I personally believe that an American is someone born in America, or who has come to American and has worked their way to deserve ti be American. Any person who immigrated here but did nothing wrong and helped America in whatever way deserves to be known and recognized as an American. When I read the statement, "This American Life," my first immediate though is about how different the lives of Americans are as compared to the life of a 3rd world person in immense poverty. I think that "This American Life"  is going to be based upon the life of a stereo-typical American, with all of the things we take for granted such as our freedom, our economical status, our government, our housing, our property, our families, and even our own lives. As compared to a lot of 3rd world countries, American has many freedoms and rights that other countries' citizens would kill to have. I might be entirely wrong about my thought, but these are just my predictions before starting to read the actual text. Another theory I have about "This American Life" is that it could be about what it means to be an American, including what Americans have access to, what their rights are, their viewpoints on people who are not American, and about all the freedom to do many things that some people desire greatly to do. It could talk about the view on government from the Americans' perspective, their views on the economy, on real estate, and on law itself. The American lifestyle is so different from many other countries, and I can not wait to start reading "This American Life." I want to revisit my thoughts on what an American is after the reading and compare what I think being an American is right now to what I think an American is after reading "This American Life." I do think and know that my idea on the definition of an American is different than many other people, and I really want to know what other people think being an American means before and after the reading.

According to Rene Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician, a human can see something, but what they are seeing might not be true. The only irrefutable truth is that you are seeing. The fact that you are seeing means your brain is working. In the image above, you can see the mind at work, looking at the entity ahead. Whilst the mind might see one thing, somebody else might see another. The only thing that does not change is the fact that they are seeing, meaning their brains are working. Rene Descartes came up with the philosophical idea of cogito ergo sum, or "I think therefore I am." This relates to the image because the mind is thinking of what it is looking at, which means that the person is there, and not in a state of unconsciousness. 

For our abstraction project, we chose to work on 
the idea of change. We started our abstraction
ladder with a salamander tadpole. A more abstract
thing would be a tadpole. Tadpoles grow into
amphibians, so they connect to amphibians. 
Amphibians usually go through metamorphosis. 
Animals can go through metamorphosis. Animals
are living organisms. Living organisms go through
evolution to adapt to the changing world. Finally,
evolution connects to change because the things going through evolution are changing. Therefore, a salamander tadpole is connected to change because of everything in the middle. 

This is our abstraction art piece representing change. This represents change through its colors. It starts off with blue and purple, then the blue branches off into lights blue, then into yellow, leading into orange. It continues into yellow, then orange, then red, then purple, then blue, etc. It keeps on changing colors in a design. That's about all I can say about this.

This year, we have studied the French philosopher Rene Descartes' thoughts on life, this being cogito ergo sum, or "I think therefore I am." I have already written a post about this a few months back, but I want to analyze it further now that I have a better understanding of it. To me, now, this means that if you ever doubt your existence, than you are thinking, and if you are thinking, you exist. This also applies to unconsciousnesss and consciousnesss. When unconscious, you see things through your mind, so you are not actually thinking of what you are seeing. This is because your mind is producing these images and portraying it to yourself. On the other hand, when you are conscious, your brain analyzes  what you are looking at. Whilst what you are looking at might not be true, the fact that you are seeing means that your brain is working. Since your brain is at work analyzing the entity you see before you, then you are actually there and you are not unconscious. Thanks to Rene Descartes, and a few other foundational thinkers, there now exists the study of Western notion or reason and science. Cogito ergo sum, or "I think therefore I am," has proven to be very useful in this world, although so basic, it serves a much greater purpose than just the words. As I said in the last analysis of this quote, I will follow it with pride, and do what I care for the most because I could make a difference, just like Rene Descartes. That is my 2nd analysis of cogito ergo sum, and with that, I bid you all farewell.

