Compensation

Today on Twitter, a friend/teacher of mine posted this article by the New York Times about the lack of compensation received by writers and visual artists on many different projects. In many cases, artists/writers are approached by different companies "telling you how much they admire your work" only then to have them ask for you to do work for them, but not pay for it. Paying for it of course is "out of the budget" and out of the question for most of these companies. The article is right, artists and writers do the same if not more work than a lot of people in America's workforce. The fact that many people in our country believe that artists/writers should not receive money, and that their work is not important. This is mostly evident in the comments on the article, where multiple people express that they do not believe that artists/writers do any work, or any work that deserves even minimum wage. From my personal experience, ART TAKES A LONG TIME TO MAKE. It takes a lot of effort and time and sometimes has to be completely scrapped and restarted! I've spent up to four hours on small doodles, sometimes I've spent more than 10 hours! Artists and writers have it the hardest, they have to consult, then work, then show progress shots which the client might shoot down, keep working, show more progress, and the cycle goes until the piece is done! In my personal opinion, I believe there should be a minimum wage for artists. It's a job, it's work, and you shouldn't have to accept 15 dollars for a piece you spent 4 hours on. And all the people on the article commenting with "if you worked harder you'd get more" is just perpetuating the cycle of society's view of artists, that all artists are lazy and stuck up. And for some reason, a lot of people think artists are rich? I don't know where that one came from but it's true. 

Homework

So in media studies we were talking about the amount of homework students receive and how it's really way too much to even learn anything from. The amount of homework we get in high school is ineffective and doesn't do anything. It's stupid, useless busy work most of the time and when it isn't you know it isn't. But 99% of the time it's going to be busy work. For example, in Chinese we practice saying the new words in a new unit for about a week. and then at the end of that week, we have to call someone and practice again, the same thing we do everyday in class for a week. I think schools need to seriously change the way they run the homework system, it needs to be changed into something that's actually effective. I think if classes were just in general more interesting and tried to strike nerves with the students and try to emotionally connect, they would see a huge improvement in grades.

Last night I was hanging out in the kitchen and watching tv with my parents. We were watching 60 minutes and they brought up a story about how so many people in America abuse the disability system. Many people claim disability and then receive a check for it, when they really don't have any disabilities beyond maybe back pain or head aches, and as long as they have one of those lawyers like Binder & Binder who will "fight" for them in court, they will get disability checks. While watching this I was thinking about how many people have this idea in their head that so many people abuse welfare, when in fact there aren't nearly as many people who abuse welfare, it's almost none. And the people on welfare need it, because without it they can't eat or take care of families and they can barely even do it with it. Also, most people stereotype that every black single mother or black family is on welfare and are abusing it, however with the disability system, most of the people seem to be white people in the south, the kind who I would imagine are the ones perpetuating the stereotype stated previously. I think it's weird that so many people can abuse the help for disabled people, because there are people who actually need it. And if enough people abuse the disability system, then it will be shut down and made unavailable for the people who actually need it. Another thing I thought about while watching it was something I'd seen earlier that day. While driving with a friend, we saw a man who was severely disabled moving down the road, he could barely hold up his head or keep his hand on the control on his wheelchair. No one helped the man and everyone was looking away from him. We would have helped him but we couldn't. Why wasn't someone there to help him? This man needed help, where was that? Why aren't people like him being given help when they need it so bad.