Political Cartoon Analysis
This political cartoon addresses the issue of him wanting to build a wall on the border of Mexico to prevent them from crossing the border into America. It literally shows him making an announcement and several caricatures are used to exaggerate how loud his message his, for example, his mouth is really big which symbolizes him being a ‘big mouth’ which is a person who talks a lot without putting much thought into what they are saying. The font used is bold which emphasizes how he is yelling his message across for the full world to hear, and the author made his head quite little which suggests that Trump puts little thought into what he is actually saying. The author uses the object of the wall to symbolize Donald Trump’s attempt to contain a threat, and the author is tackling the controversy of whether to build a wall on the border of Mexico or not. The purpose of this comic is to show that the real problem of America is the president himself, and his call to action is to contain Trump. The author has an iconic style of artwork that makes Trump iconic and easily recognizable with his slightly orange skin color and thin golden hair. The physical object of the microphone further shows how his message is spread across the world, and the author’s choice to design Trump barely fitting into his tuxedo suggests that he believes Trump is not fit to be a good president. Personally, I am on the author’s side of the controversy, and most other people are as well. The political context of the war between Mexico and America helps to understand the purpose of this political cartoon. The second half of the image shows that it is a separate time and the labeling of the ?!? brings the idea that Trump did not expect he himself to be the threat of his nation, which shows how he does not realize how many people disagree with him or maybe that he does not pay attention to other people’s opinions.
Living In Quarantine
During these recent weeks, many others including myself are experiencing something we have never have before. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the Singaporean government has strongly encouraged everybody to only go outside for essential purposes, meaning that most children have been inside their houses for a while.
Personally, I found myself having a lot more free time, especially due to the fact that my exams got canceled and I was presented with no school work during the Easter break. Because of this, I took this as an opportunity to try to learn some new hobbies.
At first, it didn’t seem like there was much I could do, I watched TV, made some drawings, and surfed the internet. I was listening to some music when I decided to try to write a song. It was quite an interesting and unique activity, and it served as something to get my brain thinking about other things during a stressful time. I found it to be challenging and quite time-consuming, yet I also had a lot of fun doing it.
Something else I found was that I started to finally do things I’ve wanted to in the past but never found the time to. For example, I took my dog for many walks each day. This gave me the chance to appreciate nature which increased my overall wellbeing and it also allowed me to spend more time with my loving dog.
To conclude, although what’s going on in the world right now is quite tragic, there are some upsides that have been brought because of this situation, for example, I may have found a new hobby which I would like to practice in the future. Anyways, I know that this full event is probably something that I won’t be going through again for a very long time, so I feel it is best to remember everything about it.
Meeting
Grade 10 has been a great learning experience for me. I have learnt many useful skills this year, the goals I set for myself at the start of the year and the mistakes I made have helped me to grow and make progress as a person.
One of the services I participated in, PPIS, was a great opportunity for me to develop my leadership and collaborative skills. In the service we would host sessions for younger children who aren’t that great at speaking English, each of us would take turns in groups managing what games we would play and what items we would need. I found it very fun and I would like to pursue services with similar opportunities in the future.
The exam period posed a very stressful time for me, but it also taught me some crucial lessons on how to manage stress. Some of the techniques I learned were breathing exercise and mindfulness. This allowed me to feel calm and focus on my exam paper to properly demonstrate my knowledge. I want to use these skills in the future as I feel they are very important.
I have taken away a lot from Grade 10, and I have learned many skills that I want to use in the future. I am grateful for having all of these great opportunities.
Transition
While in the transition process from iGCSE to IB, I have gained many opportunities to learn about which career path I want to follow for the future. The subjects that I choose in IB does have a large impact on how I will spend the rest of my two years in this school and what I hope to do after I graduate, therefore, it does feel like there is a lot of pressure.
To manage it I made sure not to constantly overthink and dread of which option I should take, and instead just choose the one which syllabus and course content personally interest me. I didn’t want to push myself and choose a challenging subject, because although it may be helpful later on and impress others around me, it would make my IB experience quite difficult and challenging.
Talking to other students who have done/are doing the IB, talking to my previous teachers who understand my strengths and weaknesses, talking to teachers who are teaching in IB, and talking to my parents has really helped me gain an insightful perspective on all of the different options I want to take. Many people tell me that my IB subjects should match each other and focus on a particular field, so I have taken that advice while also trying to try new subjects that could interest me.
