Sunny Youth Journal

Maggie and Momma have a different personality from Dee. Dee is very self-centered whereas Maggie and Momma have a different way of thinking.

Dee is different from Maggie and Momma in many ways. She is prettier looking and is used to getting what she wants. She is ashamed of her family and her heritage and therefore changed many things about her life like her name and her hair. Dee also thinks she is better than Maggie and Momma because they live in poverty and aren’t as pretty. Dee acts like a “bully” to Maggie which normally, Maggie will give in to Dee.

Maggie and Dee also have a different view on the quilts. Dee wants to hang them as decoration while Maggie wants to treat them like actual quilts. Dee complains about this when Momma wants to give them to Maggie. Momma still stands up for Maggie and because of this, the latter is very happy at the end of the story because for once, she could do what she actually wanted to do and didn’t have to cower to Dee.

Education also plays a role in this story because Dee went to school and Maggie and Momma didn’t. Because she went to school, Dee thinks that she is better than Maggie and Momma and deserves more than them. Education separates Dee from Maggie and Momma.

Because of education, looks, and her mindset, Dee is different from Maggie and Momma who are less self centered. They also care about different things, Dee cares about appearances while Maggie and Momma don’t really care about how they look.

Tradition and heritage play a large part in “Everyday Use,” though the characters have vastly different takes on what “tradition” and “heritage really mean. Dee constructs a new heritage for herself, failing to see her new “heritage” is merely an empty shell, holding no real meaning.

Dee shows up, boasting a new, more African name, saying she “couldn’t bear” being named after the people who “oppressed” her. Dee doesn’t realize that there is significance to her name, which was passed down from generation to generation. Meanwhile, her new name is devoid of meaning, much like her “African” dress and jewelry. Dee doesn’t understand her real heritage, so the “heritage” she has built around herself is only a house of cards, not a stable structure filled with bright splashes of tradition.

Dee and her mother have contradictory views on what heritage actually is. Maggie and the mother uses all the items Dee views as objects of “heritage.” Each of the items she takes show signs of wear, such as where “thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood” in the churn dasher. However, Dee takes these everyday items to be mere decoration, similar to museum exhibits. Just like how exhibits are often trapped under glass cases, these objects are, in a way, detached from Dee. She doesn’t know the history behind them, viewing them as a dead fossil instead of something very much alive.

When Dee leaves her mother and sister, she tells them that they don’t “understand” their heritage. But it is Dee, in her faux African dress, who doesn’t understand the meaning in her culture. Items of family heritage were made to be used, not stared at while on display.

Change is perhaps the most avoided part in humanity. This is because people are often unwilling to change, since many are afraid of it. Humans usually fear the unknown or doubt themselves when they are considering change. However, change is an important part of life. Not many people understand how necessary it is for someone to improve and grow. Change has many benefits for everyone, and is very important for humans.

Without change, growth isn’t possible. Every time something changes, people grow and learn new things with it. They would discover new insights about different aspects of their life. Individuals learn lessons from every change, even from those that did not lead them to where they wanted to be. However, they are able to change again, to grow even more and find a path that they are contented to be on.

Changes can also make improvements on people’s lives. Everyone has something that they can or would like to improve, for example jobs, houses, finances, and much more. However, nothing will improve by itself, and people need to do things differently to make that happen. They would have to change to make improvements in their life. Changing is the only way people can improve, showing that it is very important for many individuals.

However, some people might say that not all changes can be good. Although that is true, change will always be necessary in people’s lives. Even if it did not get one to where they wanted to be, they have learned a lesson from that change. That means people are able to make better choices based on those lessons they have learned from changing.

Change is the only way in which people can grow, learn and improve. Without accepting this, individuals are unable to progress in life. Although change is not always good, it will always be necessary in ones life.

A common problem in society is how to change people’s behavior. Most approaches include informing one about dangers and threatening one, but people tend to avoid bad news, so this strategy is ineffective. The TedTalk How to motivate yourself to change your behavior spoken by Tali Sharot illustrates three effective ways to help change one’s behavior. Changing behavior is crucial in times like this, where many people do not wear face masks and forget the importance of social distancing. Fortunately, one can create an app that does just this. Employing features such as social incentives, monitoring progress, and granting immediate rewards into an app can significantly improve COVID-19 prevention measures.

