Assignment 8: Summary

For my summary I chose to write a poem / lyrics to a song. I wasn't planning on doing so, actually, because I can only write poetry when I'm feeling very emotional, which means trying to force myself for an assignment is ineffective. But just knowing it was an option, over the last week, I found small bits of imagery coming to me, so I sat down this morning and wrote.

The poem would have been understandably less authentic and, well, poetic if I had tried to squeeze words like "hegemony" or "celebratory multicultural education" in it. And while I do feel all the more technical things we have learned this semester are important, the reason I feel this song can accurately show what I've learned this semester and in doing this portfolio, is because at the end of the day, I think there will always be more for us to learn about how to treat others as God would and as they need in order to grow. So it wasn't the knowledge that was important out of the things I learned. Rather, this class helped me to cultivate a disposition to look, to listen, to defend. It was this solidification of good character traits, the realization that they are important and can grow, that I sought to convey in this song. It is set to the tune of an old Celtic song I love, Carrickfergus.

Here is "Garden":

I walked in youth through a lonely garden

with mist and shadows of morning by.

I went to find a rare blue flower

that our town offered when loved ones died.

But on my way, there was much I passed over,

for my eyes saw only what they knew.

Then, as the light broke on the land behind me,

I chanced to look back for a sigh or two.

And I now saw what I’d walked over.

The garden flowers lay in sad abandon,

so many paths had beat them low.

My own trail, too, I saw had trampled

so many blossoms that reached up, below.

For I’d had eyes only for my blue flowers

and I had done as had all the rest.

So then, with tears, I stayed in the garden

to help all flowers to grow their best.

The small white bells, the vines, the grasses,

even those blue that were deformed,

these we had crushed in a rush for sameness,

but now I loved them, having been transformed.

And they sprang back, though long they’d suffered,

for once the feet of the wanderers ceased,

they all grew strong, in their way and beauty,

and with the growing, our pain was eased.

(Here is one lovely version of the tune, though with fewer verses than the original, if you'd like to hear what the lyrics are set to. If I had recording skills I would have sung it for you myself!)

Assignment 7: Book Club

Book Assignment:      Breaking Through by Francisco Jiménez


1.What were your points of disruption-- places in the book that caused you to feel uncomfortable or angry or curious?

     As the entire book was almost like one big disruption, I'll focus here on several recurring themes that were most difficult for me:

1. Fear
     "I lived in constant fear for ten years." The opening sentence of a book which would frequently revolve around Francisco, or Frankie's fears, whether they be returning to Mexico and thus having to end his schooling (2), fear of college because no one looked like him (116), or the constant fear that his family wouldn't be able to meet ends meet (148 is just one example).

2. Work Interfering with School
     It makes me extremely angry that young children and teenagers should ever be obligated to miss school in order to work to support their families, as Frankie and his brother Roberto did for months at a time as children (56). And even during his later teen years when Frankie wasn't missing school to work, he was still working at all times, often both before and after school, and this was sometimes to much for him on top of his homework that he couldn't get out of bed to go to school. And so, though his working hours didn't overlap his school hours, he was still negatively effected.

3. Racism
     There are a few times in the book when Frankie and his family are the objects of ridiculous racism, most notably when relationships with three girls, Peggy, Susan, and Darlene are complicated by the family's race. Frankie is extremely young when Peggy's family tells her she can't be friends with him anymore because he's Mexican, and it takes him years to realize, in confusion, that this was because of where his family is from. But the problem is much more severe for Roberto and Susan, who are forced to break up in bad feelings because her parents disapprove of Roberto's race. The same disapproval comes from Darlene's step-father, but it doesn't impede Roberto and Darlene's marriage.

4. Immigrants' Quality of Life
     The Jiménez family workers harder than anyone I have ever met in America. I believe that anyone that works so hard should be able to easily enjoy all the basic necessities of life without worry. It made me very uncomfortable to think of my economic privileges when such hard working people consider enchiladas, rice, and beans a feast; when their children rummage through rubbish bins looking for food and furniture scraps; when they may have never even set foot inside a house; or when Christmas was a time of sorrow because it brought up memories of juxtaposed poverty during that season in years past. All of these are real experiences that Frankie had-- how can that be going on in a country that claims to value equality so much?

