ch. 31 likes and dislikes

I was very drawn to the Ch. 31 article. The initial description of the school, how small it was, how diverse the children were, etc. really intrigued me to read what would happen. One thing I questioned about the school was the four-pronged effort to achieve a fair and equitable school. The author suggests that they “recruited” Black and Latino students who were “academically proficient” to challenge the stereotype of white students being at the top of the class. For some reason I thought this was an odd first point for them to use. I think that they should have brought in minority students who were doing poorly and proved to those kids and society that they could succeed instead of brining in students who were already doing well.

Something I did like about the article was her use of the kids’ questions. I haven’t seen a lot of ‘scholarly work’ done that actually uses real world situations instead of theory. When the author explained a situation that probably happens in a dozen schools around the nation every day, I got a sense of legitimacy in her writing. It seems that her journaling what when on each day helped her reflect on what she and other staff members could have done differently. I think that journaling or keeping notes as a first year teacher in any school would be a really helpful and productive tool since, if I’m not mistaken, in our PDPs we will all have to reflect and explain what we want to achieve in the next years.

Symbolic interactionist

The quote, "To claim that knowledge is socially constructed usually means that the world we live in is constructed symbolically by the mind through social interaction with others and is heavily dependent on culture, context, custom and historical specificity. " (p. 409) really caught my attention. It describes, almost entirely, the symbolic interactionist theory of sociology. I have always been drawn to this theory because of exactly what our text said. The world is in the eye of the beholder. We each see different things from different points of view at every moment. It is impossible for two people to interpret a situation exactly the same because of this. We go through life and everything is a symbol, and each symbol has a different context based on our culture, customs, etc. It really is fascinating.

Media

Chapter 22 brought up an interesting point that "There is evidence that teenagers are now self-labeling at earlier ages than they did in the past..." The author goes on to suggest that this might be because of "secular changes in our society which allow more discussion of homosexuality, more public and media presentations of gay and lesbian persona, and more visibility of gay and lesbian people in all walks of life." (p.338) This all seems very correct from my point of view but I think that the media plays the most important role. It is not likely that grandparents and parents have become extremely open in discussing homosexuality (unless their child had come out to them). Teachers and schools are opening up to the discussion but also, there are some restrictions. Therefore the next greatest influence on adolescence would be the media. On the one hand, media displays of homosexuality is good for adolescence dealing with this issue but on the other hand, media is becoming (in my opinion) far too open about sexuality in general, both homosexual and heterosexual. There are FAR too many television programs that seem to allow if not advocate sexual promiscuity. Ad campaigns show half naked men and women oozing sexuality. I feel that adolescents are becoming desensitized to sexuality. They are bombarded with it in every aspect of life. As I explained above, this might be good for homosexuals going through an "identity crisis", but for morals in general I'm not sure this type of media is best for society.