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

I Am a Promise

After viewing the movie today, what are some of your initial reactions to what you heard/saw? What did you feel after watching the movie? What are some insights you received that you perhaps have never thought about before?

-Also, can you name some of the reasons other than education that the film identified as impacting the children at Stanton Elementary? There are many aspects of our life and many possible outcomes. Identify some of those from the film.

Ungendered child

So if you've taken Dawn Graff Haights Human Sex class, you might recognize this story. It's about a child that was raised completely ungendered. It's kind of silly, but very pertinent to our earlier class discussions. I was reminded of it in Wal-Mart today while I was looking at toys, and thought I'd share. It's kind of long, but funny and interesting. What do you guys think?

http://etransgender.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1850

Dissolving Gender Roles in the Family

I found these videos on youtube and thought they really pertained to what we talked about in class. They show how current economic struggles are affecting the family unit and gender roles.
Have you seen any of these gender roles changing among your own families or in families of people you know? Do you think some of these current changes will re-define how we view gender roles in the years to come? How does the redefining of gender roles contribute to positive or negative aspects in the family unit? Just wondering what everyone thinks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YlR0_pVyCI (Part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l51rxnKJRfk&feature=channel (Part 2)

Social Institutions

In preparation for Tuesday’s class, I did some reading of chapter 6 in the Korgan and White book, The Engaged Sociologist. And in this chapter, both Korgan and White covered a topic that we had been focusing on the past few weeks: family. But more importantly, how social institutions affected family and life in general. In the chapter, it was stated that, “The makeup of your family, the laws you must follow, your professional career, your schooling, and even whether or not you believe in a higher power (and, if so, what kind of higher power) are all based on the social institutions in your society” (Korgan and White 73). They also brought up the thought of what would happen if one of our rights were upheld (like freedom of speech). Since everyone is different, I wanted to know how social institutions (like government, religion, or the education system) have had an affect on you. How have these social institutions affected where you are today? How might these social institutions affect you later in life as you start your professional career? What challenges might you face? And how might future generations be affected by the many changes that are happening in our social institutions?

Media and the Missing

I was just on logging onto the internet and this was the first thing I saw. I read the article from news week and knew it related perfectly to what we have been talking about in class. It is a great article and I think it's something we do not see alot of in the media. Read it and post what you think!
http://www.newsweek.com/id/218911?GT1=43002

This is awesome.

This video isn't really related to what we've been talking about in class, except I guess it brings up issues of class, but it is amazing and I am interested in what you all think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0

Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113974893

Why do you think different social groups tend to use different social networking sites? What does this tell us about our society "off line"? In what ways does it reinforce intragroup solidarity and perhaps prevent intergroup interaction? Is this a a troubling trend or simply a reflection of a class and racially segregated society?

Racism

Here are two videos that show racism in America today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNu-WZdHzaA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIVgMvuCM_k&NR=1

The first one has 3 white teenagers trashing a car in a park. The second one has 3 Black teenagers trashing a car in the same park.

The people at the park obviously see what is going on, and confront each set of boys. The people only call 911 once for the 3 white males trashing the car, while 10 people call 911 when the 3 black males are trashing the car.

Why don't both set of teenagers get the same kind of interactions with the people around them? Why don't people confront the white males as much as the black males? Why do they call the police 10 times as often with the black males than the white males?

Also, during the first clip, the black males were laying down in a car, and two people called 911 about them just laying in the car, afraid that they were waiting to rob someone. Why did they get more calls to 911 doing nothing than the white males who were actually doing something wrong?

How To Lie with Statistics

CNN Leaves It There

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

A humorous look at why we should fact check and rigorously look at the origins, sampling, accuracy, and potential bias of all statistics. What happens when, as a society, we rely on "experts" to define the numbers? Should our news organizations be more rigorous in their "fact checking" of important policy statistics? Should they be expected to ask critical questions? Should we think more critically as a citizenry? What will this require of us as students of sociology?

Concerted Cultivation Vs. Natural Growth

After the reading and discussions of the book Unequal Childhoods, I was curious how everyone felt about the two child-rearing practices discussed: concerted cultivation & natural growth. After reading this it really made me think about the way I was raised, and the effects it has had on me as an individual. So I was wondering what everyone else thought.

What do you think are some of the positives and negatives of each style? Are there any other factors besides a family's social class that contributes to which parenting style they choose? Can a child be raised somewhere in between the two ways?

I've often heard the elderly in my family talk about how youth "these days" aren't like they use to be (referring mostly to their sense of respect & entitlement) and it really made me think. Have children and teenagers really changed over the last fifty or one hundred years? And if so, do you think concerted cultivation or natural growth has contributed to this?

Society of Consumption

I've been thinking alot lately about capitalism. There are not many things in the world that I hate, but capitalism is definitely one of them. I'm a junior and currently broke as hell. I've realized in my life that the one and only thing that streses me out is money. Work, I can do. Homework - I may procrastinate alot - but it gets done. But money you can't automatially get or control. We all (or most of us) have things we have to pay for, and as college students we have a huge time commitment to go to our classes and do all our homework, and along with that some of us have rent and school we have to pay for too. When there is a possibility that you might not be able to pay for something because you don't have the money, nor the time to make the money - that is when things get stressful.