5. Impotence
     Overall, it is just the theme of powerlessness that was such a disruption for me. Frankie and his family were able to survive and even be successful in some ways, to break through, just as much because of generosity from the privileged as because of their own hard work. Just a little less physical resilience to hard work or sickness, just one lost job here or there, just one disinterested school counselor... any small thing could have upset how this story played out. And though it has a hopeful ending, while reading I couldn't help but think that while Frankie's story may have played out well (thus the reason it's even available to me to read at all-- he got an education), all of those things that could have gone wrong for him and his family but didn't... all of them have happened to some other immigrant or impoverished family, and their Frankie's were likely denied their chance to break through because of that twist of fate or that failure on the part of the privileged to enable their success.

2. Describe stories from the book that clarify or provide examples of the ideas we have been discussing in class.

     One of the most relevant stories in the book to this class was when Frankie and his brother Roberto are invited to eat in a restaurant by a kind woman that Roberto works for. She is in possession of cultural capital, she knows the language of power, the discourse of how to eat in a restaurant properly. At first, it's clear she doesn't realize just how new everything is for her guests. Though she is kind and discerning enough to help them learn (though not by lecturing, which we discussed is often frustrating for those not part of the privileged group, but seems to be the polite and proper way to go about helping the underprivileged-- in reality, just being told outright what to do it is much easier), she doesn't seem to sense that even questions like, "What do you want to eat?" are so foreign to the brothers that the question makes them quite uncomfortable and confused. This experience comes in handy for Frankie when he is invited to have lunch with the local Rotary Club when he is elected Student Body President at his High School. If he hadn't had that initial restaurant experience, it probably would have seriously complicated his later attempts to follow his teacher's lead with such niceties as selecting the right fork.
     Another story clearly conveys the presence of institutional discrimination in our society. When his family was deported from the United States and then tried to gain reentry, Frankie underwent a medical examination. The ableism of the questions put to him were shocking to me. The intent of the doctor's inquiries were clear-- not only will we not let you into our country if you have any kind of sickness, but if you have any kind of disability of any kind, you're not welcome. I think at one time I wouldn't even have realized this-- the hegemony of ableism. If Frankie had had a mental disability, a speech or hearing impairment, or behavioral disorder, would they have let him into the country? Yet why should a person like that have any less right to enter this country than brilliant Frankie did?
     The final story I want to highlight is when Frankie is asked by a friend to telephone her. This causes him a lot of consternation because he doesn't have a telephone. He eventually finds a place where he can use one, but the process is bewildering and a little frightening for him. He has to be guided through dialing the numbers and how to talk into the phone properly. I don't have any fancy vocabulary to describe this process, but I think it relates to a lot of discussions we've had in class about understanding others' experiences. If you had asked me to help Frankie get through one 24 hour period in his life, I might be able to think of some things from my own perspective that would be difficult for him. But how to make a phone call seems to fundamental that I would never even have considered needing to help him with that, let alone the emotional and mental anxiety it caused him. As teachers, we need to be paying close attention to our students at all times-- we never know when what seems like a basic or easy task to us is actually very trying for our students. We can't ever fall into the trap of deficit thinking, as if such lack of experience on the part of our students is due to anything other than structural inequality.

3. How did this book influence your thoughts about your future work as a teacher?

     I am very grateful to have read this book because it has given me invaluable insight into the life of undocumented immigrants, both parents as well as students that I will have in my classes. Since I will be teaching in an inner-city school in Houston, Texas, it's extremely likely that students with situations very similar to Frankie's will be in my classes every year. One of the great lessons that Frankie drew from his reminiscences is that his success was enabled not only by his and his families hard work and extreme sacrifice, but would have been impossible in spite of that without the aid of those with more cultural and economic capital than he possessed. His English teachers who so patiently helped him in improve; his counselors who not only refused to laugh at his dreams of college and teaching, but even supported him in those goals and pushed him when he himself felt too inadequate or unable to reach them; and the various adults who so patiently helped teach Frankie language of power by teaching etiquette, social customs, and American culture... all of these people were also responsible for his break through. And so I have had these three aspects of being an advocate and ally brought home to me while reading. If I want to help my students break through I must be  (1.) willing to guide each student who comes into my classroom from the place they begin to a better place, even if it means significant differentiation or additional work on my part,  (2.) push my students so that they will have the capacity and skills to be successful in ways they don't dream of as well as ways they do, and  (3.) vocally and consciously address the hegemony my students will encounter in the world and teach them how to confront and beat it (i.e. metacognitively address institutional / individual discrimination).

