Reducing Crime

Rocio Rodriguez

Allison

Jiechang

Nowadays, violence is taking control of our neighborhoods, schools and houses. Violence is seizing our liberty to walk in streets; it is corrupting the innocence of our children and also is going into our houses. We have to do something to combat it now.
One of the first problems with criminality is, more and more young people become criminals at early time. Why do they crime? Teen-agers need more attention, because they are in a rebel phase and they do not how they must act. Nor what to do, what to study or how to behave. Parents and family have a great responsibility to do with this people. Parents do not be neglectfully with your kids, so give them more love. Also school should have good and constructive skill for teaching their students.
Second problem that we have is criminal who just go out of jail continues committing crime. On one hand it is difficult for the criminal who just came out to find a job. He wastes his time in jail, and now he is out of technology. In consequence he has to bear with people discussion and doubt of his good behavior. Government could teach some good skills, so they could find a good job and being a new and better life. People don’t be so hard whit every ex-con, each one is a single person so let them prove their good or bad behavior and then judge them.
Third, some of the criminals must be treated by a psychologist for mental disorders. That kind of criminals just act without thinking, in consequence they killing, stealing and raping people. Perhaps many of them had lived traumatic experiences, so that have been affected their brain and social life. Unless they take some therapy or get help from a psychologist they could stop committing crime.
In other words, we have stop delinquency in our city. Whether not take control of it, corruption will continue disturbing to us and our loved people. Lets encourage our young people to enroll in some type of sports or activities which they like or enjoy; also, you can teach them good behavior instead of telling you are bad, you are doing wrong or can’t do nothing fine. Back up the criminal’s rehabilitation, so you can see their progress.
And our last, help criminals to get some kind of orientation or therapy with professional people.

A Green City

Kim
Grimaldi
Vivian

Do you like your city? Do you think your city is green enough? Maybe the green city is the perfect city, but how do you make a city green? These are some suggestions that you can follow: build more parks, build green houses and keep the city clean and green.

First, building more parks around the city is essential. For example, create some flower parks around our houses. You can plant many kinds of flowers. The flowers will make the people delighted, and they will make the city beautiful. You also can create same garden parks. You can plant the trees around the city. They will make the city look green and the air cleaner. Second, we should build some green houses. For example, we can use glass to build the houses. Then we can keep the houses warm all the time. We can plant some flowers or trees in the houses, they will grow even in the winter. That will make the city look more beautiful all year round. Finally, we should keep the city clean and green. Our streets need more garbage cans; we can’t throw the trash everywhere. We also need to clean the streets and parks everyday. We should teach our kids how to keep the city clean. Our city needs more green spaces, we can create some green belts around the city. We also can plant some trees around the rivers and lake.

We think our city is beautiful, but we really want to see our city looking greener. The green city will make the environment clean and healthy because there are many diseases due to the pollution at present. If we create more trees, we can avoid various kinds of contamination. Living in this city, it will be more comfortable and healthy.

Let’s Do Something for CPS

Zi Hao
Annie

Chicago Public Schools are a place for everyone. With 613 elementary and high schools, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system is the largest public elementary and secondary educational system in Illinois. However, if you graduated from a public school in Chicago, you would feel the CPS has so many things to improve. If CPS improves the instructional facilities, the quality of teaching and leadership, and the learning communities, the students would have a good environment to study in CPS.

There are 47 million youth in the US, and there are thousands high school students in Chicago Public School system. In this ratio, I think the instructional capacity is not enough space to offer a good environment for Chicago’s students. The crowded classrooms seem like closets, and the teacher’s offices are very small. As we can see, student’s library just collected some old books so we think the government could develop their library or active space. In addition, the quality of teaching and leadership needs to be improved. Because of the city's large foreign-born population, the school system employs bilingual teachers in 20 languages. It sounds good, but how about the quality of teaching and leadership in those 613 elementary and high schools? Nowadays, some of the teachers still have rooms for improve their teaching level. Maybe the teacher’s major and degree is outdated for students. There are twenty percent youth in Chicago were dropouts. That means one of every five youth is a high school dropout. Finally, the learning communities and professional development are the most important part for student. In education circles, the learning community has become standard; Student could learn life experiences from each other, such as extending classroom practice into community, so they can gain more knowledge in their life. For example, let students to lecture in front of class. It can learn about facing stressful situations, and control their feeling. Live experience can help you know about the city, like high school student needs to volunteer in their spare time. This is a part of live experience. Moreover, the professional development could decide the student’s career. Every student has specialized in their own favorite major, and teacher can give them more opportunity to exert it. Also, it is important to bring the personnel community into the school to enhance the curriculum and let students learn tasks more interest. Otherwise, teacher and administrators can learn simultaneously during in class.

CPS is most important for teenagers. If the CPS improves the instructional facilities, the quality of teaching and leadership, and the learning communities, student would have a good environment to study. We need a hand from all of you to improve this situation, so teenagers can have got better student life. Don’t you think we have to do this for our children? Let them have better education starting from CPS.

Air Pollution

Luis
Theresa
Phoebe

Do you know why the temperature in the world is getting warmer and warmer? Air pollution is one of the most important problem that we have living a city and around the world. There are some contamination problems that as a modern society are having effects on our lives. Air pollution has started with the development of the 20th century and the increase of using cars, factories discharging smoke, and the few green spaces to intake the carbon dioxide.