Social incentives are comparing one to others. For example, creating a leaderboard system for committing a certain helpful behavior can promote this action. The speaker used social incentives to increase the hand-washing rates of doctors from 10% to 90%. In this app, let’s call it COVID-19 Fighters (yes the name is cringy), the developers can add a leaderboard that shows how many times one is washing their hands, or how often they social distance and wear masks. There could be four separate leaderboards. Three of them each represent how much people social distance, wear masks, and wash hands. The fourth leaderboard can show the overall amount of protection. There can also be a system added which shows the average performance, one’s own performance, and the performance of the top 10%. Obviously, competitiveness is a common human trait, so people will take even more precautions to reach the top.

Progress monitoring is another strategy in order to improve behavioral change. The speaker explained how one of her electrical bills included the average usage, her usage, and the usage of the most efficient neighbor. Of course, she wanted to become that efficient neighbor. In COVID-19 Fighters, there should be an option for one to see a graph of their progress. One could see progress over each month, week, and day. Doing the right actions will make the graph go up while committing wrongdoings does the opposite. Not only can one see their own progress, but the app should also enable one to see anyone’s progress. This helps people see how much one should improve if they want to climb the leaderboards. Additionally, the opening screen of the app should contain a message saying how the person is doing. If their progress over the current week was less than that of the previous week, the message would help motivate them to try harder. If they were doing better, the message would tell them they are doing great. These possible ideas of progress monitoring can really help people strive to climb up the leaderboards and fight COVID-19.

Granting one immediate reward is also crucial for changing one’s behavior. In the same strategy of making doctors wash their hands more frequently, the speaker also explained how making the points go up immediately made the doctors feel better. In COVID-19 Fighters, immediate rewards are presented when one earns points and climbs in the leaderboard for taking precautions. There should be two immediate rewards granted at the same time, one of them is leaderboard points, which increases their leaderboard rank. The other reward should be a reward of a certain amount of in-game currency. This currency can be used to buy cool items and gadgets which can help increase points earned for each activity. For example, buying a sink for one’s in-game home can increase the number of points one earns from washing hands in real life. There should also be something added called leaderboard rewards. Every few weeks, the top performers on the leaderboard will earn a large amount of in-game currency, and possibly even real money. Obviously, the money reward should not be so much that the game goes bankrupt.

Below are some possible additions to this app that do not follow these three strategies can also help promote safety precautions. There could be a small icon in the corner of the screen that shows the distance of one from another user. If the distance is under 10 feet a warning should pop up. Additionally, there should also be an option to friend family members who live in the same home, this way, the warnings will not pop up if the two family members are near each other. Friending should only be allowed to people within a ten-foot radius to prevent the app from not showing warnings when confronted with strangers. The game should also employ animations and graphics that are pleasant to all ages. The app should not be seen as a childish game nor something boring for children. The entire family should enjoy it. Adding in-game homes would make the app a lot more fun to play during spare time. One could upgrade their home size, add furniture, and also tour other user’s homes. The in-game furniture can be used to generate automatic points, grant more points for specific actions, or just for decorations. If this game were to be further developed, it could help save millions of lives.

Having good behavior is always a good thing and never a bad thing. Not everyone has good behavior, that is why this essay is based on a TEDx video entitled. “How to motivate yourself to change behavior.”

When you were a kid going to school was not as fun as going to your friend’s house. But if someone wants to get better and start liking school. Then they will have to do more school work and communicate with the teachers and students. In order to do that she or he will have to motivate yourself to do it. Just by thinking in your head. “If I pay more attention in school and think it is a good place to be, then I might get a very good grade and go to a good college!” Even though it might not work. At least you knew you did better than you did before, and continue working harder to get better.

Even though school is a very important thing to keep in mind, having just regular behavior on how to treat others and your actions are also very important life skill to have. For example if you are a host of a party most likely he or she would welcome someone in kindly for example, “Hello! How was your day?” or “Welcome, welcome the party will start as soon as everyone is settled!”. The kind words someone ways always brighten the day up.

So this brings the essay to a close. Even if you are very responsible and caring. You’ll also have to be very generous and welcoming. Never forget that having good behavior is always a good thing.

Your family will always be family no matter what happens. In Everyday Use by Alice Walker, a girl named Dee visited her mother and sister after a while on her own but it clearly shows that she doesn’t truly care for them at all.