Assignment 6: Reimagined Classroom

I was pleased, as I read through my Imagined Classroom, that so little hegemonic thinking showed up in my plans. I can honestly say that even before this class I would have excitedly included the descriptions that I did in this assignment of a classroom full of diversity and in which I cultivate a sense of safety through frequent, open, yet controlled dialogue.

At the same time, one of the big themes of the class has been, at least for me, that we must not only be passive allies of those with less privilege than us, we must take affirmative action and be advocates in order for society to change. I saw too little evidence in my initial project of a classroom of active advocacy, and that is primarily what I wanted to change in my classroom.  In congruence with that goal, I made the following changes:

• I would include a seating chart for the students every semester so that they are forced to sit near students who are different from them. My classroom will feature frequent discussion between students sitting near each other, and the best way to help them overcome prejudice and misconception is to have them actually talk to those different from them.
• I will post a 'Safe Space' poster / sticker in a prominent location in the classroom. It isn't enough for me to passively support my gender non-conforming students. I need to actively show my defense of them.
• I will focus my curriculum on a broad spectrum of historical voices, not just those who always possessed cultural or social capital (rich white men). Primary sources in my history classroom will just as frequently be from women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and underrepresented groups of every kind. My curriculum will actively bring institutional discrimination and hegemonic thinking to light.
• I will help guide students more into learning the language of power by providing books of various levels in my class library. For students who are  fairly new to learning English, I'll have some lower level books that will help them because the books have more comprehensible input. What's more, I'll try to include and prominently display books that have been written in different students' primary language of discourse-- books by latino / latina authors, blacks, American Asians, etc. In this way both the content and the resources of my classroom will be clearly expansive.
• I will allow the hall pass to be used freely, but will monitor its and address abuse if I see it. Only allowing one student to go at a time may exhibit bias which I have as a man. My female students should be allowed to visit the restroom whenever they need to during their periods without having to feel like they have to wait for someone else to come back with the hall pass.
• I will vocally encourage tolerance and understanding during my unit on religion and take time to read sympathetic accounts of various persecuted religious groups with my students, particularly Muslim accounts.
• I will select only media clips to show that have adequate subtitles. As most of my class will revolve around student discussion, I will plan ways for each lesson that a student with hearing or speech impairment could fully participate.
• As a general rule, I will let the voices of those without privilege be heard just as much in our study of history as the voices of those with privilege. This relates to every possible group: ethnicities, religions, sexual minorities, anything.

Assignment 5: Community Experience

Community Experience

For my community experience I went observed the regular Saturday drug court. I learned that it was a weekly or biweekly occurrence only after a little while observing. The judge clearly knew most of the offenders already; in fact, he knew them by name and their situations very well. There was one point where the judge was asking an offender about the proper place for him to live once released from the facility he was staying at, and immediately rejected the idea that he go live with his wife again, saying, “We know how that turns out for you.” There was only person that the judge didn’t know (in fact, I noticed him looking inquiringly me at several times, as if aware I didn’t belong), and that was only because it was the man’s first time at drug court.

In a way it wasn’t surprising that the judge seemed curious about me, though, because I could tell as soon as I walked in that I was going to stick out. Most of the people ordered to show up to the court brought friends with them. They all looked pretty unkempt as if they didn’t shower often and hadn’t brushed or combed their hair that day at all. Many people had hair died in crazy colors (which I just have to say I would absolutely do if I wasn’t a BYU student) and the hairstyles were not conservative. Their clothes were often dirty and worn. So when I walked in with my very conservative hairstyle, new clothes (I was very aware of how bright white my shirt was), well-rested appearance, and not a single piercing, I very clearly didn’t fit in.

It took me a while to get absorbed into the conversations the judge was having with each offender as they were called up. In fact, that very structure was surprising to me, because I’ve never been to a court before, I don’t think, nor have I ever watched a TV program like Law and Order. So I’ve only rarely seen court scenes depicted in media and am pretty unsure of what they’re like. So when the court just consisted of the judge reading updates about each offender’s progress in the rehabilitation program and how well they’d completed / adhered to his rulings from the previous session, I was very surprised. I was a little surprised at the judge’s tone of voice, too. I was happy he was so kind to the offenders, but he seemed to be talking to them with just a hint of the voice you use when you talk to a child. But I actually came to understand after a little while. There was a fairly open dialogue between the judge and each person when they took the stand (enough so that I could tell he was good at cutting them off when they’d get on rants about how motivated they were to change—presumably actions speak louder than words, particularly when you've seen the same words not come to fruition many, many times). As I listened to each person speak when they got up, I was amazed at how slow, slurred, and simple their speech was. I could tell that for many of the people, drugs had probably permanently affected their brain. It really brought home to me the severity of what these people had been engaged in and what kind of sheltered life I’ve led that I don’t even know how to identify the smell of marijuana, let alone ever had close friends or relatives involved with drugs.

