Author Archives: David Lartch

Reading Reflection #3: Issues, Conclusions, and Reasons

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  1. The two types of issues are descriptive issues and prescriptive issues. Descriptive issues are issues that have questions that ask about what something is and a prescriptive issue is an issue that poses a question that challenges something that is happening.
  2. Some questions I can ask myself in finding a conclusion are: What are the writer or speaker trying to prove? What is the communicator’s main point? A question I would ask as well is, “Does the first paragraph leave me questioning?” If it does, I can skip to the end because the conclusion is often there, if not in the introduction. Other ways to find the conclusion is to look for indicator words like, consequently, therefore, thus, shows that, ect., and remember that a conclusion is not a reason, for example, “I had a nasty taste in my mouth,” is evidence to the conclusion that, “This milk is bad.” Also, you can sometimes find a conclusion if you know that your author always has a certain position, so, get to know your authors.
  3. According to “Critical Thinking” (Browne and Keeley), the combination of the reasons and the conclusion results in what we defined in chapter 2 as the “argument.” Some characteristics of an argument is that they have intent, the measurements of quality vary, and it could be a single reason for a conclusion or several reasons for a conclusion. An argument has the issue at hand, the evidence or answers to the issue, and the conclusion.
  4. The main question you ask yourself when looking for reasons to a conclusion is “Why.” “Why do the writer or speaker believe the conclusion?” Some indicator words to a reason are: because, studies show that, as a result of, and so on.
  5. Issue at hand: Intellectual Pride. Conclusion: the anecdote, or cure, for intellectual pride is a concept called intellectual humility. (Not all these terms are found in the source but I summarized it with my own terms) Reasons: Laszlo Bock, of Google, said “without intellectual humility, you are unable to learn.” Intellectual humility is the ability to understand the limits of ones own knowledge so it takes pride out of the question. Psychologist Tennelle Porter agrees with Bock and says that “Intellectually humble people are more likely to learn from people they disagree with.” Carol Dweck says that people that can’t do this have a “fixed mind-set.” The author of “How ‘Intellectual Humility’ Can Make You A Better Person,” Cindy Lamother, also got her reasonings from psychological studies published in journals, experiments that  dealt with correlations, newspapers and other sources.

Reading Reflection #2 ENG 191

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Observation: I chose Cultivating a Culture: Implementing Methods to Embrace Diversity and Inclusion, by Barbara S. Jacobs et al., because I have been a judgemental person in my past and want to educate myself a bit about diversity. I am also going to be a nurse or doctor some day and wanted to see what the healthcare field was doing in regards to embracing everyone for who they are instead of ostracizing whole cultures. The article mentions implicit bias and how they were implementing plans to reduce it.

Relevance: My topic is youth homelessness and what caused it. At the moment. I believe that genetics makes us who we are and tells us what our behavior will be like. If my father did; there is a good chance I will too. So this moves beyond why we become homeless to how we become black, or gay, or someone who gives up, or someone who is smart, and why we are judged for it and how do we fix it, or does it need to be fixed? I believe some of it does, like the homelessness and giving up in my genes; that needs to go. But does the black need to be cleansed from our genes? Hell no, and neither does lesbian, or gay, or transgender. Or does it? Was there a point in time when a baby is woven together that somehow the girl DNA was woven into the mind of a boys body? Is it a defect or is it normal? These are just ideas formulating in my mind but what is it? All I do know is that the people that this happened to don’t deserve to be judged. Corrected, yes, some. But judged and ridiculed and ostrasized? No.

