Monday, September 17, 2007

Do Grades Really Matter?

Our group talked mainly about the speach of Steve Jobs. His three stories touched us because it was really personal. Some people liked the part about his cancer and how he fought it. This men has a lot of courage. An important sentence in his speach is: " If today were the last day of my life, would I wanna do what I'm going to do today?" This seems to lead his life and we think it's a great way to see the life. We also talked about the article and we agreed that we can't judge someone by his grades at school because he can have other skills. Your future depends on your ambitions and if school doesn't fit with it, then you just have to do like so many people and quit school to follow your destiny.

What we discussed

The assignment for week 4 was to discuss if grades have an influence on students future. We agreed that high school grades have no importance because students are not studying in what they want to study, they have to learn things that they don’t necessarily want to learn. CEGEP grades are more important because a student is supposed to study in what they want to study, they’re learning things that they want to learn. In CEGEP, a student is driven by passion and curiosity. If a student has poor grades in CEGEP, maybe he’s not studying in the wrong domain. To motivate student in high schools, teachers should pay more attention to a C student, try to motivate him and make him like school.

Discussion summary

Last week our group discussed about an article from MacLean's magazine called : The Radicalisme at Our Doors.Through our debate,we realised that it would be a lot of trouble and expenses to investigate in depth every immigrant's past and thoughts and that it would be very discriminative to only screen immagrants from some counrties.It was alose obvious that nobody can know for for what someone thinks, those proceeders may prove to be useless after too much trouble.But we also discussed about something else.What is worse between immigrants come to North America through immigration or North Americans invading the Middle East with millitary force?but this question has been difficult to answer.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Our Girls Are Not Guinea Pigs

Last week we discuss the massive inoculation against the HPV virus that may cause cervical cancer.This inoculation is being launched by Canada's government. We agree that it was too soon in the vaccine history to be released.We also discuss the fact that Gardasil only prevents against two strains of HPV wen there are about 200 strains and that even with the immunization you still could get the virus or the cervical cancer.Our discussion also wen trough the fact that it's easier for parents to have their kids vaccinated then to sit down and have a talk about sexual protection.My group tough that five years of tracking the trial participants who received the vaccination wasn't enough. We also tough that there was a link between the fact that Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. was delivering the vaccine and that they probably sponsored the political campaign.

Monday, September 10, 2007

summary

We discussed about the radicalism in Canada and how it's affecting Canadians. There is some radical people who immigrates to Canada and tries to impose their point of view and their values which is absolutely wrong. Immigrants should keep their good values and adjust them to integrate the society. We think that making a values assessment program for potential immigrants is against the freedom of expression. Western people can't impose their values to new comers.

Our latest group discussion


In our latest group discussion we mostly discussed the whole morality factor behind that vaccine called Gardasil. So basically, we each gave our own opinion on aspects such as the parents POV (point of view) when their normal and healthy daughther contracts diseases shortly after being inoculated with a new vaccine that was supposed to help her in the first place. According to the text, parents are more likely to send their kids to get a shot against a sexually transmissible disease than to sit with them and discuss the matter. However, we could not say that all parents want the easy way out of a problem only by basing ourselves on one article, but we did found that it is always better, in our opinion, to have conserned parents that will discuss these kind of issues with their kids instead of letting them hear it from a stranger or a doctor when it is too late. With the statistics the article gave us about the efficiency of the Gardasil shot, we all had to share our thoughts whether to keep or to ban this vaccine. Looking at the costs and benefits of this product, we found that it would be in the governments' advantage to take this vaccine out of the market for a while in order to do more research on it!

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Collaborative Blog - Longueuil

This blog will be used for summaries of the discussions we have in class regarding articles in Maclean's magazine--or any other topic. Feel free to add thoughts, discoveries, anecdotes and interesting tidbits you think about before or after the discussions.