I’m really glad I went and observed the court. I’ve always felt very disconnected from criminal experiences and drug use because of my upbringing and limited media exposure, but I really want to be able to understand those things. And I know that the area I’ll be teaching in in Houston will feature a lot of those lifestyles. My students’ families, friends, and even some of my students themselves will personally deal with those issues, so I need to learn more about them now (and be able to identify if one of my students is even high…).

Assignment 4: Personal Cultural Artifacts

 1. Bookshelves in my bedroom. I began receiving books as presents from the time I was in 1st grade. My mother read books to my siblings and I every night until I was probably 12 and I stopped listening, and even then she'd still read to us on long car trips.

2. Piano room at home. Part of my culture is enough comfort with my family that I can sing and play music at any time and it doesn't annoy anyone. Furthermore, I grew up listening to music with primarily piano or orchestral scores-- there isn't a guitar or drum set to be seen in the house. This image represents the culture of my musical taste and ability my family's music focus gave me to learn to be a musician.

3. In my home, the pantry is fair game. It is always full of food. My culture has been that there will always be food to eat when I want it and I don't need to limit myself or wait for family mealtimes if I want to eat. A culture of ease towards food.

4. My mother keeps these folders on the wall in the mudroom. She puts mail for each child or important documents in here. This is a great example of the culture of organization that pervades my home. For us it is a given that things are always clean and put in their place. If there isn't a place for something, you make one, like these folders. 

5. In our house, we lock the bathroom door when we're using it. Privacy is a part of our bathroom culture, but not our bedroom culture-- we do not lock our bedroom doors ever. Even after I turned 18 it was a rule I just continued to keep. Mom can pop in to vacuum any time she likes even if I'm not home and I don't feel my privacy has been violated. But the best way to signal to someone that the bathroom is in use is to lock the door (although we do always turn out the light when we leave a room-- culture of saving energy). This was an uncomfortable realization for me when an aunt and uncle's family stayed with us for a month and I walked in on people several times.

6. We also always sit down when we use the restroom in my home-- man or woman, it doesn't matter. It's cleaner and less noisy. And when we are finished, we always shut the very top lid, too. This unique cultural difference means I don't get along very well with male roommates.

7. General cleanliness is part of American culture. You're taught to wash your hands after using the restroom. But there are plenty of people who don't do it. Not in my culture. I was raised to be a germaphobe, haha, so not washing is never ever an option! Sometimes I just need to go wash my hands even if I haven't been to the restroom-- usually after coming home from a public place (like campus).

8. Part of my culture is that I have my own bedroom. This wasn't the case while growing up in a very small house with plenty of siblings. But when I was 12 we moved, and so during my adolescence I became used to being alone in my room. This culture is very strange in, say, certain classes in China where the students go to boarding school and might even share a room with their parents their whole life.

9. Landline (but we have cell phones, as well). Part of my culture is the expectation of being available. If I don't text people back relatively quickly, they get impatient. If I were to leave my cell phone at home, say, and only respond to texts in the evening when getting home from my obligations, my friends would annoyed! But I often do just leave my phone sitting in my room when studying in the study so that I can be free of it. So my culture of 'being available' is less complete than most Americans.

10. This picture represents the culture of values in my family. Not only do we have a distinct set of frequently-reinforced religious / moral values, but we also consciously value value. Get it? We have a culture of daily trying to develop Christlike attributes, which shows itself in my Mom posting inspirational sayings like this on the pantry door. The saying rotates every month. We look at it often, think about it, and it influences how we live. So it is also a cyclical cultural feature, coming back to influence our culture because of how prevalent we make it.

11. We always have fresh fruit available, but have very little unhealthy food around the house. The is a part of our culture that's difficult for some people when they stay with us for extended periods. They're apt to say, "There's nothing to eat here ever..." Yet for me, having to cook something if I want to eat or eating fresh fruit when I'm hungry is very normal.