Argument: I would say that the main objective of the article was to make it known, for one, that discrimination against every culture that is different from what we have portrayed as normal for generations is still a problem, and two, what are we doing/going to do about it. The argument in this article resides in a hospital in Annapolis, Maryland named Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC), and goes out to all other healthcare professionals who care to listen. They have “cultivated a culture” of professionals and leaders who are inclusive to diversity. Their plan of action includes; performance metrics which is a system that reads the performance of workers and judges them on things like equity and equality, business resource groups who have meetings, discussions, and even role-playing on subjects within implicit bias and the like, they have implemented programming to educate workers on all the different cultures and languages, and finally, they are moving toward acceptance of every culture, including LGBTQ individuals as well as African Americans and Hispanics and the like, onto the workforce within hospitals and other healthcare centers. This is an argument of compassion and love and of what healthcare providers and others want the near future to look like within hospitals and eventually everywhere else.

Reading Reflection #1 for ENG 191

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Observation: In reading “A Hidden Healthcare Crisis: Youth Homelessness,” by Marita Schifalacqua et al., I noticed that I can resonate a lot of what I was reading to myself. There were many times I was homeless as a youth or without a permanent address, and it rolled over into adulthood as I faced homelessness on countless occasions in my late 20’s and early thirties and it contributed to my addictions and sexual deviance. The social injustice in this, I would say, is on the part of parents and their insufficient way of living and there abuse to there kids and on behalf of social services who were not equipped for developmental issues back is 1989 as we are today. I believe I can trace my homelessness as a youth and as an adult to being in multiple fosters homes and seeming to always be in limbo as an infant and into adolescence. Just in 2013, the US government started tracking statewide youth homelessness, as it said in the article, and between that time and 2020 started making connections between youth homelessness vs. adult homelessness and human development/drugs/sex trafficking. Why did it take so long? Youth homelessness has been an issue since way before the 1800’s, they didn’t notice the effects of this back then? Or if they did, why didn’t they do anything substantial about it back then? Because it is still happening hundreds of years later. What can end it permanently? Can it be done? Reading this article though I can tell that we have made great strides, or at least Nevada has. This article was addressed to the rest of the nation and beyond. Why is this only happening in Nevada?

Relevance: As you can see from my observation, if I have a topic, It is quite broad at the moment. I didn’t even have one in mind until I read this article. Youth homelessness and what caused it. This article points out many reasons like abuse at home, criminal activity, parental substance abuse , or rejection, but I want to dig deeper into the mental health aspect on a generational scale. I believe it is a huge problem but we haven’t even grazed it yet.

Argument: Youth homelessness is a healthcare problem. With youth homelessness comes risks of pregnancy, std’s, mental health, suicide, and other illnesses. In many cases, young people haven’t the know how to take care of themselves and don’t want to seek healthcare for fear of judgement or getting reported to authorities. The Global Nursing Exchange in league with the Nevada Partnership for homeless youth (NPHY) and other homeless youth service providers formed a coalition to help cure youth homelessness. They created ways to “break down the barriers that often prevent unaccompanied homeless youth from accessing needed healthcare,” (A Hidden Healthcare Crisis: Youth Homelessness pg. 193), by bringing free healthcare to where homeless youths like to hang out, by parking their mobile healthcare van, which offers a plethora of healthcare services, outside the NPHY drop-in center to administer to youths in need, and by fundraising and gaining new partnerships to help stop the spread of youth homelessness and the horrors that come with it. The authors of this article wanted to give the world the news of how this epidemic could be taken care of. If it was done in Las Vegas, Nevada, it can be done everywhere else. To reiterate, youth homelessness is not just a problem for the various communities that have these young people running around unaccompanied, but it is also a problem for Healthcare professionals everywhere and the cure is a global effort.

