DSP essay

DSP essay

America has always been know for our athletic abilities around the world. We dominate in not only professional athletics, but also the olympics. It is known that Americans love athletics, but because we are not doing well enough should we reconsider them entirely? Placing blame on high school sports for our nation’s shortcomings in testing compared to the rest of the world is ridiculous. Athletics have such a minuscule impact on our educational systems, compared to the many more influential reasons why the US is not excelling on these foreign test.

Ripley's main point in the article is the connection between America’s passion for high school sports and America’s average performance in international performance rankings. This connection does hold true because there are millions of dollars being funneled into athletics programs that could be put towards bettering our education systems, but saying that our passion for high school sports blinds the American public from seeing that our math scores are much lower than other Asian countries is ridiculous. This is a national problem the United States must face and is due not to the love of high school athletics, but to the United States’ education policies and the American Public Education System. If we would really like to make a difference to becoming one of the great countries at having 15 year olds do well at international math test we should consider different means of educating our youth.

According to this the Washington Post we have been doing similarly on international standardized testing since the 1960s. This doesn’t seem to have great effect on the USA’s location atop the world. Our testing scores clearly have not had a great impact on our ability to maintain our status as one of the top countries in the world. In the past fifty years, the US has still had the most dominant economy in the world. The United States maintains the most dominant university level education in the world. According to the 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities, over half of the the top 100 schools in the world are located in the US and eight out of the top ten are located in the USA. So although our 15 year old children are not doing aswell well as Koreans at international testing, I believe we will do alright for yourself because that great 15 year old korean at math is going to come to come to the USA to learn at a higher level.

High School athletics have been a huge part of American culture since 1900 as pointed out by Ripley. Something like that can not just be that easily changed in the United States. Athletics offer way more than just “exercise, lessons in sportsmanship and perseverance, school spirit, and just plain fun.” Athletics are an opportunity for kids to showcase athletic talents with no cost to them, a way to get exercise in a country with the second highest obesity rate in the world, according to UN studies, athletics also present the chance for kids to get scholarships and go to college if they otherwise would not have had the ability to do so. High school athletics provide so many important opportunities to students that cannot be taught in classrooms. On nearly every college application there is a space allotted for the chance to tell the school about any positions on sports teams or leadership positions on said team that you may have had. Academics more strongly influence the chances of being admitted to a college, but if two people have the exact same test scores and grades, but one played two varsity sports, which one looks more appealing?  

In The Case Against High School Sports Ripley touches on the fact that in all the other countries students play club sports outside of school because the idea of school and sports should not mix. I played club sports for two different sports, and I know first hand that club sports are very expensive and it is not fair to those who can’t afford club sports to not be able to play the sports that they love at a competitive level. High school sports provide a means of creating diversity on sports teams.

Most sports in high schools, in my experience, are very self sufficient. There are fundraisers and the cost of tickets help pay for the expenses high school athletics have. In my district of Durham Public Schools, each sport only get $250 dollars per year to help with expenses, this is hardly enough to buy new uniforms, so not all districts pay top dollar athletic expenses.   

If you would like to look at the true reason why we aren't doing as well as other countries at on international testing, you would need to look at the policies that America is putting forth to support education. According to worldatlas.com, the US has the third largest population in the world, which means it has a lot of kids going to school across the third largest country in the world by land mass it's hard to get a grip on the one thing that democrats and republicans have no idea on fixing, education. This is just proven by the fact that policy changes, such as No Child Left Behind, have not made any changes to America’s test score average, according to the Washington post. The county as a whole is too stressed out about what to do about “the failing education system,” that they can not think of a valid means of fixing. It only ends up with bad policy and blaming things such as high school athletics.

The United States education system does not cater well to outstanding performances in specific areas, such as math or science, due to Americas more holistic way of teaching kids. Kids in many Asian countries are surpassing the United States’ places in classes that suit their skills, such as math or science, at a much earlier age than in America. When Koreans, who constantly get placed among the top in education in the world, go to their upper school they must choose a specialty track of what their career will be. All of this is done by the age of fifteen. I believe that the United States could do better on the test, but it would cost our ability to take time and decide on what we would like to spend the rest of our lives doing.

Personally, I have a great connection to high school sports. I played two different high school sports, and loved every second of it. I loved hanging out with my friends on fall friday nights watching my Riverside Pirates play football. I loved that feeling of going to the first week of lacrosse practice when it is freezing cold. I loved riding home on the bus after a big win. It baffles me that something so small and fun is the sole reason why Americans aren’t as good as Koreans at taking math and science tests. I believe that The Case Against High School Sports has some interesting points but it is absurd to believe that something as insignificant as Americans passion for for high school athletics is the cause of America’s performances.