In the end, I think I am in quite an important time of my life, but by taking advantage of the help and advice that I can receive from others with more experience than me, I was able to make this transition process as smooth as possible.
Career Path Investigation
From the Interest Profiler website, I found that my top results were jobs related to business and arts, design, sports and entertainment and media, for example, film director or a business entrepreneur. These jobs are what I have always been interested in since I was young, and I am looking to attempt pursuing this field of work in the future. I think I have always been interested in these because of my natural talent/skill, personal goals, and what I generally really enjoy doing.
Some jobs that I have never considered were becoming an architect, a corporate seller, a software engineer, yet I found out that they are well-paying jobs that can actually be really intriguing.
I found becoming a mechanical engineer, or a physician to not really interest me, and this is mainly because I do not enjoy practicing maths and I am not really interested in physics topics.
Collaborative Games and Taking Initiative
During the first day of school in grade 10, the full grade got to play these fun mini-games. Some of these games demanded the full group to be involved in order to accomplish the goal of the game.
For example, in of one of the games we played, we had to tangle ourselves by standing in an enclosed circle and holding the hands of peoples across and around you, and once everybody was holding someone’s hands, we had to untangle ourselves without letting go. This was a unique and challenging experience because if one person decides to do something, everybody else would get effected. In order to prevent everybody from moving around and falling over, we had to coordinate ourselves.
I saw this as a good opportunity to take the leadership role to calm the full group down in order to figure out the best way to approach the situation. Once everybody had concentrated, the game became much easier. I told someone to step over another person, and from their, the full group understood how to untangle each other, and in a relatively short amount of time, we were able to untangle ourselves while holding on to each other the full time. All it took was some initiative and collaboration.
The Grade 9 Personal Statement
Since I was born with so many privileges, I feel obliged to make the most of my life because I cannot let anyone down. Therefore I have to take the necessary steps to do so. This year I have tried to take many risks and become independent in order to prepare myself for the future. I signed up for the Kenya school trip this year, where we are going to go on a 10km hike at very high altitudes. I have been training for it so that I can enjoy those three weeks which I will be away from Singapore. I also tried playing new sports this year, I joined a school badminton class where we practiced badminton every Wednesday from 3-6pm. This was useful because it allowed me to practice useful skills in physical education which can also be used in other sports. I also tried playing golf this year, and I found out that I really enjoy the sport. My goal is to join the golf SEASAC team next year and to do that I have to practice a lot and consistently. While going through this year I also wanted to express my gratitude for all of the things I take for granted because sometimes things go by too fast and you don’t have time to appreciate anything, so I joined the Capturing East service, which is a service where our objective is to celebrate and show appreciation to the support staff in our school community. We wanted to build a closer connection between the students and the support staff, such as the librarians, chefs, security guards. So far, we have already set up many eye-catching posters which are about individual staff members, fun facts about them, so that students will learn more about the people that take care of them and treat them more like regular humans. I have been proud to be a part of this service because a goal I set myself last year was to take service seriously as it is a vital aspect to have when developing to an adult. I tried to achieve my goals by experimenting with various techniques for studying, such as studying for 45 minutes and taking a 20-minute break, or studying for a long period of time and then taking a long break, because I knew I need to develop good studying habits and practice time management in order to do well academically in this school.
Writers Fortnight Reflection
This Writer’s Fortnight journey was a very new and insightful experience for me. I practiced things I had rarely done before, like journalism and interviewing others. I enjoyed the process of listening to the talks given by other people. I’m grateful I got the opportunity to attend them because they were very inspiring and motivational to me. The research process was good practice for me, as in the future I would need to know how to gather information from reliable sources and use them as evidence for my essays, and making sure to credit all the information as well. Writing the article was a new experience for me, and I decided to challenge myself by making an opinion based article. I found it challenging to structure the article, as I did not want to make it simple in chronological order because I learned that to be a writer you need to write all the points you make as well as making it interesting for the reader to read.
In my article, the first draft had a lot to improve on. I wrote down all my points but the structure didn’t make sense and it was boring to read. In my final draft, I focused on the structure and I was proud of what I got. There were still some problems with the flow, however since this was the first time I had practiced journalism I was still okay.
Writers Fortnight Article
Should You Trust Doctors?
Cancer survivor Sabrina Lone would not have had her loving, beautiful daughter if she had trusted her doctors who told her to get an abortion early on in her pregnancy.
