Corn Maze10/24/2019 6/2019 Corn Maze
Through this event, I learned about the American Fall Festival, which is super fun and interesting in my opinion. Since Connecticut is in the New England area, the leaves turn red, yellow, and orange during fall, so there’s a lot of representation of these colors in Lyman Orchards, especially orange- color of pumpkins. It looked pretty to me because there’s not a lot of colors during fall in the part of China I lived in. Also, it was really interesting to see how apples were widely used in food and dessert. I’ve never had apple cider in China but after I tasted it here, it became my favorite drink. I also was intrigued by the “cider dog” on the food menu. However, I was disappointed when I found out that it tasted the same as a regular hot dog. Apple picking in Lyman Orchards seemed cool too as it's a fun experience to pick the fruits you eat directly from trees. I liked how there were so many families that came to the orchard, which let me learn that Fall Festival is a vibrant festival that brings families together to celebrate the harvest. The interaction with American students was good as well. Our team worked together and became the first group to get out of the maze. The American students in my group also showed Chinese students different desserts that people eat during fall, such as apple fritters, apple butter and honey sticks. Though they didn’t come to corn maze a lot, they were still very familiar with activities like apple picking. After the event, my host family picked me up and we bought pumpkins in a store nearby. They noticed that a lot of people put pumpkins in front of their house, so we are doing it this year. We will carve the pumpkins into Halloween faces and put candles inside them. We also got some spaghetti squashes as food too. In general, I think fall festival is happy festival that connects food and family together.
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Freshly Squeezed10/6/2019 The Freshly Squeezed topic this year quite informative. It definitely helped me get more insight into hate crime itself and the status quo. I like how one speaker stated the stages of how hate crime grow- starting with a joke and so on. Which means, there are ways to prevent hate crime from happening by stopping it on the “joke” stage. Another speaker pointed out the problem of who gets to decide the definition of hate crime beyond the court, which makes me wonder if those who have the most power get to define it. For example, because gay marriage was legalized, many hate crimes or speeches targeted towards the LGBTQ people might not be even considered as hate. Therefore, it is good to see that civilians are having more and more power in American society. Before this event, although I knew that hate speech is very prevalent in many areas like race, religion, etc., I did not realize that social media is such a big platform for them to express prejudice. Specifically, I did not know that there’s so many “deep web” that offer people opportunities to do so. I was mad when hearing such a loose policy in terms of internet freedom as well. However, I especially liked it when one speaker pointed out that the public should not focus too much on whether those internet users have freedom of speech themselves. Instead, they should be more concerned with what impact this “freedom of speech” has on society. I completely agree with what she said, and I think freedom of speech doesn’t come empty-handed. It should be bored with the responsibility to the people themselves and society as a whole. Freedom of speech is a right, but when abusing the right beyond the norm of society, it is no longer a right but a privilege that should not be given.
Hate speech and crime definitely have tremendous impacts on society. From my perspective, I pay the most attention to their effects on schools and students community. It is true that through developing, students are easily affected by others and follow the trend, but they are also easy to be corrected once the right measurements are implied. However, not all schools care equally much about correcting students, so a student may grow up having a deep bias, enter society, and eventually commit hate crimes. I think it’s an excellent method to promote the idea of equality and diversity in school, letting students understand the importance of accepting others’ opinions. One speaker also brought up the idea of “empathy” towards those who commit hate crimes. However, I think empathy only suits in some places, but not all. It is great to have empathy for those who enter into the world of hatred, but it might be too late for those who cannot be changed. In that case, correction centers are the only way out. The class discussion was interesting that it emphasized a lot about social media policy, whether importing stricter regulations is a good idea. From my own understanding, I think it is a good idea. Though I admit that putting stricter regulations might cause them to have more hatred towards society, but not doing anything will let them believe that their actions are acceptable. Like one of the classmates said, the goal of regulations is not to get rid of hate speech, but to at least send them to a deeper world where the general public has no access. In my opinion, freedom of speech is overused and abused. In the world of rapidly developed technology, laws can barely follow the step of crime. Therefore, the definition of freedom of speech might need to be readjusted. Besides, according to the speakers, when Germany presented the stricter regulations, though people feared that democracy would be harmed, nothing much actually happened yet. According to what another classmate said, “how much do we need to compromise.” Even harmless memes and symbols are considered hate symbols now. I suggest that we take more proactive steps than reactive steps to prevent hate crimes from spreading more. |