Work Cited: A Hidden Healthcare Crisis: Youth Homelessness, by Marita Schifoloqua RN, MSN, NEA-VC, FAAN, Arash Ghafoori, MA, and Melissa Jacobowitz, MPA. These are their references:

 

Narrative Essay

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I decided that I would like to talk about 2 social injustices. One on how I, as a Christian, was persecuted for trusting in the bible, and two, how the bible made me judgmental of everything that came against what I perceived as true from the bible, like homosexuality, same sex marriage, sex outside of marriage and the like.  I will also touch on how I tried to use the word in every facet of life, from giving advice to rebuking the devil and others who contradicted my judgement and therefore God’s judgment. I picked this topic because it offers both sides of the argument and explains how both parties were being discriminated. I have learned though and will continue to learn while writing this essay, and beyond, that to live in this life and to be a good person you have to put judgments aside, otherwise you won’t make it. This topic has made me challenge my beliefs, and I have decided to not be a Christian, partly because of the other side that I wouldn’t look at. Part of my essay will include bits of history about Native Americans and what the bible, coupled with white Europeans, did to them in the name of greed masked by a plight of reform and making the native people a civilized race along with the whites. This essay will also involve facets of my mental disability and how I came to be a christian and have the views I had regarding judgement.

It happened 4 years ago when I was released from prison. I had been baptized there and was looking to live a christian life . I started hearing very small and subtle voices in my head saying, “daaaavvviiiddd, daviiiiiiddddd, daviiiidddd!” The only logical course for me was to ask, “What? Who is this?” Then the voices gradually got stronger and louder and started saying to me, “your worthless,” or “wiiise choices,”or, “if you didn’t want this then why’d you do what you did?” And another one they say is, “be gay,” and much more. No doubt a lot of you are probably wondering what voices in my head has to do with social injustice. To me? Everything! I thought these voices were demons come to persecute me for being a Christian, that’s when I really started taking everything in the bible literally and seriously, and consequently, when I started judging gay people along with pretty much the whole entire population of the world for not living by the bible, but living as sinners with no regret for what they were doing against God. This religion led me to live as a Christian monk at a monastery for a year until I realized, with all my praying, and chanting, and worshipping, none of these voices were going away, so there was only one of two conclusions, God condemned me, or, God doesn’t exist and I’m mentally ill. It took me awhile to face the music, even when I left the monastery to live with my Native American friend, Aliina. I didn’t want to believe it. This is where the story begins, this is where I really gave not being a christian a second thought because of the horrors Aliina’s ancestors went through. “How could God sit by while all this is happening, or let it happen?” “He isn’t real, or he wants this to happen, which is sick and demented.” This woman played the horrors of her ancestry back to me time and time again after I invoked God as part of one of our conversations, or arguments. She asked me, “how can a god let slavery happen?” I found myself questioning that, along with many other terrible happenings from the past and the present. This isn’t what I mean by discrimination.

When Aliina saw me reading the bible in her room she said to me, “why is that book in my room,” or “what makes that book so special that you trust in it whole heartedly,” my answer was “faith,” and she laughed. “David, its just a damn book that men wrote a long time ago to keep order,” “Jesus was a good person, thats all he was, a good person that got killed like Martin Luther King, he isn’t the son of God!!” Then came the talk. “When whites came over here, we, Native Americans fed them, and showed them how to hunt and fish so they wouldn’t starve to death and what did they do in return? Raped and murdered women and children and killed the men of the tribes. Then the ones they didn’t kill they made march the trail of tears to reservations, many died on the way there. Then they made us forget our traditions to pick up their traditions, made us wear white people clothes and taught us the bible. They seeked to make white men and women out of the natives.” I could not refute the latter without preaching to her and making her mad so I kept silent. “Why is she attacking my religion?” “Is she with the voices in my head? The demons?” “Its like she’s trying to get me to quit being a Christian.” Sometimes the conversations were about what was on the t.v, “Trannies have there own show now?” “Whats wrong with that David? Your stupid bible is making you judge people, you know, in my culture gay people were celebrated because the Creator endowed them with wisdom more so than the rest of us.” I almost laughed, “The bible says that the sexually immoral will have their reward in the lake of fire, I don’t want to hear this gay crap.” “Maybe your gay David, don’t your voices tell you to be gay?”

