Ice Festival Excitement

The seventh annual Butler “Carved In Ice” winter festival was held Friday Feb. 11 from 5-8pm and Saturday Feb. 12 from 11am-4pm in downtown Butler. The ice festival had many activities including food trucks, a DJ, children’s activities, vendors and of course ice carvers. Children had fun sliding down an ice slide, getting their faces painted, and getting balloon animals while adults enjoyed themselves at the alcohol tents. Many people from the Butler community came to enjoy the festivities and take part in a successful festival.

Frosty Work

Robert Higarda carves an ice throne shaped like a snowman in the middle of the ice festival.

Paw-some Festival

Labradoodle Sir Winston barks at people passing by while enjoying the music in front of the DJ booth with his owner Jim Fiel.

Never Too Cold For Fun

Luca Tolfa and Aidrick Varner brave the cold to play on a slide carved out of ice.

Something Hot in the Cold

Marcelo Nylund and Niki Sasiela greet festival goers and pass out stickers in front of the Oscar Mayer weinermobile.

Roaring Good Time

Jacob and Aubrey Thomas admire the SRU lion ice sculpture while walking around the festival.

Meeting An Ice Guy

Noah Shouse meets a penguin mascot at the festival while being carried by his mother, Cally Shouse.

The Foreign Language Dilemma

While nearly half of the world is bilingual, only 20 percent of Americans can converse in two languages. This poses the question; should every student be required to learn a foreign language? While this question has no definitive answer, looking at the facts around learning foreign languages may help you form a better-informed opinion around the subject.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, there is not a statewide graduation requirement for a second language, however, individual schools can choose to require a second language for students to graduate. Even so, all Pennsylvania schools are required to provide at least two world languages for students to choose from and one of these languages has to be a modern language.

English is the worlds most widely spoken language. Approximately 1.5 billion people speak English while only 400 million of those speakers use English as their first language. Those against requiring students to learn a second language claim that since the rest of the world is learning English, there is no use in requiring foreign languages in schools. Other people are against learning a second language in school being mandatory because leaning a new language in school is not effective. While students would be learning a new language in class, students would rarely use the newly required language skill outside of school, which means students take longer to retain the language and learn less.

Those who are proponents for foreign languages being required in schools point to the many benefits of foreign languages. Not only do foreign languages improve students chances for college admission and career prospects, but being bilingual improves problem solving skills and helps people travel in the future. Proponents also point to the fact that children learn languages better at a young age. By mandating a second language in school, children would be able to learn a second language earlier which would make it easier for them in the long run.

It doesn’t seem like either side of this argument will prevail anytime soon. For now, it is left to the students, their parents and individual schools as to whether students should learn a foreign language.

Faiths Fascinations

Hello all, my name is Faith, and I cannot wait to share my thoughts and learn more about new media journalism. I decided to name my blog "Faithfully, Me" since you all will be witnessing my personal journey through new media journalism and I think it is a fun play on my name. Let me tell you all a little about me. I am a Junior at Slippery Rock University, and I am studying public relations. After college I aspire to work at a PR agency doing any work that can further my knowledge of the field. From a PR standpoint, I am interested in new media journalism to further my ability to think like a journalist. A big part of PR is working with the media, and knowing what journalists are looking for in stories will help me to better tell the stories my company wants to promote. To help further my understanding of journalism and media relations, I have been reading articles from The New York Times. I have also been studying the digital medium NPR and the effect it has on digital media as a whole. I am currently the secretary of SRU’s Public Relations Student Society of America, and I perform in SRU’s Musical Theatre Society. When I am not at school, I enjoy volunteering, hanging with friends, and painting when I can find the time. If you would like to look for updates for my blog, I will be posting them on my Twitter and Facebook.