iThink

Remember when moms washed their children’s mouths out with soap for saying a dirty word.  Remember when using God’s name in vain was wrong.  Remember when using the f-word was unthinkable.  Well, those days are gone—welcome to the 21^st century where, unfortunately, anything goes.

Take, for example, the January 15^th edition of Good Morning America.  In an interview with Diane Sawyer, actress Diane Keaton dropped the f-bomb on Sawyer.  Causing no mushroom cloud, ABC chose not to censor Keaton’s expletive, instead allowing viewers across the country to hear a highly offensive term.  At 9AM in the morning!  ABC never apologized for their lack of censorship, offering no excuse for their slip-up.

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For high school students only two things matter: school and Facebook, but mainly Facebook. Here lately, though, those have been a dangerous combination.

Recently, a Minnesota high school punished 13 students for photos posted on the students’ Facebook pages. The images showed underage students in possession of or using “illegal substances.” However, just how school administrators obtained such photos is still unknown. The larger issue, though, is not their interception of the images. It is their crossing into the students’ personal lives and affairs that is so shocking. And, perhaps, illegal. What students do outside of their school-legal or illegal-is totally independent of their school. Therefore, it is not the educational institutions’ right to take punitive actions against students for activities done outside of the school. (To read the news article, click here.)

Think about the pictures on your Facebook account right now. Would you want your school principal to see them? If not, you might want to consider removing the images, because if this precedent sticks, your principal could suspend you for what you were doing when your friend snapped those pictures. 

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Read the following questions and respond to two of them.

1. How does the author, Daniel H. Pink, establish ethos?
2. Pink states towards the beginning that he simplifies the material within the book.  One blogger, Alex Reid (of Digital Digs blog), states, “Pink’s questions [regarding survival in this right-brainded dominated era] make sense, but like much in his book, they are a little oversimplified.”  Discuss Pink’s reasoning in simplifying his book.  (Hint:  Refer to the Rhetorical Triangle.)
3. Pink divides up the past 150 years into “acts” as if they were part of a play.  How does this metaphor relate to his overall topic that R-directed thinking will inherit the future?  Refer to page 48 to read this metaphor.

Graphic from Daniel Pink’s Website.  Edited using Microsoft PowerPoint 2003.