Take Control of Your Culture - American Studies - Blog

Welcome!

Welcome to the weblog for our American Studies class. Here's the place we will be continuing conversations from class and starting new ones. We'll be discussing and debating current events, historical controversies, and literary conundrums. We might even see a little poetry.

So, what's a blog?  And how will we be using it class?

For information on blogging and how to join and post to our blog, see "All About Blogging." 

Make sure you check your e-mail for your invitation to join the blog. Also – and this is very important – when entering in your “First Name” and “Last Name” enter your entire first name and just the initial to your last name (for example, “Bernie” would be my “First Name” and “H” would be my last name). Having just the initial to your last name keeps a little bit of anonymity with the outside world.

We're looking forward to a great year.

My Perfect Future

In my perfect future world, social classes would be a thing of the past. Everyone would start on an equal playing field. Grades 1-8 you would go to school for a half a day. When you get to high school you would go to a shcool that specializes in what you want to do as an adult, such as a language school, a mathematics school, or a history school. Then you would go to college for that profession. The cars would be ran on ethanol and factories would be run on bad gases that pollute the air and then the factories would then emit good gases.  If you didn't agree with the government then you would get together with others of the same feeling and a government official and organize the collective thoughts and find away to get your thoughts to the government so that our country wouldn't look so divided and weak that our own government can't maintain peace within its people. These are just a few of my thoughts and ideas.

Back to Blogging ...

One post and two comments is due from everyone by Friday morning, February 1.  Early bird posts (by Wednesday morning) earn extra credit (3 points), as do an extra post (5 points) and an extra comment (2 points). Remember that you are writing for a bigger audience that our class -- and the tone of your posts should reflect that sense of professionalism. Capitalize titles, spellcheck and grammarcheck your posts, don't indent paragraphs (just leave a space between) -- and generally proofread your writing for capitalization and punctuation errors.

Since we are in the middle of our unit on representations of women, the guiding questions below are related to that topic.  Remember, however, that you can always post on something else -- as long as it concerns a book or article we are reading in class, an idea we are discussing, or a piece of contemporary American culture that connects with the first two.

And especially this semester, you can always post on the presidential campaign.  Obviously, you can connect it to the unit we are discussing -- gender and race are big parts of the campaign, of course -- but you can also just post your response to ads, debates, speeches, etc.  As with everything on the blog, the more specific you are, the more interesting you are.

For those who need a little inspiration, here are a few questions to consider:

1. What is your favorite presidential candidate's position of women's issues -- healthcare for women, reproductive rights, etc?  Is she or he a feminist?

2. Where do you see stereotypes of women in pop culture -- on the news, TV shows, films, etc? 

3. Where do you see women breaking stereotypes?

Why are Blacks not on top? was there a hold-up?

A long time ago in the 70's, in Iowa, a white teacher taught a pre-school class full of white children. This was near the time that racism was at its prime with discrimination toward non-white races. The teacher didnt want these children to be raised as racist, so she thought of an idea tho change this while they are young. She put collars on half of the children in the class, while the other half were just as normal as when they had walked into the class( well hoping that they were normal). So for a week, the kids with the collars lost privileges and were discriminated against because of their collars. Meanwhile,  the other half of kids were privileged and treated better.The kids with the collars represented African Americans. Feeling belittled,  the collared children scored lower academically feeling as though they were not up to par with the collar free children. The children then switched positions with the other half of the class, then they wore the collars and went through the same treatment. The ex-collared children then began to tremendously raise their academics in a matter of a day. Now compare this to African Americans throughout history. Starting around colonial times, we as a race began to fall to the bottom of the social class and were looked down upon. Could this be a link to why African Americans are not at the social status on top of the social caste where we are supposed to be? Maybe there is a link between this situation and the potential of African Americans as a whole. If a historian was to go back in time and change the status of blacks back then, would the world be different? Would African Americans be mentioned more throughout texts and todays world as a more successful race?

does music express current life events?

Music is a big controversial subject. Many musicians translate their feeling about life through their music. Music is a quiet melody that speaks in loud words to make vast connections. There are many controversies involving celebrity's against other celebrity's'. An example of this is Oprah Winfrey versus 50 Cent , Ice Cube, and other hardcore rappers. Oprah believes this form of music is nonsense because she has yet to realize the meaning and messages behind each lyric. I read that the main cast of the movie " Are We There Yet" were invited to Oprah's show, all except Ice Cube. Sounds like discrimination among rappers. I'd like to see an episode of her show featuring many of the popular top selling artist to come and converse with Oprah on her show so that she could get a full understanding of what is actually put into each lyric in each verse of a song.

Premarital Sex Amoungst Teens

It seems as time goes on the younger the age that kids start having sex. Is it because we are exposed to explicit songs or T.V. shows? Yes!! Last year my teacher told the class a story about his mom, how Back in the 50's she fell asleep next to a guy and she woke up thinking that she was pregnant. Its because in the 50's teen weren't exposed to things like that, So they didn't even know about the other sex. But nowadays if you tune in to  just about any channel past 10:30pm or 11:00pm they show pornographic shows. Don't get me wrong its not just T.V. and songs.Its the schools. I feel as if schools are teaching young kids about sex. I remember in third grade my teacher taught us about the other sex. And not just that about condoms and STD's. So a way that we can stop premarital sex,which leads to teenage pregnancy, is to  not teach them until a appropriate age and not make it so easy for kids to just stay up late and watch pornographic films.(I know about parental blocks but some kids will try and crack it).

Welcome!

Welcome to the weblog for our American Studies class. Here's the place we will be continuing conversations from class and starting new ones. We'll be discussing and debating current events, historical controversies, and literary conundrums. We might even see a little poetry.

So, what's a blog?  And how will we be using it class?

For information on blogging and how to join and post to our blog, see "All About Blogging." 

Make sure you check your e-mail for your invitation to join the blog. Also – and this is very important – when entering in your “First Name” and “Last Name” enter your entire first name and just the initial to your last name (for example, “Bernie” would be my “First Name” and “H” would be my last name). Having just the initial to your last name keeps a little bit of anonymity with the outside world.

For information on your responsibilities as one of the authors of our blog, check out "Responsibilities of Authors." 

We'll be talking about these responsibilities during the first week of class.  More importantly, we'll be trying to figure out what to call this blog ...

We're looking forward to a great year.