Pay for Play ?

College athletes are some of the hardest working people around. Athletes have a routine that includes brutal practices, intense games, and difficult college courses. College athletes carry a great weight on their shoulders. Compensation for college athletes has been a heated subject for years. Many people have their arguments in support of each side. However, no definite decision has been determined in this matter. College athletes should get paid for their performance because their sport is their job, the players have other financial responsibilities they need to handle and their respective schools are gaining large amounts of money from their talents. Today, sports are no longer just fun and games, sports are a business and college sports are no different. In division one-college sports they give a huge source of universities income. The school receives money from ticket sales, television contracts, and sport related merchandise, also with many other sports related revenue builders. The athletes on the other hand, receive their scholarship and little more and sometimes the price of a full time scholarship usually comes up about three grand short reported from the New York Times in 2011. While the idea of receiving a free college education is something few would complain about; when the issue is more closely examined it becomes evident that it is not enough. Universities are using athletes, and recently the problems that this creates have become more noticeable. More and more athletes are now leaving school early to enter the professional league in order to make money and to me it should be obvious if the Universities don’t want a High drop out rate then they should find other means of revenue for athletes.According to the many surveys, Northwestern football players spend 40 to 50 hours per week doing football-related activities, more time than most of them, spend attending class and studying outside of class. Their class selection and participation is also are very limited by their football commitments. There have also been more reports of violations surrounding university boosters and alumni paying players because most of the time a family will take in an athlete under there wing who are less fortunate financially but gifted in his or her talents. In college football more generally, there has been reports about how non-serious the academic part of football player’s lives are. A scandal at the University of North Carolina showed that their players were often enrolled in classes that wasn’t even real. From one of those fake classes, a 146-word essay that received an A was recently released, an essay so badly written that its author could not have had anywhere near college-level reading and writing ability. Just last year Ohio state was placed under a one-year bowl ban and other penalties against the Buckeyes football program as punishment for a scandal that involved players receiving $14,000 in cash and tattoos in exchange for autographed jerseys, rings and other memorabilia. Furthermore, athletes have been accused of making deals with gamblers and altering the outcome of games. Many of these problems can be eliminated if not completely eliminated, by adopting a program for compensating student athletes. College athletes are abused by their schools, which make millions of dollars off of them. This leads to violations, students leaving college early, and student-athletes that cannot even afford to do anything that their sport does not sponsor. The NCAA and professional leagues can work together to institute a plan to compensate these athletes and fix all these problems.  Student athletes need money just like any other college students, and many of them need it even more. According to Steve Wulf, many college athletes come from disadvantaged backgrounds. This means that while the free tuition is nice, they are still going to need money for other expenses that every college student faces. The NCAA finally realized this recently and decided to allow athletes to have a job earning up to $2000 during the school year through work-studies. Work Studies provides part-time employment while you are enrolled in school. It’s available to undergraduate, graduate, and professional students with financial need. It’s available to full-time or part-time students as well. North Western University is trying to wrap up their final stage in being a Union. When football players at Northwestern University submitted a petition to the National Labor Relations Board to form a union last month, they were above all asking to be recognized as employees. The request is an open challenge to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which since 1953 has designated college players as “student athletes” a term used to to avoid the responsibilities and liabilities that come with employee. There are also a few cons to all of this. Most people would also argue that college sports exist not so the athletes could gain profit, but to show athletes the true meaning of sportsmanship between colleges. We all love to watch the big Duke and Carolina basketball and many people think that add revenue for playing the games will deface the college athletics. Putting money in the equation for the players’ contribution would debase the principle of amateurism. Amateurism is the views and principles of a person who engages in an activity for pleasure rather than profit. There once was a time this year over Christmas break we had to stay here at school, and miss almost half of our break, and the café was closed everyday so we received $20 from our coach everyday. The money is was kept all the players to keep coming back the next day and also you wanted your scholarship renewed at the end of the year as well. My point is if you give student athletes anything, just something to help them out financially along there Journey in this cold hearted world maybe more student athletes percentage of drop outs will decrease and the percentage of graduates will increase.

Work Cited

“Amateurism.” The Free Dictionary. Farlex, n.d. Web. 07 May 2014.

Mark Schlabach. “NCAA Sends Message to Ohio State.” ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, 2 Nov. 2013. Web. 05 May 2014.

The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 12 Feb. 2011. Web. 06 May 2014.

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Healthy Eating: Is it for Everyone?

Healthy Eating: Is it for Everyone?
Character Guide

Radley Balko: A senior editor for the monthly magazine Reason and a columnist for FoxNews.com. He focuses on investigative writing on civil liberties and criminal justice issues, and he depicts himself as a “small-l” libertarian in his blog The Agitator. He has also contributed to other publications such as the Washington Post and Playboy.

Mary Maxfield: She graduated from Fontbonne University in December 2010 with a degree in creative social change and minors in sociology, American culture studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Michael Pollan: A professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote six books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (2010), and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008). He was also named one of Time magazine’s top 100 Most Influential People in 2010.

David Zinczenko: The editor-in-chief of Men’s Health magazine and author of numerous best-selling books, including the Eat This, Not That and The Abs Diet Series.
Radley Balko, David Zinczeno, and Michael Pollan are sitting in a restaurant eating a healthy lunch together. They are waiting for their friend Mary Maxfield to arrive. She then enters the restaurant and joins the group. She sits down at their table with a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts in her hands and offers them to her peers.