High school sports is not the true problem with our poor performances with education at the national level. High school sports are an important part of American culture and the public education system as a whole. There is no real support to the idea that athletics hurt education, so if we really want to look at the problems in the education system, we should look elsewhere.

Refection

One of the biggest problems of my DSP essay is the fact that I tend to procrastinate on writing my essays. I don’t mind doing work; I tend not to procrastinate when it comes to things such as math, science and the humanities. But as soon as it comes to reading, writing and other things that I do not feel that I am strong with I tend to take longer to get started.  I think it stems from my low confidence when it comes to reading and writing due to my dyslexia. I believe I am a strong writer but I may not show due to the simple mistakes that I make when writing. I knew about the DSP essay for months before I even started considered writing that essay, then it took me another week before I finished the essay on the day that it was due. I even procrastinated on this essay, I started to do the essay and before I could even finish the first essay I was working on math homework. My procrastination has lead to me not having a ton of time for writing; editing and I end up writing my essay in one day. If I fix my procrastination problem I will help me write an essay that isn’t rushed.  

One of the hardest things for me is editing my paper. I am not a good reader so I make a lot of errors and I don’t see them when I make them. This all stems my dyslexic tenancies, I just avoid letting others help me with my editing because I have been embarrassed by it my whole life. In the DSP essay I barely looked through the essay and only had one person look at it. For the future I would like others to be able to look and help me make changing things because I only let people critic my grammatical errors and I don’t like when people try change my sentences. I feel as though that if I had more confidence in my writing I would be able to write better and allow for a greater amount of editing. I’ll have a lot of confidence after writing some things such as in my year journalism class my senior column was really good and my editors and teachers all thought it was really good and I had a lot of confidence in my ability to write but I am inconstant in my writing so that cause a low confidence.  

Organization is one of my biggest problems within my essay. The way I tend to write leads me to a lot of decent points that don’t seem flow that well together. There are lots of different paragraphs that seem to be just thrown together. In my DSP essay goes from the cost of high school sports to my opinions on international testing with out a transition. This is caused by my lack of editing. I feel as though if I could just read my essays carefully and make more carefully and make the transitions and the paragraphs flow with my points. If I was better at editing my papers I believe that my organization would be stronger. My organizational issues are epically prevalent in longer essays. Length tends to get me off track. I need to develop a way to stay concentrated in essays that are longer than one or two pages. This really shows in the DSP essay, a essay that is five pages in length, because my points and arguments become more diverse and less centralized in the ending paragraphs of the essay. I think organization could be the most important to me developing as a writer.          

My writing also isn’t complex. I write short definitive sentences, and I am not very wordy. If I could develop a more complex vocabulary and stop describing things so concretely I would establish a stronger essay. I have had plenty of sentences in my DSP that could have been better if I just made them a little more exciting. “High school sports are an important part of American culture and the public education system as a whole.” That sentence is boring and needs to be “spiced up”. If you write an essay like you’re making statements instead of making it an entreating essay it can defeat the purpose and loose the attention of the reader.  I have had this habit my whole life and I believe it is very important thing for me to try and break in college. If I can improve my writing in that way I think it will have a big impact on my writing for educational purposes.

My thesis’s my whole life have been weak. I have always not been able to write a strong thesis, they mostly have been just a main point of the essay instead of a thesis that is trying to prove something. The single most important part to a strong essay is the thesis and if I cannot write a good thesis it takes away from the essay in the first paragraph. My thesis in my DSP essay was “Athletics have such a minuscule impact on our educational systems, compared to the many more influential reasons why the United States is not excelling on these foreign tests”. This is not a strong thesis for a good academic essay there needs to be more power and confidence in defining what the opinions are, but my problem is that I can recognize that it is a bad thesis but I don’t know how to fix it. If I could learn how to write a great thesis statement It could drastically improve the strength of my academic writing.

Finally, my conclusions tend to just summarize what has already been explained. If I could learn how to write a proper conclusion it would improve the end of my paper and the essay as a whole. My conclusion in the DSP essay was basically three sentences saying the same thing with the final sentence being “There is no real support to the idea that athletics hurt education, so if we really want to look at the problems in the education system, we should look elsewhere.” This is a extremely lazy conclusion. I blame this on the fact that no one has ever taught me how to write a proper conclusion.  While I do not believe that the conclusion is one of the most important part of the essay but a good conclusion can make or break an essay.

The DSP essay did have some good points. I feel as though that I am good at bringing out outside sources and connecting them to a point. This comes from my experience in journalistic writing. I also believe that I brought up good points and counter points to the writers essay. It would be a pretty good essay if I had organized it a little better. I also connected the author to the essay very well; I tried to use the author’s opinions in as many paragraphs as possible with out it being over done.