Judge not, lest you be judged. I judged Aliina for being a liberal and I attacked her heritage in the process. Aliina then judged me and that book I read, in turn insulting my religion. These attacks on both sides separated us naturally and we almost quit being friends. I used to believe in obeying your master, even if they are harsh or fools, like President Trump. Don’t gossip against them or put them dont like the news does, so I defended him when Aliina bashed him one time. She told me, “if your going to be a trump supporter then we are not friends.” I hung up on her. Then I thought about it, “I don’t know enough about trump and republicans to let this ruin our friendship,” so I called her back and told her that and apologized. This is the story of all my judgments when I was a Christian, my Christianity pushed not only Aliina away from me but many others. I didn’t hide it, I wore it on my shoulder. It wasn’t until I really started thinking about everything, from this conversation to slaughter in America right down to the voices in my head that I really started thinking, maybe I’m wrong.

 

 

Reading Reflections #2: Implicit Bias and Race

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Implicit Bias and Microaggressions 

  1. I felt when reading, “Trouble in mind: to be black is blue in America,” that IBe would have had a better time in America if he would’ve just stopped worrying so much. Every corner he turned, it sounds like, he thought he was being persecuted for being black. I doubt very much that every instance he thought he might be getting discriminated that he actually was being discriminated. I’d say it’s a lot like the voices in my head, every voice I hear is a person that I know or have seen, maybe in class, maybe in the dorms, etc. So, I used to walk around thinking I was the only one that didn’t know what was going on. “Did I not get that job because he heard what I said in my head?” Chances are very unlikely that he heard me say anything in my head and these people are just normal people. I understand some of what IBe saw could have been discrimination, but it also could have been a little bit of paranoia. He was in Saint cloud not too long ago because he was talking about President Obama. That leads me to believe that America was already changed when he got here. I really do believe that America has changed since Martin Luther King’s day and has gotten a lot better. Everybody has the same opportunities as anyone else does, black or white, male or female, gay or straight.  

 

2. I think IBe meant that even if you’re not angry, the oppression will hurt you, get you depressed, confused, paranoid, and afraid. All of that is trouble in mind. 

 

3. A time I witnessed a microaggression is when I said to my friend that women can’t drive. I meant it as a joke, but she got pretty angry at me. I can’t recall exactly what she said but I’m sure she was saying something about how women are on the rise and women do better than men in everything, and women are more intelligent than men. So, I resolved to not hit that button again. 

 

4. I think it is very important to feel like you belong anywhere you are, including the classroom. If you are ostracized and put down, then you’re depressed and lonely, probably not doing very well in school because you don’t feel like being there. Whether it’s explicit bias or implicit bias, it hurts. On the flip side if I am feeling well and welcomed then I know that I want to be here, I know people like me for who I am and I know that I won’t get hurt or be lonely. All this will allow me to not have to worry about anything but school, in turn letting me succeed in what I am venturing to do, whatever that may be. 

 

5. All the schools I was in were pretty diverse. I never thought about being white, it was never an issue. I don’t know if it’s a privilege anymore to be white. Meaning my race is no better than anyone else is. I had the same opportunities as any other kid in my school including my African American friends, and Mexican friends, and Native American friends and they had the same opportunities as me. We never had a racial discrimination problem in my schools that I could see.  

 

6. I believe if we keep making a big deal out of race it will always be a problem. We’re blowing it up just like the George Floyd case. I don’t think that cop would have done any differently if George was white instead of black to be honest. I believe that police officer was just a violent jerk that shouldn’t have been on the force. I have been apart of diverse groups all my life and very seldom did anything racial happen, but when it did, it was out of ignorance and it was handled within the group or amongst ourselves where the problem originated. Talking about race in the classroom will only make the problem bigger than it is. The only talks we had in class about racism was in history class where it belongs. Because racism is history, I don’t see it in the future, I barely even see it now, maybe on the news, that’s about it. Every life matters. 