12. My family culture includes expectations that when we have a family meal, everyone is involved in either cooking or cleaning. We had a special family breakfast together for President's Day, and since I didn't cook or prepare, I washed the dishes. What's more, our culture is to wash the dishes immediately after dirtying them. Often the person cooking leaves no dishes to be washed except those the food is being served in.

13. Formal culture dictates couches as the place where Americans sit, but in my family, despite having really comfortable couches, when we gather in the family room or just sit there reading / on the computer, you'll generally find most of us sitting on the floor leaning against the foot of the couch. We usually put a pillow behind our back, and I always have a pillow on my lap, too, and sometimes on my feet (when it's cold) when I'm relaxing in the living room. This is my family's informal norm as opposed to a formal norm.

14. A unique formal norm to our family, however, is that no one uses the table without a placemat or putting a tablecloth on it. Because it's a wooden table that we don't want scratched, you'll often find us throwing down a cloth placemat or pulling out a tablecloth to put on the table before we use it, even just for a bowl of cereal.

15. Another part of our culture is that shoes are always removed when you get into the house. If you enter from the garage, they're left in the mudroom. But one person is generally only supposed to have one pair of shoes in the mudroom so it isn't too cluttered. So we usually keep only a convenient pair of shoes in the mudroom if we need to run quickly outside for something and carry any other shoes we wear back to our bedroom rather than walking there to remove them.

16. Another value that is part of my culture, reflected here, is preparedness. We keep a year's storage in a cold storage room in the basement (that this is even a room still part of our architectural culture is significant), and this food, unlike the pantry food, is not to be taken freely. 

17. Here is a great example of a culture of tensions between my, my father, and my mom. My dad is from a family who loves to hunt, and part of his culture is keeping trophies mounted on the walls. My mom's culture is that rustic, violent decor like that is unseemly. So they've compromised and my dad gets to put his trophies only in the basement recreation room. As a vegetarian, these things are offensive to me and my culture of passivity, so I include this photo as part of a room that I rarely visit, because I don't feel comfortable because of how it is decorated.

18. Americans generally value fitness and exercise, at least visually if not themselves taking part in it. But isn't it interesting that that culture isn't put on display. These workout machines aren't put in our living room upstairs where everyone who comes into the house can see them. Rather, we put them in a room guests are unlikely to see and where we can exercise privately. Some people work out in public or outside, but I grew up working out only in private, never at gyms (like I talked about last time), so this picture reflects that part of my culture.

19. Growing up we always used these... poofs to wash our bodies when showering. It wasn't strange to me. I figured everyone did. You put bodywash on the poof or on a loofa and use it to get clean. When I first moved away after high school and as a missionary, I realized that this is something many other men don't do! I was stunned that they thought they were cleaning themselves by just using a bar of soap and their hands to shower! How does that remove any dead skin?! They were just as surprised that I would use something that is cultural construed as more feminine to bathe.

20. These pictures of artwork in my bedroom represent more of my value culture, namely that religious art should be a part of our lives to remind us of God. 

21. Finally, this picture represents one of my most prized cultural aspects: a bed is to be made when you wake up. I always keep my room very clean, and a room can be otherwise tidy, but if the bed is not made up, it will never look really clean. So when I wake up every morning, I immediately make my bed before praying. This morning routine displays the values of orderliness and spirituality that are essential to me.

I really enjoy these assignments because they help me be more humble about my success in school growing up. I can see how many things about my culture enabled me to do well in school. It wasn't all just about my natural intelligence or capacity. My family prized reading, being orderly, quiet (that's hard to show in pictures, but the only sounds ever in my home are if someone is practicing the piano or voice techniques), obedient, normal Mormon religious values, and healthy living, eating, and sleeping patterns that made school the sort of thing that would naturally be easier for me than for a child with a culture that was very different from what is found at school. My cultural and social capital, as bestowed on me by my culture, are as much part of me being 'smart' as actually having a good brain!

Assignment 3: Being the "Other"

It was difficult for me to think of a place where I'd really feel truly uncomfortable without having to go a long ways away, but thankfully the idea of going to the gym was included in the assignment description! I have never been to a gym since I had a weights section of my 9th grade P.E. class, and that (just like all other P.E. classes) was a little traumatizing for me, so the gym seemed the perfect choice. I certainly approached the assignment with enough consternation to illustrate to myself just how other I was going to be.

