Reading Notes. September 28, 2010

Reading Notes.

September 28, 2010

Gallop, " The Ethics of Reading"

After closely reading this piece by Gallop, I realized exactly how I had been projecting my preconceived notions onto every book, article, movie, song and person I had ever encountered. To really understand what you read, you need to first read what is literally there on the paper. This is a point that Gallop reinforces over and over throughout.

"For me, what makes them English courses are not the books we read, but the way we read the books we read." This really hit home. It makes perfect sense when Gallop says that we start to look for things in the text we are reading that will prove our preconceived notions about a subject to ourselves.

One thing that really helped me to understand "close reading" was the five things to notice while close reading.

1. Unusual Vocab

2. Unnecessary repetition of words

3. repeated images and metaphors

4. italics or parentheses

5. footnotes that seem too long.

By paying closer attention to these small details, the big picture and main idea float to the background and we can really understand what the author is really trying to tell us about the subject.

Note: I have not purchased the text yet so I did not read the Johnson reading. I will buy it as soon as I feasibly can.

Class Reflection Sept. 23, 2010

Equality, Justice, Democracy

There can only be equity and justice if there is true Democratic methodology in our group discussion. The questions brought up at the end of the class by A^2 really made me think.
Do people in a democracy have the right to choose whether or not they participate in that democracy in the first place? Should everyone operating within the Democracy voice their opinions? If people are forced to speak out when they are not ready to, is Democracy lost?
If only a certain group of people speak every time a question is brought to the table, the democracy seems to become solely about their interests instead of what the entire community agrees upon. I feel like this is the reason that "The Other" exists. The people who speak out begin to create the rules. Those who do not voice their opinion, or are not educated enough to do so, receive the rules and policies instead of forging them side by side. Maybe this is what, in a sense creates a cultural separation. The people who just accept the rules fall so far outside the circle of influence that they feel like they are no longer equal. Am I right? Maybe.

Conversation Reflection Sept. 21, 2010

Today we talked about Cushman for the majority of the time and lightly mentioned Butin and O'grady writings. The central conversation was trying to establish what exactly service learning entails. We have not come to any concrete solution and we may not anytime soon. I feel that the class is starting to grasp these concepts or maybe that's just how I feel.
Our conversations all revolved around Service learning, Volunteer work and the Missionary Idealism. This was an interesting term to talk about since it brought up memories of Catholic school and Church. the memories actually made me think more of the days when the catholic church was pushing their faith on other tribes and smaller civilizations. The more days that go by, the broader our understanding becomes of what exactly we are in English 150: Multicultural America.

Class Reflection

Last Thursday, I really saw some improvement in the way our class discussion went. At some points during the conversation we lost our focus, but only for a moment. As we all started to understand what needed to be done, we quickly decided upon exactly how the wiki posts needed to be turned in, how we would group ourselves and how we would grade them. If we keep continuing at this pace, I feel like we will begin to have some meaningful and deep conversations about what it is to be truly multicultural.

Reading Notes on Jay, Chicago Group, and Crenshaw Sept. 21, 2010

Multiculturalism came into wide use in the early 1980's in the context of public school reform.

· "Eurocentric" bias.

This term talks about how the content of class curriculums rarely included women, people of color, or people outside the western European tradition. It was interpreted as a value judgment that reinforced racist attitudes. I can agree with the prior statement because you mold a child from birth. First a child is taught mechanical things like eating, walking, and not to cry. Later they are given a foundation of right and wrong (this though is based on the way I was raised). as they enter school and slowly begin to form their own opinions with increasing age, the curriculum can be seen as a guide to what is right, wrong, important and unimportant. With an absence of Women, black people, and any other non-western European race, I can see where the image of dominant white culture would have been instilled in their brains. Growing up today with great athletes, CEO's, and even the president being non-white, I feel that I am much more comfortable living side by side with all different cultures and races.

Critical Multiculturalism- Chicago Group

I'm not very well versed in the political jargon and postcolonial studies language that flows throughout this piece. I can take some things away from this reading. Multicultural education derives its pull because it challenges the conceptual norms that some people have. I do not exactly know who they decide is the norm because normal is indefinable. This reading was by far the most informative so far, and I would have taken more out of it if I was a social work major. This reading begs the question "will a multi-cultural emphasis on education bring about a more democratically critical society or one with more subtle international abilities.

Crenshaw: The Intersection of Race and Gender

· Black Women in Los Angeles who are battered and seek help are mostly Unemployed or poor.

· Have poor friends.

