Pedal on Over

https://youtu.be/kCrvrE7RZFE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCQLuffVJZA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE5j_N_TuIs

Hello my name is Amanda. Today I am going to be talking about how students should be taught about drugs early in their education. I have been very privileged to be able to come and learn here at the University of SanFrancisco and my high school the Edmund Burke School. As we all know before coming to college we all had to take an online course about drugs. Maybe for some of you that might have been the first time you every really learned about drugs. For me it wasn’t. I was luck to be in a high school with a strong Health and Values program. During sophomore year of high school we learned about drugs and were given this book. Unlike some programs we weren’t told that drugs were these scary things that should be avoided at all costs because they were bad. We were just told here are different types of drugs, here are what they do, here are consequences of doing them. We also got to research a drug of our choice and teach the class about it.

Now there are many people in the world who’s first education on drugs is in college. Or their only education was don’t do drug. Say no. Drugs are terrible things that will kill you. I think that should change. I believe that student should be taught about drugs in high school at the least. That these courses should be based on facts instead of fear and abstinence. Telling people not to do things or that they can’t have things will make them want it more. Teaching by using fear won’t actually educate them about it. Drug education should be taught in a way that informs students of different types of drugs, their effects, what forms they come in and the consequences of them. It should also be taught in a way where it lets the student use the knowledge they gathered to make the decision themselves about whether or not they want to do drugs. And if they choose to do it then they should be responsible about it.  Also having them learn at a younger age will make it less likely that they start then. It is important to teach them at a younger age because it is show that it takes teens less time to get addicted than adults.

I myself have never done any drugs. But my cousin has. I decided to interview her and asked if it was ok to tell the class about her experience. She said yes. My cousin is in her 30s and is getting dentures. This is because she has meth mouth. Meth mouth is caused by Methamphetamine. It causes the teeth to blacken, rot and fall apart. I asked her about her about her drug education and would have it been helpful if she learned when she was younger. She said that she never really had one until college and even then it was treated like a joke and wasn’t that helpful. She said that her parents told her to stay away form drugs and that they were bad but never the real details. She also said she would have liked to learn about it when she was younger even though she didn’t do drugs then and that it maybe would have prevented her from ending up where she is today.

This is why I think the education system should teach their students early on about drugs and their effects. It could decrease the amount of irresponsible drug use.  Thank you. What questions do you have?

When I was there I learned about a new way of presenting a project. Before walking in and looking around I assumed it was going to be a standard presentation where we would sit down and listen to someone talk about the project. Instead there were posters around with different information on the subject. It was nice to see the two different ideas next to each other, the one side and two side idea. I learned that if the bike lanes were on both sides of the road it would take double the amount of time to build and that it may be better to have the lanes on the same side because the people biking will want to look at the bay and would be closer to the piers.

With the posters I found that I could go at my own pace and come back to them. While with the powerpoint slides it would go at the presenter’s pace. The presenters I asked seemed credible. They all road bikes and were very knowledgable about the topic. Also having the giant map of the pier was helpful to see how it would actually look. Personally I wish they had a small talk about it to start it off. When I went in I didn’t know where to start and wasn’t sure if there was supposed to be a specific order. In all the experience was interesting and informative.

Reflection:

Looking back at my S2 presentation I think I over all did pretty well. In the moment of my presentation I felt like it was going really quickly and that the four minute presentation that I was aiming for was more like a two minute presentation. There were times where I thought I was speaking too quickly or left a thought unfinished. But because I know people’s brains tend to remember things wrong I doubt my presentation was as bad as I thought it was. What I think I did well on was projection. Although it was a weird feeling to be not quite yelling but also not using my normal volume of talking voice I think I found a good in between. The aspects of the presentation I could have improved on where eye contact and moving around more. My notes were in a notebook all written out mostly word for word. That gave me something to read off of and I just need up doing that even though I had the presentation memorized. Next time I will try using note cards instead. One thing in the presentation that I think helped my credibility was that I used quotes from some of the people I interviewed.

Comments:

I thought Helen’s presentation was very good. She projected her voice very clearly and at the right volume. And it was interesting to hear about critical mass. I saw she was using note cards and I would like to try that because she wasn’t just reading off of them.

I enjoyed Jack’s presentation about the bike shops. It was interesting and informative. I liked how he had something (the business card) to pass around to the class. It was interesting to hear how bike shops are more reliant on rentals and repairs now than when the internet wasn’t a big thing.