Reading Reflection #1: Critical Thinking

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The Benefit and Manner of Asking the Right Questions:

1 .Some values that critical thinkers have are adventure, ambition, autonomy, comfort, excellence, justice, rationality, tolerance, and spontaneity. To be honest, I didn’t hear any of these discussed along with our going over the classroom agreement. I would say though, that autonomy and tolerance are up there on the list of things to value within this class because within the class agreement are things like being non-judgemental and being respectful of others’ ideas and opinions.

2. The difference between strong sense and weak sense critical thinking is that weak sense is used for the sole purpose of defending beliefs and strong sense is used to evaluate beliefs, even the ones that we, ourselves, hold. I think strong sense critical thinking, to speak from experience, is harder to use because as a christian I didn’t want other points of view to contaminate my own. I didn’t want my judgement clouded so I rejected all other opinions other than my own. As a christian I held my beliefs closely and judged everyone around me for being the way they were. If anyone tried to question my beliefs I was quick to rebuke them with beliefs formed from the words of a book written 2000 years ago. Recent events though have caused me to re-evaluate my position and I have opened up to the possibility of there being no god and my judgements were for nothing. This will open me to new ways of thinking. Although christianity did give me useful values like prudence and tolerance, and compassion and peace and goodwill toward men, those values were very closed off by the judgements that religion had me take up. Now I can use those values in a whole world of people that might have different ways of thinking and being that before I would’ve just, potentially, dismissed. Also, If I was still a christian, taking this class, this book would’ve gotten me down quite a bit. The way it talks of rebelling against those that try to get you to believe a certain way or to be a certain way would have thrown me into the belief that the writer of this book is anti-christ and this book would have been in one ear and out the other. This book also called most christians weak minded through the use of the weak sense critical thinking because they don’t likely stray from the faith and will guard it tooth and nail, which I would say is still a pretty strong way of thinking and the book insults that way of life. Most of the ways of thinking in this book is dangerous to christians and that is why they won’t likely open up to the strong sense critical thinking, but now that I am not a christian I find this a breath of fresh air, freeing, and invigorating.

3. An argument in this class is a way to harness and grow our conclusions and those of others. It is a learning experience based on evidence, not a way to verbally abuse someone or put someone down. The books’ definition of an argument does not rely on “me” being right, whereas, often, in arguments between parents or friends, the outcome relies on who’s right and who’s wrong.

4. Everyone has there own opinion of how or why, things should be done. In my opinion there are many, “right answers,” and the one we choose should be respected unless it endangers someones’ life.

“Why Questioning?”

  1. I can relate to this chapter. In the deciding to come back to college I answered a huge question. I haven’t been the most successful person, to say the least. I was looking at my life and asked myself, “where am I going to be in ten years?”Am I going to still be working dead end jobs, trying my best just to survive? I want a wife, kids, a house, and other nice things. I can’t get any of that being a loser. I need to do something, and fast. So I applied for college and decided I am going to be a doctor. I am going to work my ass off to get what I want.
  2. I think it has a lot to do with the beliefs that are thrown at us growing up. If the answers are already in us, what’s the point of asking questions? Just do what has already been laid out for us. Also, I think it has to do with our insecurities. If we constantly believe we can’t achieve what others have and more, then we slink into what’s comfortable and stop striving. No more questions. “I can’t do that, that dream is way to big.” Then I tell you the dream is truly dead. Until you start thinking otherwise and just go for it. Bezos, Jobs, and Einstein obviously didn’t let poor thinking get in the way of them reaching the heights that they achieved.
  3. As a student I have to ask questions to succeed. I have to ask questions to gain the knowledge that I need to do well in anything that I aspire to do. As a doctor, I guess one question I should ask right now is, “do I want to be the kind of doctor that uses old techniques to diagnose and treat patients, or do I want to be the kind of doctor that will discover and build new ways of diagnosing and treating patients?”

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