your mind and getting smarter! If they don’t believe you, show them this text! Prove them wrong and they’ll leave you alone about this topic.
References:
Lebow, Sara. “Gaming’s Growing Population.” Insider Intelligence, Insider Intelligence, 19 Oct. 2021,
https://www.emarketer.com/content/gamers-make-up-more-than-one-third-of-world-population.
Kovess-Masfety, Viviane, et al. “Is Time Spent Playing Video Games Associated with Mental Health, Cognitive and Social Skills in Young Children?” Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, vol. 51, no. 3, Mar. 2016, pp. 349–57.
Bolton, Doug. “Video Games May Actually Have Positive Effects on Young Children, Study Finds.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 9 Mar. 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/games/video-games-children-learning-intelligence-social-skills-study-a6920961.html.
Shimai S, Masuda K, Kishimoto Y (1990) Influences of TV games on physical and psychological development of Japanese kindergarten children. Percept Mot Skills 70(3 Pt 1):771–776
Final Reflection
If you had to compare your current self and your older self-just a few months apart, would you be able to tell any differences? What about if it was a skill you were already experienced on? Do you feel like you changed noticeably? If I had to think back about my writing in the past and compare it to the most recent writings I wrote I would say that not much has changed. However, when I put my two pieces of writing together, one from the start of the semester and one from this current month, I would be able to point out the differences. I believe that I have gotten better due to techniques like the quote sandwich and while attending this class I learned how to structure my writing better. If I had to compare and contrast my unit 1 and unit 3 work, I would say that there’s not much of a difference. However, if there was another unit, I think that it would be different due to the knowledge I have gained throughout this semester. I also think that the video comments Professor Carrie Hall made for us really helped us learn and get better because the comments were very helpful and informative, it pointed out our mistakes and how to make our writing better.
One of my favorite assignments is the unit 3 project assignment. I really enjoyed making this presentation compared to the rest of the assignments because making the presentation was entertaining and it introduced me to a website known as “Canva” which made making presentations easier and fun, if I had known of this website before, I would have definitely used it in the past. Making this project has also opened my mind towards different perspectives and different age groups. When I made the rough draft of the presentation, Professor Carrie Hall has pointed out that my presentation isn’t fourth grade friendly despite fourth grader’s being my audience. When she pointed that out, I looked back at my project and realized how much she was right. Thus making this assignment my favorite because I think I learned a lot as well as had fun. When I first started this project, I thought to myself that I should make an infographic, for it provides information needed as well as a bit of pictures to keep you enticed. However, I was wrong after reflecting back at it now. That’s why if I had to redo an assignment this would be the one I would redo. My design for this project was an infographic, fourth graders don’t really get appealed to this, so I would change up my content and design to be a comic book that follows a story with kid friendly language to help them understand the content. Another of my favorite things during this semester is the online writing. I find it a lot easier to write online than to write in person so switching to online really helped in terms of speed and less work.
My early beliefs and assumption’s about myself and my writing, is that I believed that I was a decent writer. I felt like I had a creative mind and my grammar was good. Not much has changed. While I still think I’m a decent writer, I realized that I didn’t have much technique. One of the noticeable things I can point out about my writing from early on this semester, is that when I quote something, I usually explain it a little bit and leave it at that. However, I learned that the quote sandwich technique, were I introduce the quote, quote it, and then explain it. I used to barely explain my quotes and rarely analyzed it, an example of this would be on my unit 2 project, “Video Games and Benefits”, I quoted, “They also found, “Children who played a lot of video games were also found to be 1.88 times more likely to have “high overall school competence” (Bolton 2016). This quote states that video games improve your intellectual functioning as well as your school competence by more than 1.5x for both.” While this was just a month ago, I noticed that my explanation is extremely short and there’s not much analysis. While Professor Carrie Hall told us that the explanation and analysis should be longer than the quote its self, this did not happen during my unit 2 project. Which is why I would say that the quote sandwich technique is a really nice technique to know and I believe that it will transfer over after this semester ends. An example of this would be during my Unit 2 essay I said, ” ‘researchers have found that online video games can lead to beneficial effects such as; “manual dexterity, brain’s gray matter, social skills, and many more.’ This quote had nothing but the quote, there was no analysis. However, my revision included the explanation and analysis, ” ‘In “Gaming’s Growing Population. Insider Intelligence,’ by Sara Lebow she says that playing online video games can improve; manual dexterity, brain’s gray matter, social skills, and many more. This shows that online video games are helpful to people because of the impacts like developing/improving intelligence and perception-we can mainly see that playing online video games develop the brain.” If you were to compare these two quotes you can see that the latter quote is more developed than the other quote. Another technique I learned from Professor Carrie Hall is topic sentences. I subconsciously use topic sentences, but I think that topic sentences are great for transitioning paragraphs. An example when I used this was on my unit 1 revision. I said, “The reason why Chinese New Years is so important to us is because the older Asian generation loves being around family, family is number one.” This topic sentence set me up for my conclusion as I talked about the main point of my essay.
Ultimately, this semester was really informative and fun. I learned multiple techniques and even a website that will be helpful in the future. During this semester I learned a decent amount about myself as a writer. Techniques learned from this semester will carry on with me as a writer and I will be sure to use them as they improve my writing.
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