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Spring High School
Newville,
Pennsylvania
Teacher: Mrs. D. Whitmoyer
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The
Role of Personal Responsibility
Quality of Life
By
Heather Hair
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How do we, as an individual person, help to improve the quality of life? Take it little by little and start out in our own communities. There are many possibilities as to what direction a person could and will go to help improve the quality of life. As people we should look for ways of enlightening the children of our communities and allowing them to work to their full potential.
One way to go about this, would be to examine the education that they are receiving. I believe that the best type of education is using the “hands on” approach. If they are in a classroom where all that is being done is lecturing, more likely then not, they are probably going to space out, or lose concentration of what’s going on. Also, I think that students of all economic backgrounds should be receiving the same basic education nation wide. The government should allow government money to be spent on making sure of this equal education. From what a German exchange student has told me, Germany offers free education even through the college level. That means that they probably have more educated people than we do due to the fact that they make it accessible and affordable to people in general. If the United States would do something to the same affect, then we would be producing more intelligent people to run our country and help solve our national problems.
Next, we should look at the values that are being bestowed upon the younger generation of people. It is apparent that certain values are changing in the United States. At the present time, it is all right in our society for a couple to live together and have children together without what used to be the sacred license of marriage. That would have never happened say thirty years ago. If marriage is supposed to be a certain norm by which we are to hold onto, then the generation, whom are of age to be wed and are instead cohabiting a household, should go ahead and get the legal papers of what a marriage is composed of. Besides that, by law if two people of the opposite sex, live together in the same house for five years, then they are considered married by the state. There are also little things like cursing. Often you can hear a parent or another adult swear at something but as a child you aren’t supposed to learn such words. If you are not supposed to know them, then why are they said in the first place. Same goes for the idea of violence and crime. Why does the news always highlight the stories on violence and not emphasize other more positive stories?
Finally, why not be a role model and volunteer somewhere. My father, had been a volunteer coach for either baseball, softball, or soccer for the past nine or ten years. Not only will I probably do the same when I am older, but it also gives him a chance to spend more time with his children. I don’t think that enough parent take the time out of their “busy” schedules to spend time with their kids. Sometimes, I realize that they are out working to help feed the family and such, but other times and all too often do parents work a lot longer because they want to afford the expensive luxuries. I don’t understand how they would rather take that time out of the time they could be spending with their children. Another person, who takes on the responsibility of a role model is a teacher. They are the ones who enforce the rules the school they’re teaching at has and they help a child to develop certain habits. Some teachers want a student to become socially active in the community, to volunteer. A teacher at my school is largely into community service, so we have to do basically a service project. Four students in my class, including myself, decided to go help out in a soup kitchen. To our surprise, we enjoyed what we did there because it made us feel good. So, now we are going to try to go there at least once every month to help out. Thus, the importance of volunteering has been thrust upon us.
So you see that there are ways of getting a child to shine in a community, which in turn is actually helping to improve the quality of life within the community. All of those little things all add up in the end causing a chain of events to occur that all result in the one thing that it is supposed to, the advancement to improve life.
Answers
To Questions Re: Required Reading
Q1:
In the United States, marriage isn’t greatly emphasized.
People here tend to choose to live together instead of taking the
vows. Sometime they have
children together without the “legal” aspect of marriage, but instead
they consider themselves to be married my way of heart and soul.
This is different from Manus, where people actually invest money and
other valuable things into other people’s marriages.
Q2: # years of marriage Advice on how to maintain a long, happy relationship
| 5 | “ Never stop being friends. Agree to disagree.” |
| 20 | “ Good communication and work out problems together.You should always kiss your mate in the morning before you leave for work and at night before you go to sleep, if not more.” |
| 20 | “ Be able to laugh a lot and ignore the small stuff. Don’t argue when you’re mad.” |
| 44 | “ Cooperate with each other. Recognize that it’s a 50/50 deal.” |
| 44 | “ You have to take the bad with the good.” |
| 15 1/2 | “ Compromise. Pick your battles.” |
| 35 | “ Lots of give because if both people are stubborn, it just doesn’t work.” |
| 16 1/2 | “ Always listen to the other person before you get upset. Talk it out.” |
| 3 1/2 | “ Whenever something’s bothering you, just tell them. Don’t go around the house throwing things." |
Q3:
According to Richard Echersley, our collective goal should be to get
to the point of a better life and maintaining it without damaging the
environment.
Q4:
I think that a worthy goal for my community would be to clean up the
water pollution in our local streams. There
is a spring, where a mill is located. There
are a number of people who enjoy fishing there, but the water’s too
polluted for certain types of fish to survive.
I suggest that as a community, we should clean up this area, so that
many people not only can say that it looks pretty, but take pride in knowing
that it is clean, too.
Q5:
In response to the first excerpt, I don’t think that children
should have dolls that remind them of their mothers.
In some cases, the mother may have walked out and left her child with
a doll that reminds them of her. I
ask you would that not cause more heartache to the child?
At the same time though, a child whose mother has passed on could be
comforted by the doll. In
response to the second excerpt, I think that something should be done in
order to give children and young people hope to achieve great things, no
matter what economic status they were born into.
This could be accomplished through the government giving money to all
schools to make sure that an equal education is given everywhere.
Q6:
Since the United States is a democracy, lawyers are to be considered
particularly helpful according to Kathleen Sullivan.
She says that lawyers take on the responsibility of being a type of
assistant if you will to the government, since people in the US are
basically distrustful of the large, centralized government.
The lawyers also help the US citizens to stand up for things that the
government hasn’t found national solutions for yet, such as the gun
“problem.” The citizens are
using lawsuits, carried out by the lawyers, to take on their own solutions
to such problems. Lawyers are
also helpful because of our diversity, we need someone who will deal with
the conflict about social customs that this brings.
As for lawyers and the United States’ wealth, you might say that
since we have a fair amount of money as a country, we tend to worry about
the length of a human life and how the government can help to achieve it.
Also since the US is such a large area, there are a number of
national companies that don’t always know what a company in one town is
doing compared to a company in another town across the country therefore
causing some disputes that lawyers help to settle.
Q7:
I think that punitive damages are better than trying to regulate
everything. Think about the
cost it would take just to enforce the new regulations.
But then again punitive damages sometimes are awarded even though it
wasn’t the companies fault. Instead
it was the stupidity of the consumer, which in my opinion should be taken
into consideration before the company has to fork over a large amount of
money.