Mary Maxfield: Hey guys! Sorry I’m late. I had to go to Krispy Kreme and pick up some doughnuts. Anybody want one?

Michael Pollan: Are you kidding? Why in the world would you bring doughnuts? They’re so unhealthy for you!

David Zinczenko: Yeah, why would you bring those? You know I don’t eat any kind of fast food or processed foods.

MM: Come on guys. They aren’t so bad. We are all adults and “adult human beings are allowed to eat whatever and however much they want” (446). It couldn’t hurt to eat just one doughnut.

MP: Yes but we should only eat what is good for our bodies. “In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today” (439).

Radley Balko: Michael is right, you know. “We’re becoming less responsible for our own health, and more responsible for everyone else’s. Your heart attack drives up the cost of my premium and office visits. And if the government is paying for my anti-cholesterol medication, what incentive is there for me to put down the [doughnut]” (396-397) if I choose to eat one?

DZ: Yeah, “I learned how to manage my diet” (392) and what I eat all on my own. However, “I tend to sympathize with these partly fast-food patrons, though. Maybe that’s because I used to be one of them” (391). The problem with certain processed foods, like doughnuts, is that “there is no calorie information charts on fast-food packaging, the way there are on grocery items” (392-393). Fast-food companies need to work on informing people on what exactly they are putting into their bodies, maybe even provide healthier food options in their restaurants.

RB: You are quite right David but did you know that “Senator Joe Lieberman and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, among others, have called for a “fat tax” on high-calorie foods[?] Congress is now considering menu-labeling legislation, which would force restaurants to send every menu item to the laboratory for nutritional testing (396). Instead of manipulating or intervening in the array of food options available to American consumers, our government ought to be working to foster a sense of responsibility in and ownership of our own health and well-being” (396).

MP: That is an interesting way to think about things Radley but you have to realize, these fast-food companies are what the Western diet is composed of. “To escape the Western diet and the ideology of nutritionism, we have only to stop eating and thinking that way (437). In other words instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature” (438).

RB: Yeah sure, I guess you’re right. All I’m saying is that “we’ll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and personal health when someone else isn’t paying for the consequences of those choices” (398).

MM: Okay everyone let’s all calm down and end this debate. I do agree that “we are a nation stricken by heart disease, diabetes, and cancer” (444) and “our diet of processed foods makes us sick and fat” (444). But you should “trust yourself, trust your body, meet your needs” (446). Eat what is right for your own body. So let’s all enjoy the rest of our lunch eating what we feel is right for our own selves.

DZ: Well then you eat what you want and I’ll eat what I want, but I’m definitely not going to touch those doughnuts.
Everyone at the table laughs and continues on eating their lunches together.

Works Cited
Pollan, Micheal. “Escape from the Western Diet.” “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in​Academic Writing: With Readings. 2ND ed. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russell Durst. New York: Norton, 2012. 434-441. Print.

Maxfield, Mary. “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating.” “They Say/ I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing: With Readings. 2ND ed. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russell Durst. New York: Norton, 2012. 444-447. Print.

Balko, Radley. “What You Eat Is Your Business.” “They Say/ I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing: With Readings. 2ND ed. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russell Durst. Ney York: Norton, 2012. 395-399. Print.

Zinczenko, David. “Don’t Blame the Eater.” “They Say/ I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing: With Readings. 2ND ed. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russell Durst. Ney York: Norton, 2012. 391-394. Print.y

**This is a collaborative assignment with my ENG 131**

Annotated Bibliography

Higher Education: An Annotated Bibliography

Introduction

For the first paper of this semester, an annotated bibliography, I chose the subject of higher education. This subject became interesting to me after we watched the documentary Declining by Degree in class on how a college student had to maintain a double life, working in a factory to be able to pay for college.

Another subject that grew to my attention were the readings that we are doing from the “They Say I Say” textbook. There were two particular writings that were shocking to me. They were “Watching TV makes you Smarter” and “Thinking Outside the idiot box?”

Annotated Bibliography

Johnson, Steven. “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”. They Say I Say. 277-294. Print.

Mr. Johnson made some really good points in his writing. One of his points was that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today. The Sleeper Curve is the most debased forms of mass diversion. Video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms turn out to be nutritional after all.

Steven Johnson is the author of seven books, among them Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is actually Making us Smarter (2005) and Where Good ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation (2010). Johnson is also a contributing editor for Wired, writes a monthly column for Discover, and teaches journalism at New York University.

 

Stevens, Dana. Thinking Outside the Idiot Box. Slate: New York Times Magazine, 2005. 295-298. Print.

I agree with Ms. Dana to a certain degree. I believe TV is capable of making you smarter; it just depends on what you are watching. Many shows on TV today are very educational, and on the other hand there are some things that are inappropriate. She made a point saying “ Johnson’s claim for TV as a tool for brain enhancement seems, deeply, hilariously bogus”.  

Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critics and also written for the New York Times, Book forum, and the Atlantic.  Stevens has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

Groening, Matt. “The 9 Types of College Teachers.” Cartoon. Plashing Vole. Plashingvole.blogspot.com, 25 Oct. 2012, Web. 12 Feb.

In this cartoon Groening illustrates nine cartoon pictures of different types of college teachers. Many of the descriptions hit the nail right on the head, because I have seen and had many of the characteristic’s shown. This relates back to Higher Education because the Disdainful Teaching Assistant many times is your teacher in a big college class and also the big Mighty Famous Big Shot will also be your teacher because they have been at the school so long they have nothing to worry about because he or she have job security.