This combination, makes it impossible for the women to escape because they live in poverty. It is a sort of vicious circle that exists for some groups of minorities, genders, and sexualities. Because the people affected by this know that they are poor and minorities, they compound the segregation because their perception of the way things are is altered. Crenshaw mentions multiple times that government trying to make things better for a minority only makes it worse because the institution has its own policies to counteract behavior towards these minorities.

this is because:

· Many Immigrant women depend on their spouse for legal status so most will choose to be abused and treated badly in place of seeking shelter. this is because they will be deported if they choose to leave their spouse. So in trying to help people, laws and regulations tend to trap some people in the same vicious circle.

Class Reflection

In Class on Tuesday I realized just how difficult it is to organize anything. Now add college students with different schedules, tastes, behaviors, wants, needs and so on and so forth. It took us over an hour to democratically come up with the weekly due date for the wiki gardening. This is because we had a breakdown in listening to one another and the class became a little tense. Although we all remained polite and respectful towards one another, the lack of organization hindered our ability to quickly and efficiently come up with a solution to any of the wiki gardening procedures at hand. I thought that that last tuesday, despite the length of time it took us to make decisions, was a step forward with the class being comfortable with each other.

Reading Notes on Butin, Cushman & O'Grady

Buttin's work talks about the benefits that service learning has on children where it is present. He says that children Improve in areas including citizenship school work and overall intelligence. This writing begs multiple questions about what service learning is really about. Is it an "Institutuional mechanism fostering student's growth and self awareness? Is it a "philisophical stance committed to the betterment of local and global community?" Butins article can be seen as a clarification of what service learning really is.

Cushman opens by defining public as the middle and upper class policy makers whom tend to omit the local community. I like the quote Cushman sites in his work: "In the next century the intellectual must be willing to take more risks by choosing exile from confining institutional, theoretical, and discursive formations"(Kritzman1124). This means to me that for us to find out what Service Learning really is, we have pull ourselves out of the conventional structure that society places us within at birth. It is difficult if not near impossible to change some of our deepest and most understood ideas of how institutions work with people and their cultures.

O'Grady speaks of Education and how it is "Contested Territory." When she says contested territory she is siting the fact that the government and other factors determine and fight over exactly the material that is taught. She goes on to say that "Service learning is not political." I completely agree because politics forces a person into decision about matters and crafts an automatic response to stimuli. Stimuli being any situation a person is put in where he or she needs to react to a different culture.

These writings made me a little more comfortable thinking about the way I think about and perceive the world around me. I am more and more excited to actually become a more "Multicultural person" because I feel like I will be so much more useful in the world.

Reading Notes September 14

Reading Notes:

Crenshaw: The Intersection of Race and Gender

· Black Women in Los Angeles who are battered and seek help are mostly Unemployed or poor.

· Have poor friends.

· Cannot escape from battering because they live in poverty.

· the Marriage fraud provisions of the Immigration and Nationality act caused many Immigrant women to stay in abusive relationships with their spouses because the bottom line is stay with your spouse or be deported. Most Immigrant women chose the abuse instead.

· Many Immigrant women depend on their spouse for legal status so most will choose to be abused and treated badly in place of seeking shelter.

· Black women deal with both Racial discrimination and Gender discrimination.

· If we are trying to help black women escape racial and gender discrimination, we have to deal with both issues without letting one be more important than the other.

Frye:

· Oppression is based on ones conception of societies standards and norms.

· Those who oppress are also oppressing themselves by limiting the good that can come from the people who are being oppressed.

· Women who are sexually open are assumed to be whores, while women who restrain themselves from sexual pleasure are viewed as squares.

· All of these Ideas are based on Frye's social perceptions and understanding.

· "It is now possible grasp one of the reasons why oppression is so hard to see and recognize: One can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence, without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage, and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced."

· I don't like the idea presented on page 5 about men opening doors for women. "The door opening and similar services provided are services which really are needed by people who are for one reason or another, incapacitated." "So the message is that women are incapable."

· I open the door for a woman simply out of respect. I strongly believe than men and women are different for reasons that may be as basic as instinct. The view that Frye provides is cold and systematic as if we humans were only machines of efficiency. Only holding the door for a woman when she is carying something is fine, but how can one assume that the act of opening a door out of politeness is a caging in of women. I assume this Frye is a Feminist.

Ratcliffe:

· The Idea of erasing commonalities between people is interesting.

· If one was to be talking about white male teenagers, the only people who would be interested would be white male teenagers or lets say someone studying the behavior of white male teens. there is no longer a connection to black male teenagers or even middle age chinese women.

· Why is it so hard to listen when we feel left out?