Cars have given us the possibilities to move fast, go far away or travel safely, but now the truth is getting out. We notice that cars have been moving with fossil fuels not renewable which are so bad for the air. If you look around, principally in the U.S. or Europe, the average almost every family owns at least one car. Cars can be a useful tool for us, but they are also a selfish way to think about our environment. The world’s temperature is becoming warmer and another reason is that commercial factories are putting out the deleterious smoke on the air. You can see all of factories around our city even though they are built out of cities which continue discharging the smoke day by day. In an iron factory, the dioxide smoke which includes deleterious substance is putting out when they are smelting iron. Actually, factories are not in the cities, they are in suburbs because the people don’t want to live with a factory as a neighbor. Finally, every one has known that greens can transfer carbon dioxide to oxygen, and greens can make our environment look better. If we don’t have enough green spaces, we will intake the carbon dioxide and other deleterious substances that affect our health. Also, cities can be more alive with parks and people walking besides the cars and cement.

Through research on the internet, in 2006, forty-six percent of cars and thirty-one percent of factories made the air pollution serious day by day. The problems that we don’t have enough greens in our environment to intake the carbon dioxide. Protecting our environment is the one of useful ways to solve the air pollution. We should be conscious that our life style is something that has a definite end. Cars and factories are giving us things that we need for comfort, but what is the cost? We can make walking to take a train or riding bike instead of using car when we go to work or support to develop more green areas. In the future, we believe we can build some cities without wasting resource, keep our environment pollution down, and then we can be more conscious about our own home, “the earth”.

Recycling Program

Sam Oh
October 19, 2006
ESL 99

Why should we recycle? Why is recycling important to us and the future generation? Without recycling, we couldn’t comfortably live in the world due to a lot of waste. Recycling Programs are recently more popular than before because they are necessary to protect our health and environment, to conserve our natural resources, and to save our energy and money. The three components of a recycling program are to reduce, reuse, and recycle. By planning and using the three R’s, you will be minimizing your impact on our environment.

First, we should reduce the amount of unnecessary packaging, and we should find ways to reduce the amount of trash. To reduce our garbage, we should compost food scraps. Composting is a good way to recycle food and other household organic matter- such as fruit & vegetable scraps, tea bags, coffee filters, egg shells, grass clippings, wood ash, and dry leaves. As time passes, bacteria will decompose this matter into a useful product. We can then use it as mulch, and it can help retain water and prevent weeds from growing. Using this method, we can reduce the amount of garbage we throw away by thirty to fifty percent. Second, we should buy reusable products and repair durable product. We should also reuse bags, containers and other items. Reuse is defined as using an item over again in its current form without significant processing that alters its material structure. Reuse plays an important role in any recycling program because it includes diverse programs such as thrift stores, where clothes are exchanged in the purpose of reuse. In fact, there are a lot of reusable materials such as appliances, furniture, clothing, and machinery. If these durable goods were reused, many new jobs could be created around the world. Finally, we should buy recyclable products and recycle them. Recycling is defined as making a new product out of old one. There are many recyclable materials such as paper, glass, plastic, tires, batteries, textiles, motor oil, aluminum and steel. Compared with plastic, other items are considerably easy to recycle. However, plastic is difficult to recycle because there are many different types of plastic. We often believe that the coding symbols on plastics mean ‘recyclable items’. In fact, most of plastic are rarely recycled or very difficult to recycle. For example, PET(Code number one) and HPDE(Code number two) tend to be easily recycled, but other plastics(Code number three to seven) are hard to recycle.

In conclusion, we should follow the city’s recycling program and demand that it be improved. All recyclable materials should be recycled not only to save our money, but also to protect our environment. Actually, recycling is sometimes annoying and bothersome, but it is impossible for us to live comfortably in the world without recycling. There is an aphorism, ‘no pain, no gain’. It means that we can’t get anything without effort. Therefore, I believe that recycling is an investment for the future and a savings for the next generation, so our children can live safely in the clean world.

More Parks Are Needed

Sifang Hong
Majda Samri
Rosalina Nava

How do you usually spent in your spare time? Do you still remember playing games at the playground or parks in your childhood? If there is an option, would you like your child have a wonderful childhood, stick with their little friends at the park, or stay home 24/7? However, now, we can hardly see any more playgrounds in Chicago. There are several reasons for this problem. One of the main reasons is that the number of parks is the increase much less rapidly than the increase of buildings. Another primary reason is that there seem to be too old and small parks. The last chief reason is that parks are not sitting balanced; there are more on the north side and less on the south side.

Our suggestions to deal with the problem are as follows. To begin with, it is urgent to create more new parks. Chicago is a sprawling city, and it is the third biggest city in the U.S.A. More and more people are moving to Chicago. The greater the population there is in a locality, the greater the need for parks. We usually feel crowded when we walk or play in the park. We should build more parks to fit the increasing residents, especially because children need enough place to play. Secondly, certain parks that are going outdated should be improved. These old parks should be replaced by modern parks with enhanced new equipment and bettering existing equipment. Simple exercise equipment, playground equipment, tables and chairs for entertainment, facilities should be everywhere. By the way, safety is more important than equipment for a park to be improved. Finally, the distribution of parks should be more equal. The need of parks is not according to economy of the district but the population of the district. There are more parks needed in the south of Chicago. We need to balance the allocation of public resources.

In all, more functional parks are needed. With the continuous development of urban construction in Chicago, the surrounding parks should keep pace with gradually increasing population. We should spare no effort to beautify our environment and provide higher-quality living environment for residents.