Flowers for Algernon Essay-
Click here - FFA Essay

Argumentative Essay-
Click here - Argumentative Essay

Me and my 2 friends recently made a project, as seen above, about mindset, both fixed and growth. We stated that a computer represents a fixed mindset, because it cannot physically learn anything new on it's own, but if you update it, it learns new things. Sure it takes time to upgrade, but it contributes a lot to learning because it makes the computer faster. We made a 3 paragraph "essay" focused on growth and fixed mindset. We based our 3 paragraphs on an article called "The Effort Effect" by Marina Krakovsky. We cited evidence from the paragraph to support our claims that a person with a growth mindset is more successful than a person with a fixed mindset because a growth mindset person is more open to helpful criticism and mistakes and challenges than a person with a fixed mindset who think's they are at their full potential and avoid everything. We continued with the statement that mindset can be changed over time, and that it takes the will to persist in the face of challenges to overcome to barriers you put upon yourself. We then went on to explain how the computer was the perfect example for our base idea. That is all for today, so I bid you all ado. - 3 paragraphs -
 Many psychologists have been researching over the past years on the topic of mindset, and how it contributes to why some people achieve their full potential and others don’t.  So first of all, we need to learn a bit more on the topic at hand, mindset theory. According to the article, “The Effort Effect” by Marina Krakovsky, “...’learning goals’ inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than ‘performance goals’” (11), and analyzing this, it is true in the real world because we’ve seen people with these different types of goals, and they truly do inspire different behaviors. We as a team firmly believe anything can be learned if tried hard enough, which is characteristic of a growth mindset. On the other hand, some people believe that you are only born with potential, and if you don’t have it when you’re born, you never will, which is typically a fixed mindset quality. From the same article is as follows, “In the late 1960s, a hot topic in animal research was “learned helplessness”: lab animals sometimes didn’t do what they were capable of because they’d given up from repeat failures”(5). Comparing this to what we found out before, the past had different thoughts on what caused people or animals to give up while others proceeded no matter the amount of failures. This leads into how these ideas changed over time and what they have contributed to.

Mindset theory has truly changed over the years and helped contribute to our society. As you can clearly see, what we have learned and known about mindset has changed. Relating back to our research before, in the 1960s, we thought that living things gave up in the face of setbacks while other equally talented ones didn’t due to repeated failures. Nowadays, we know that the reason some kids don’t reach their full potential is due to their certain mindsets. Now moving on to the contributions of what we now know about mindset. Due to our knowledge about mindset, kids these days, and mostly anyone at all, can learn how to succeed by simply changing their mindset. Parents and teachers know to congratulate children on simply doing their best instead of when meeting a certain standard. Plus it helps the whole world to try a bit harder to help them achieve what they can. But how can we tell all this in a simple manner by using some sort of visual representation?

A computer/laptop is the perfect visual representation of mindset theory, able to show both a fixed and growth mindset. The reasons we believe this are quite simple. First and foremost, a simple computer is a perfect example of a fixed mindset. Once a computer is made, it cannot learn anything new. You can program it to do many things, but it still will not develop anything new. Though if you update it, it can! This is also a perfect example of a growth mindset. Updates help make a computer perform new things but take lots of time to complete. This is similar to a growth mindset since we can also learn many new things, but it will take time and practice to complete the new skill. Overall, mindset is a very deep subject and can be compared to many things. It can be found in mostly everyone’s thinking process and is such an important thing to know about. Contributions of what we have learned over time about it have helped people of all ages. This concludes our sayings about this whole subject. We sincerely hope you take into account all of this and use it in your life!

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                       " I think therefore I am"
This inspirational quote was said by the French philosopher René Descartes on his search for a statement which can not be doubted. This indubitable quote is this year's theme, "I think therefore I am." This quote means that you can not doubt your existence for you are the one doing the doubting in the first place. This is a very deep but simple quote that is easy to be motivated by because your existence matters and what you do matters as well, since you exist. This year, we will do what matters to us for we exist and that in itself matters. I thank René Descartes for conducting a search for this quote, because I will follow it this entire year. That will be all for my first blog on this site, so I bid you all farewell.