When Dee was young, she already despised the conditions her family lived in and was even happy when her house burned down. She also didn’t seem to care when her sister got hurt. One of the first things she did after arriving at her family’s house was to take pictures. However, the pictures were mainly of the house and the areas around it, rather than the people. While in the house, she also took many things without properly asking for permission and she was also going to use them for decoration, not the way they’re supposed to be used.

This teaches us to always be grateful to your family, especially if they’ve continuously helped you a lot throughout your life. For example, I plan to visit my family often in the future and also pay an amount of money to them every month as they have spent a lot of money for me too. You shouldn’t just stop caring and separate yourself once you start living on your own.

Has your mom ever said, ” We need to respect our history, and enforce our heritage?” Well in today’s short story we will see what the outcome will be when people forget their heritage. Too often, we young folk, forget our history and lose respect for our heritage.

There is a humble family that has a rich and diverse heritage, including everybody being able to sew. But they soon lost that. But one family member still does. Dee, when visiting her family, want to take a couple of items. She wants to take a bench and some quilts. Now, these are no regular items, they are full of heritage, the bench being carved by a grandad, and the quilt by a grandma.

You may wonder what is so special about this story. Well these items are literally the only thing this family has to remember their history. Again, you may wonder, what is so specail about remembering your heritage? Well sewing was literally in their history. When they lose their heritage, thye lose their sewing history. But let us look at this in aother example.

But let us look at this in another example. We see this in Marco Polo. Marco Polo’s family has a history of being merchants. Marco Polo could easily just say, I want to be a sailor, etc. But he decided to stay true to his heritage and be a merchant, which helped him to see the Mongolian empire.

Today we looked in the example of this short story and saw how losing our heritage is bad and unwise. But in the example of Marco Polo, we see how he stayed true to his heritage and as a result saw many wonders. I our ever-fast growing modern society, it is especially hard to stay true to our heritage. But we must prevail and do our part!

People don’t usually react to someone warning you to stop doing something bad because then you will try to knock out that bad thought wit an excuse. Then how do you motivate yourself to change? This ted talk by Tali Sharot is about how to motivate yourself to change. She said that there are three ways to do that. Progress review, Social incentives, and Immediate reward

Progress reviews, they show you with another person. You will see that and try to be better at it. This also works because of the feeling of pride. You want to be happy so you will do it.

Social incentive is the fact that we can see someone else’s review. You know that you can do it and you can do better. So you will try to improve.

The immediate reward is a reward that you can get now. This works for many things. Quitting smoking and also exercising. It gives you immediate rewards.

That is how you can actually change your behavior without warnings because it will help you more. Could you use these ways to make your life better?

In the story Dee is portrayed as a pretty girl that is really selfish. She is ashamed of her family for being poor. She can’t accept being poor and wants to have a nice life, which is acceptable, but she knows nothing about her ancestors and thinks that all the special things in their house are just
relics and cool things from her ancestors.

Dee is portrayed as this really selfish girl that is really ashamed of being poor. She doesn’t really even understand her ancestors. She thinks all of their items that are in the house are just relics. She is super selfish and wants everything to be nice for her. She isn’t really nice to her sister because she wants everything to herself. She doesn’t exactly care for her sister.

Let’s look through Dee’s eyes though. She lives in a poor family and she really hates her house because it is so shabby. She is so smart and pretty so her mom decides to send her to a really good school. She is so smart and talented so obviously she wants to have a nice house and be rich. I think that if you look at it from her view maybe you might think she shouldn’t have been portrayed as a mean and selfish person.

You can look at the story from both ways but I think that it makes sense that she is shown as a selfish person. Even if you look at the story from her POV you can still see that she wants everything to be nice for her. She is unable to accept the fact that she is poor like her sister and her mom do. She just wants to have everything nice for herself.

I thought Everyday Use by Alice Walker was a good short story. It had a good story development and backstory. The story was set in the late 1960s. The main character had little education, with here mom dropping out of school in 2nd grade and she not finishing all Twelve years of school. The main character also had a sister, which was very different from her. The character choice was very unique, the main character and her mom are not very educated, while the main character’s sister is very educated. The main character and her sister are complete opposites. There are also a few spelling mistakes, such as “dur.ing” and “soft.seated“. All the mistakes are with periods, so I wonder if these “mistakes” were made on purpose.

The end of the story was very interesting; The main character and her mom are kind of happy to see Dee, the educated sister of the main character, leave their house. My sister is graduating high school next year, I think I will miss her when she goes to college. I guess the reason the main character is happy to see Dee leave is that she might be not close to Dee and they are very different.