Anyways, the way this connects to capitalism is that we have to pay for this education. The purpose of government is to protect its citizens. How can the government claim to be protecting its citizens if there are people starving on the streets and college students going thousands of dollars into debt to pay for an education?

We talked about this in class a little bit, with the income disparity and the graphs that we looked at. Why is this disparity so huge? Why does our society place such a huge emphasis on having material things and producing stuff when there are so many problems in the world that need to be fixed? We, as a society, need to reevaluate our values and focus on the things that are important in life - our loved ones, feeding the people, education, etc. My question to you is how do we change this? How do we implement a paradigm shift that takes our government's priorities and our societies values off of "national security" and producing material goods that eventually go into huge piles of garbage, and onto things that actually matter?

http://www.storyofstuff.com

This is a sweet little video about our stuff. It really makes you think. It's twenty minutes long but worth it.

The WASPs

On Tuesday and Thursday of last week, we watched a clip from a film called "People Like Us." And in this film, a man by the name of Thomas Langhorne Phipps talked about the culture he grew up in, known as the WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestants). In America's history, this group has always been composed of upper class white citizens. But in describing the WASPs, Phipps states, "We stand better, we walk better, we speak better, we dress better, we eat better, we're smarter, we're more cultured, and we treat people better . . . ". He also addresses that you cannot get into the WASPs, you have to be born into the group. From his views, I looked for an article online and found one which was called, "The Way of the WASP: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It, So to Speak" by Laurence Auster. In this article, Auster interviews many people, one including a man by the name of Richard Brookhiser, who claims this about the WASPs, "It is the mold, the template, the archetype, the set of axis along which the crystal has grown. Without the WASP, it would be another country altogether. Without the continuing influence of its values, [America] is sure to lose its way." So what I want to know is what you think about each of these attitudes portrayed about the group known as the WASPs. Do you believe that what Thomas Phipps conveys about the WASPs is accurate? And as for Brookhiser, do you think that the WASPs have had such an impact on America as he says they have? If so, what kind of impact? The address for the article is http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_1282/is_n1_v43/ai_9363794/?tag=content;col1

CHanging climate of HS Reunions

We spoke in class on Friday about high school reunions and people's efforts to maintain or reconnect with their high school identity. Additionally, the lengths individuals will go to to protect themselves from the potential embarrassment that may be initiated at a high school reunion.

I was curious whether the fairly recent development of social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. will change the climate of high school reunions. Will as many people even attend their reunions? Will we have the desire to catch up face to face with old classmates when we can simply "facebook stalk" their profiles?

What effect, if any, will the internet have on the future of high school reunions? Will people be more or less apt to attend? Will reunions be more or less a tradition of the past? Since we are the first generation to fully take advantage of facebook, I was thinking we might have thoughts about the future?

Who Rules America: Concentration of Weath in the US

Examining the charts below (click on them for full view), what explains the growing concentration of wealth among members of the upper class? Do you feel that this distribution of wealth is justified? why or why not? After reading "Who Rules America" in your reader, what perspective does Domhoff offer? What, if anything, should be done about these trends?



Percentile Wealth in $ % of total wealth
99% $10,203,700 34.0%
95% $1,441,200 57.4%
90% $623,500 68.8%
80% $344,900 84.6%
60% $161,300
40% $61,000
20% $11,000
1% -$8,900

The Stop and Chat

As we discussed today in class there different ways you can handle communicating to people that you run into on the street based on how well you know the person.

This is a clip from the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Watch how Larry David, the main character, handles his meeting with a previous acquaintance on the street.

Stop and Chat Video

So here is my question. What certain connections between two individuals allow for a "stop and chat" situation instead of a quick "hi and goodbye?" Or you can look at it this way. How well do you have to know someone to actually stop and chat with them?

Returning to the healthcare debate...

We spoke in one of my psych classes about how Celebrities have become involved in many recent elections and the way the media portrays it, most hip, young, and relatable stars tend to align with a liberal agenda (think...P. Diddy's efforts to get youth to vote for Kerry and many visible celebrities campaigning for Obama).

Anyways, I was thinking about how these stars vocalizing their support has really changed the tone of elections. Are youth really more inclined to vote one way simply because of the celebrities influence? Are younger generation American's truly more liberal in their attitudes because they are educated or because they like Beyonce, who says she is voting liberal?

I ran across this video which I think in itself is a tool of influence. Comedy is a light hearted way to identify with a younger generation, many of who would recognize these stars. Any thoughts on this idea or the video?

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/041b5acaf5/protect-insurance-companies-psa?rel=player

What is the Culture of Linfield College?

What are the norms, values, and social practices that define Linfield? Is there a special language or vocabulary that members of this community use? Are there special rituals or traditions that unite members of the community? What material artifacts or objects define Linfield as a culture? Are there any particular subcultures or countercultures on campus? See exercise 4.2 in the Korgen and White text and draw from the chapter to inform your response.

Bowling For Columbine

So, most of us just watched the movie, now I want to know what people think of it. I know we'll talk about it tomorrow but I thought it would be a good blog topic to inculde anything that may be missed in class.

2008 Poverty Rate Highest in 12 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/us/11poverty.html

Using your sociological imagination, what is contributing to this increase in the poverty rate? What impacts might this have on individuals and families who are below, near, or at the poverty line? How might this change impact other areas of our society?

Obama's Speech

Who here watched it Wednesday (Sept 9th)?