Being a doctor is an important profession, a well-paid one as well. Today, many people are conscious of maintaining their health, whether it’s because they want to feel socially accepted, or they want to live a long life. However, there is an increasing rate of people who are too busy to make time for doing physical activities. But to make sure they are healthy, they turn to medical assistance.
According to Ipsos MORI Veracity Index in November 2017, 998 British adults aged 15+ were asked about which individuals they trust the most based on their professions. Over 90% of the contestants said that they trusted nurses and doctors the most. But, are they as reliable as everybody claims them to be?
Sabrina Lone, would not have the amazing daughter she loves right now if she had taken her doctors advice to get an abortion during her pregnancy.
To give you some context, Sabrina has gone through a painful and emotional journey with cancer. It runs in her family, most of her uncles have died from cancer. Instead of studying at a film university at the age of 19, she was taking care of her relatives diagnosed with this disease.
After almost 10 years down the line, she decided to take a break from this nursing business. “My mom told me, Sabrina, you have put your life on hold. Go out there, travel for 6 months and come back with a fresh mindset”. She traveled to Singapore, found her husband and made plans to have a baby. Unfortunately, she got a severely painful backache and after many tests, she discovered she had thyroid cancer.
Fortunately, this is one of the easiest cancers to treat. According to a study by EndocrineWeb; In patients who are less than 50 years of age, both papillary and follicular types of thyroid cancers have a more than 98% cure rate if treated appropriately.
She underwent an intense but successful surgery. After a few months, she attempted to make a child with her husband. For the next two years, all she got were false pregnancies and early miscarriages. “At some point, the doctor’s told me to stop. They did a diagnose and ran something on me, and they told me this is not going to happen, I was not going to get pregnant, and I should just stop”.
Vioxx is a drug that was once considered one of the best painkillers in the market. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on May 20th, 1999. As time went by, patients that used the drug filed lawsuits claiming that they suffered a heart attack or stroke as a result of ingesting Vioxx. This equated to more than 44,000 people. Then an FDA investigator released a study indicating that Vioxx greatly increased the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes and had probably been responsible for at least 55,000 American deaths during the five years it had been on the market. Merck & Co. reported over $11 billion in Vioxx sales during the 5 years the drug was on the market.
An article by HuffPost made by a doctor named Peter Rost, tells us why we shouldn’t trust doctors. He had a friend in the drug industry who used Vioxx when it first became popular, but then he heard about the heart problems it gave and stopped taking the drug. “Meanwhile, regular patients kept popping those Vioxx pills like candy. And now some of the patients who suffered heart attacks after taking Vioxx lined up in court” The doctor’s that prescribed Vioxx to their patients could have easily found out about the harmful effects it gave if they had cared enough. If they genuinely wanted their patients to be well they would have done all the necessary research on the medicine before they prescribed it to them, but obviously, they preferred making more and more money off of it until it had been legally banned to be sold from the market.
Sabrina Lone’s, like most other patients, took the doctor’s advice and quit trying to have a baby. She let herself relax, but after a few months, she felt nauseous. She had a test done and found out she was actually 8 weeks pregnant. Suprised, yet also relieved, she started doing everything that was best for her baby.
Around her 12th week of pregnancy, she did a 3D scan test to check the baby’s gender. The doctor saw a small abnormality in the results and advised Sabrina to kill the baby and try again. The doctor assumed the baby had down syndrome and heart problems. Keep in mind ultrasound scans are never 100% accurate. An article made by Krissi Danielsson tells us that the accuracy of an ultrasound test can vary based on factors such as the stage of the pregnancy, the quality of the machine, the skill of the practitioner, and the position of the baby in the womb.
Sabrina decided to investigate further, but the doctor warned her that delaying the abortion will make it more and more painful. A few days later she did a CVS scan, and she found out the baby did not have down syndrome. Still a bit hesitant, she underwent several more scans and they all showed no negatives.
Sabrina questioned her doctor’s reliability, and she decided to change her doctor. She did a final scan being 21 weeks pregnant. The new doctor finally told her the results: “Everything looks good, the baby has a healthy blood flow into the heart and that’s exactly what you want to see”. Sabrina burst into tears and could not stop crying for the rest of the day.
Sabrina’s experience teaches us a lot about doctors. Most people do what doctors tell them to because they think they do not know any better. Doctors can take advantage of this, just like how they did with the Vioxx medicine. So, next time you go see the doctor, you should get to know them and make sure they are giving you the right advice, otherwise, they may encourage you into making a wrong decision you could regret for the rest of your life.
Image Sources: