Fake Threats

Over the weekend there was a bomb hoax on campus. I want to know what people think about this. Clearly it was not smart to do something like this, but do these kinds of things cause people to be more cautious or would this situation cause people to think that most are just hoaxes?

Popular Music

When reading the introduction to the book Understanding Society Through Popular Music, I came across a statement that said, "Musical choices are cultural choices. After all music is part of the way we choose to live our life" (Kotarba and Vannini 6-7). In today's classrooms, children are being exposed to popular music icons in their math and reading programs through books and videos. How do you think this will impact educational programs as society continues to market popular icons through their textbooks and reading materials? If "music is part of the way we choose to live our life," how might marketing music through children at school influence their choices as they grow?

Equality

The article for next weeks reading regarding the Maytag factory closing in Illinois and moving production to Mexico caught my eye and in the closing paragraph the author quotes, "Globalization is such a fraud. It's just a rush to the bottom for cheap labor. Instead of reducing United States to the Third World we should be elevating the standards of those countries."

This quote reminded me of what Rob said in class on Friday when we were in our stakeholders and policy makers groups. It was mentioned that taking away resources from the affluent or middle class schools to to distribute to working class or poor schools might create more equity, but middle class families would probably be angry or resentful and may think it unfair and that they are being punished for their social/class standings. Why should we take away from the affluent, or lower standards in one place to raise standards in another? Can our nation's education dilemma relate to the Maytag article quotation? Is it possible, and if yes, rather than reducing some schools standards, how can we elevate less affluent school districts to the same level?

Whilst I don't entirely agree that this is possible, or that reducing superfluous resources from affluent schools to provide more equity and basic necessities to poor schools is unfair, I am curious what other people think.

Breaching Experiments

Following the work of ethnomethodologist Howard Grafinkel, we will be conducting "breaching experiments" where we examine people's reactions to the violation of social norms. Your task will be to 1) go out into the campus or broader community and engage in some form of norm violation activity 2) talk to an record the responses of those individuals observing your behavior and 3) respond to the following questions.

• what norm did you violate?
• how did people in the setting respond?
• how did the norm violation itself and their response make you feel?
• did you feel any desire to "repair" the interaction once you breached the social norm?
• how might a systematic or continued breaching of this norm change our definition of what is "normal"?
  

More on Education

http://www.realizethedream.org/reports/national.html



There is a great website here that has national and state information on the race of schools and rates of graduation, and some other information (etc.). This may be helpful for those of you interested in this topic and for a response to this post by Evyan.

The Achievement Gap

I found a link on NPR's website to a fairly current article and story they covered concerning the disadvantage African American students are facing in middle-class or affluent schools. The story outlines possible reasons why black students are failing, most interesting of which I feel concerns an identity crisis. Scholars have hypothesized that perhaps black students are more influenced by their poor counterparts (poor black children) than are white students, and they must navigate being middle class while also dealing with the pressure to remain "authentically black."

Cooper, a high school sociology teacher, performs simple studies in her class and exposes students' discriminatory patterns, and suggests that black students even conform to stereotypes against their own race.

It is a captivating article and has a link where you can hear what was actually aired on radio.
Does anyone else find this interesting, as it is certainly pertinent to what we've been learning about in class. I think it poses a new facet that we have not yet dealt with specifically, and that it the manner in which middle-class African American children deal with both historical and contemporary inequality while balancing their family's own affluence.

The link is. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114327591