Week+2+Discussion+5366

Prompt 1

I agree with the idea of a school “selling” an education to students. I teach at a high school where the logo is used basically for athletics as well. Why don’t schools market the idea of a good education? Education uses a lot of other ideas from the business world, why not branding? As students get older and the curriculum gets harder, they need motivation to “keep going”. With the rise of graduation requirements in the state of Texas and the dropout rate increasing, the educational system needs to ingrain the idea to teenagers that **__they need us__**. Education is not an option—it’s a must!! Without it—their future is certainly uncertain. While I agree with the fact that schools and districts should using branding to sell their product, I do not necessarily agree with the fact that public school teachers should brand themselves. I am not sure how it works in everyone else’s district, but in Leander ISD, students don’t get to hand-pick their own teachers. They get assigned a teacher. If their friends are in another class or they want a different teacher because they have a reputation as being “fun” or “cool”, students cannot just go down to the counselor’s office and get a schedule change. I think if you are out there trying to “sell yourself” to students, this could create a lot of problems. Not only will this create an issue of “everyone” trying to get into your class, but may cause other teachers, whose classes the students are trying to get out of, to resent you. Even if you are an elective teacher trying to get students interested in taking your class, trying to sell your product or brand has now created competition among teachers that wasn’t there before. I am not at all saying that teachers should not care about their image; rather, I am merely pointing out that this sort of competition among teachers could be detrimental to the overall mission of the school.

Prompt 2

The brain is a like a muscle that needs exercise to get bigger, stronger, and more efficient. Mathematics provides that exercise. Even if students aren’t planning to go into a career involving math, it still serves a function—to develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills. It is important that students embrace the overall purpose of higher level math classes and strive for success instead of being resolved that they are merely “bad at math”. My mission statement must convey the message that learning mathematics is important in all areas of life—education, career, and life in general—in that sense .
 * My mission is to prepare students for continued schooling, career opportunities, and life through higher order thinking skills in mathematics. **

My idea for a logo is to have my initials AR made out of 3 different shapes—absolute value, parabola, and lines with arrows on the ends to represent that the pieces of each letter is made up of functions and non-functions. Under the initials, a short saying having to do with “knowing your functions” or something with a double meaning like that. I am still working on it.

Prompt 3

I think taking the average is good for some things, but not necessarily beauty. When it comes to beauty, especially in people and their faces, we look for extraordinary features—not ordinary ones. Taking the average of all of the different ways a person can look creates an ordinary or “average” appearance instead of a striking one. People that we consider the most beautiful, especially models and actors, are not considered to have average beauty. I definitely think certain symmetry that is pleasing to the eye and brain have something to do with the beauty we perceive, but can that be expressed as a number? Perhaps… When we see an exceedingly disproportionate face, it stands out, but not necessarily as a beautiful one. This topic reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies, American Beauty (1999). A boy tells the beautiful cheerleader in response to her saying she wasn’t ugly, “Yes you are**.** And you**'**re boring. And totally ordinary...and you know it.” The movie is based on the idea that one of the things we fear most is being ordinary. That is not to say that beauty cannot be found in ordinary things, as the same boy finds in filming a plastic bag “dancing” in the wind. It all goes back to who is looking and how they are looking at something. Beauty can be found in anything and anyone, depending on whose eyes are doing the looking.

Prompt 4

The ratio of the full length of my head to length of my chin to the eyebrows was 1.444. The ratio of the chin to the eyes and chin to the nose was 1.39. My eyes were almost 2/3 up from my chin--.61. The location of my eyes is closer to the Rule of Thirds than in the center of my face. I suppose the ratio of my face is smaller than most as I have a small head, ears, lips, and eyes compared to my 5"10 frame. It makes sense to me that it would be a little less than the Golden Ratio.