in a nutshell part 2

Throughout the year I have learned to keep an open mind with everyone I meet. When the class started I wanted to travel all over the world for my future career, which I still want to do! But sociology has made me realize that there's so much more to get out of the experience of traveling to different cultures. I will meet people with different traditions, food, religion, and even toilets! There's so much to look forward to, and I had no idea every culture had such extremely different lifestyles. I've also thought of now for my future career to possibly become a foreign affairs nurse. This way I will definetly be able to travel, and I will definetly be able to help people from all around the world. My oldest sister Stephanie has moved to New York, and I can't wait to visit her in the busy city. That will be another way for me to compare the people from New York to the people that I know at home. Community service in the class has really made me want to continue working on different community projects in the future. It's a really good way to spend some of my free time, and you get to meet really interesting people. The class has motivated me to get involved, and to be understable about different lifestyles.

Crash

Crash was movie that really showed how everyone creates stereotypes, and some create stereotypes on themselves. I think the pervey police officer was a frusterating character to watch because he is clearly racist against black people, but he ends up hating himself for judging the black race. After he saved the woman that he recently molested from a car accident, you can tell the woman is dissapointed in him because she can tell that he can be a good person if he wanted to, but he chooses to treat the black race with disrespect. Another character I really liked was the one Ludacris played. He's so angry at society for judging what kind of person he is by his race, yet he's following the stereotypes that society creates. His friend was someone who understood that people are all related, and that we're not that different from eachother, but for some reason we feel we have to segment ourselves by race. To help people look past race, we need to start looking at every person as a complete individual. This means we would have to look past race, and be able to listen to eachother with out making assumptions.

Racial Stereotypes

The Harvard video of the doll experiment was very interesting. Especially since that experiment was first conducted many years ago, and then conducted again recently. This means that the racial stereotype of black people hasn't made much progress. It was also sad to see that there are such extreme racial stereotypes within a race (dark skin, light skin). It just shows that society feels that we have to keep seperating people into certain categories. The last thing said in the video I found very dissapointing. The girl said that people don't know what their culture is based from, but we allow society to decide what kind of person you are. Although she was talking about her race in specific, I think the statement applies to all races. There is so much we don't know about each and every persons past and present life, yet we allow society to judge how someone is supposed to act. But not even that, we also allow ourselves to givin to the stereotype. We allow ourselves to be whats expected of us from society. Although that's a very intense way of looking at the subject, the situation of racial stereotypes may become more serious the more people take apart and divide races into certain expectations.

monopoly

Playing monopoly in class really did show how hard it is to move out of your social class. By the end of the game, each player was about where they started. Since moving to a higher class is so difficult, you probably have to go through extremes to get there. Both of my parents had grown up in an upper middle class like I am now. I didn't realize till I asked them, but it does show how classes tend to stay the same throughout generations. I'm not sure what class I see myself in in the future because I plan on doing something very different then my parents. In fact, among my sisters and I, we all are going a different path although we'd like to be successful at whatever we're doing. My oldest sister is an artist and has been trying to work her way up the ladder of art production, set design, murals. This profession doesn't have a set salary. You get paid job by job, which is very different than what my parents do. My other sister, Melissa, is studying to be a nurse. She would very much like to be successful at it, and is actually thinking about being a surgical nurse. Depending what kind of nursing job she'd like to do, may determine what "class" she is in. I'm thinking about foreign affairs nursing, or international development. So if I plan on traveling for an open amount of time, I might not even own a house.

Tammy's Story

I find Tammy's story...going no where. and its frusterating. They have to continue moving in that cycle. They can't move away to a different location where she would have more oppurtunity, b/c they have no money to transport themselves. She just has to keep doing the same thing everyday. What's also very frusterating is that she doesn't want her son to break out of the cycle. It seems like she doesn't want the best for her son, but maybe she thinks "the best" is staying to your roots. Its unfortunate that we accept the stereotypes of different classes, especially when these classes have no other choice

education and wealth

Its true that the higher a family's income is, the average ACT is a lot higher, and the higher the education the student recieves. With a higher education, the student will get a high income job, and then they have children and the whole cycle starts over again. So really, the middle class system is dying and wealthy will just keep getting wealthy. There are very few who start from the bottom to work there way to the top. The reason poorer families can't recieve higher education is because of "rules" of America. How would poorer families get good education if good educators don't want to work at a school with a smaller income. The children are deprived of better education.

30 days

Seeing the video of the guy trying out jail for 30 days was very interesting. Even though it the people seemed a lot less scary then i stereotyped them to be, the pain the prisoners suffered was even more frightening. Morgan was only in the jail for 30 days and he was craving being outdoors so much that I can't even imagine people who had been there for years. It also surprised me how much different the people are in the rehab prison, why isn't this used more? I had a lot of hope in the people who were being released that their life was going to change for the better, but instead they ended up back in jail. This shows that people can't get used to life outside of prison after being in it for so long. Why do people have such a hard time changing for the better? Why can't these prisoners refrain themselves from doing bad again? Do they not remember how much pain they went through inside of jail?