I thought both of the articles were very interesting. The article “If Kant Were a New York Cyclist” at first sounded like a Doctor Suess story in the way the first paragraph was written. The message in that article that I took away  was that it may seem ok to bend the laws to fit you because you are only one person but it really isn’t. If everyone did that same thing as you did it would cause more harm. For me I normally obey the laws when biking. I pretty much always come to a complete stop at stop signs and when I don’t I do a “California stop”.  Thinking if every biker at the same time were to disobey the traffic laws would be extremely chaotic and would cause a bunch of accidents. Like the article said I know that a bike isn’t like a car so it is more ok than if a car where to break the law but it still isn’t the “right” thing to do. If more and more cyclists start bending the rules to their convince the more unpredictable they will be and get into more accident. There is also the fact that it could teach younger people to behave that way.

While reading David Byrne’s essays my thoughts were provoked and I was also sort of lost. When reading the one on San Francisco I felt lost after the first two paragraphs. He suddenly jumps into talking about technology. The first two paragraphs made me think it was going to be about just his bike ride. It would just be about the sights and sounds. It was but it also had more to it that I didn’t expect. For me it didn’t really have an order and the points he was making weren’t clear to me. It wasn’t a typical formatted essay that I learned in school. It felt like a bunch of thoughts written down on paper in no particular order. That isn’t a bad thing and it was interesting to read. His insights to different issues or topics I don’t really think about were very thought provoking to me. He was talking about the “normal” and how people will play into that role and how there are some people who haven’t learned how to “master those social skills”. I never really realized how true it is that if someone doesn’t fit into the “normal” category then how hard it is for their work to be appreciated or be taken seriously. As someone who  fits into that category it is hard to imagine how life would be if I wasn’t in this category. It is hard enough to being “normal” and having people appreciate the work I have done because there will always be people who try to drag you down but it has to be really really hard when you don’t fit in with society’s norm. In the essay about San Francisco there was a lot of interesting history.

The topic I was interested in was the subculture in the cycling community:

Types of people/ groups

Do they get along?

They way I gathered this information was through interviewing people.

I went out and asked people 2 questions. The 1st was what type of cyclist are you. The 2nd was Do any of the sub groups in the cycling community dislike, have problems with or hate each other?

I interviewed a total of 13 people.

Results were the

Majority likes everyone, no hate.

Quotes. “Cycling is an all around positive experience, people got to do what they got to do, and it doesn’t matter which group their in, their still cyclists and that is what matters.”

“We are all cyclists we all enjoy riding bikes, why hate each other just because our bikes are different. There is no reason to create an inner feud.”

Minority

reason for dislike was hazardous to others on the road.

What I took away from this project was that I found that the majority of the people I interviewd in the biking community get along and don’t dislike or hate each other. They were all very positive and supportive of one another.

Thank you for listening. What questions do you have.

S2 practice 1

S2 Practice 2

S2 practice 3

What I need to focus on improving is looking up at the camera. I was looking down at my notes. I also need to improve not playing with my hair too much it got distracting when I watched it. What I did well was projection.

The TED talk I watched was “The Cheap All Terrain Wheelchair”. It was about how regular wheelchairs don’t work on rough terrain and that people in poorer places need wheelchairs that are durable and affective. The guy talked about how there were already some wheel chairs that were like mountain bikes but they were too expensive. So they had to create a new type of wheel chair that would not only work on rough terrain but also be cheaper than $200 and reparable and work in doors. They used bike parts to make it. How it worked was using levers and the levers detached so it worked indoors also.

The evidence he used was the wheelchair. He talked about how it was made, what it was made of and the trials it took to get to where it was. He talks about how the first two designs of the wheel chair were not affective at all but with the help of the people reviewing it it got to where it is now, an all terrain affective wheelchair.

I would like to find out more about the subculture in the cycling community. There are so many different groups when it comes to bikes. There are the professional racers, mountain bikers, bmx-ers, and casual commuters. Are there more groups? What do they think about each other? Does one group dislike another group or do the groups all get along?

My plan for gathering this informations is through surveys and interviews. On the survey there would be a box you could check that says what category you are in, are you a pro or are you a commuter and so on. Then there would be a series of statements like I find commuters problematic and you can either strongly disagree, disagree, be neutral, agree, or strongly agree. For interviewing I would go to different types of events and ask the people what they think about the other groups.