Meagan Fullerton-Lee, February 24 2010, Blog #1, 3/3

Today in class we:

• Reviewed the questions from the articles "High-Tech Hazards?" and "The Woman Who Kept Falling Down"
• We wrote and marked our eye, ear and brain quiz
• We started in learning about the second part of our unit, The Endocrine System
• involves hormones
• we did take notes down in class, so ask a classmate if you missed them
• REMEMBER!!! Bio Exam is tomorrow NOT Friday!!!!

About the material:

The small discussion today that we did have about hormones and the endocrine system not only gave us a few laughs (the grade nine hallway's testosterone levels), but also an idea of how important hormones are in our body.  We can understand that they are necessary, but we really don't know how significant they are.  An interesting thing we learned was that adrenalin, a hormone released in our body for "fight or flight" moments is really a crossing between the nervous system's parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems and the endocrine system.  It is why it is the fastest acting hormone, because all other hormones take more time to have an effect.  I thought this was interesting. 
While I didn't have a question about today's material, I did think of a question about the eye while we were writing our quiz.  I wondered why, as we get older, our eyes sometimes change and we end up needing glasses, even if we didn't need glasses when we were young.

Above and beyond:

Info retrieved from: http://www.eyecarefun.com/content/when-will-my-eyes-stop-changing

The answer is a lot simpler than I thought.  I didn't realize it, but our eyes tend to change as we get older.  I thought we had the same size in eyeball all our lives.  As it turns out, we don't.  As we grow, our eyes are also growing, including in ways that may need prescriptions to resolve.  What is being noticed now is that with more technology like computer games, video games and anything where long amounts of time are spent looking at a screen are part of why an eye changes.  So that is one thing that I learned.

I feel that I got a 3/3 on this assignment.  I tried my best to describe what we did, and had input on what we learned today.  I also learned something new, which I think is an important part of the blog, so i think that a 3/3 is fair.