I don't have classes until 1 pm every day, and so I planned to go to the gym in the morning on Wednesday. But I couldn't bring myself to go do something difficult like that. So I pushed it off. And pushed it off. And pushed it off. Finally, Saturday morning rolled around and it was the last real day I would have to go. Just the thought of being the other, knowing I would be the other, stressed me out!

I took a long time obsessing over what I'd wear. I only own one really ratty old pair of sport shorts that I wear as pajamas, and I felt really uncomfortable wearing them in public. But I always think of gym-goers as having a very specific uniform, and if I come in looking really different, I was sure they'd recognize me right away as someone who didn't belong. So I tried to do the 'look': athletic shoes, tall black socks, shorts (I wore a pair of summer, not-sport-shorts that I own), and a black T-shirt. I didn't own a shirt with some school or athletic logo or that was made of some workout-convenient fabric, however, so I knew I wasn't fully fitting the bill.

I had never been in the Smith Field-house before, and it took me a while to find the gym inside the building, all the while, I noticed that even the smell of the place made me uncomfortable and withdrawn. I am actually fairly naturally gifted at athletics-- when I have a kind person to help teach me and I'm actually interested in learning, I can do well at any sport. But I've never had any interest in learning sports besides tennis and volleyball, and so my poor performance led to a lot of embarrassment on my part in P.E. classes and neighborhood games growing up. So even the smell of athletics, which I've associated so long with embarrassing situations, makes me tense. The mixture of sweat, deodorant, and something else indefinable... not the smell of the locker room, but the smell of a gymnasium... it made me feel other before I was even at the place itself!

When I finally arrived, the person at the counter where you have to swipe your BYU I.D. card was an unsmiling, athletic guy. I was sure he was judging me for being a first timer because I didn't know where or how to swipe my I.D. So being other made me feel paranoid. The gym was unfortunately packed, not just with machines, which lined every wall and filled the center of the room, but with people. As I walked in, it seemed like every single treadmill along the long wall to my right was taken by some extremely fit person, all of whom were surely staring at me. I looked in vain for some corner place where I could sit and 'stretch' out of sight in order to get accustomed to the room. Finding none, I found the best place I could between two machines nearly at the edge, away from the gaze of most of the cardio crazies, and began stretching. But soon enough it was time to try the machines.

I was sure I was doing something wrong. First of all, I felt ridiculous as I walked around the whole circuit of the weight machines. They all looked so ridiculously convoluted. How on earth am I supposed to fit my body into that? What does it do? What do I push? Pull? There were instructions on each machine, so eventually, when none of them looked immediately forthcoming, I starting reading the instructions on the machine farthest away from the treadmills (the benches for the bench press were right next to me, but luckily weren't as full as the cardio section, and the people working out there were naturally looking skyward, not at me). After reading, I tried out the machine and managed to figure it out fairly easily, which was nice.

I proceeded to try out each machine, but after a while, I ran into other people using them as well. "What was the protocol for waiting for a machine?" I wondered. "That guy's been standing by mine for 30 second on his phone. Does that mean I'm taking too long? Where am I supposed to stand and which direction should I look if I want to queue for this next machine? I don't want this girl to feel like I'm rushing her..." Not knowing the protocol made me feel very other and even more nervous.

I even ran into a couple of people I knew. Luckily, they were nice guys and seemed a little uncomfortable there themselves. If I'd run into someone obviously gym savvy, I don't know if I would have tried to hide or been brave enough to ask her / him for advice!

I noticed that no one was talking at all, and my interpretation was that people were very focused, and wouldn't appreciate being distracted. It made me feel like tiptoeing around. And that in spite of the music being played, which (though not really loud) was of this indescribable mixture of genres. I can say that I would never have voluntarily listened to a single song being played, however, and that made me feel not just uncomfortable, but a little irritable, too, that I had to do this hard / strange thing while listening to terrible music. What, the jocks don't like Lady Gaga?

In conclusion, I realized through this experience, that though I have trained myself out of feeling uncomfortable as the other in most situations, there are yet some very specific instances when I feel other because past experiences I've had dispose me towards insecurity. I responded to this by withdrawing, being more shy and timid, and feeling a lot of anxiety. I can vividly imagine that students undergoing this kind of experience at school would have a really hard time of it! If even the thought of school, the smell of school, the sight of school gives them anxiety and makes them feel a little nauseated?! I will have to put in an awful lot of effort into making my classroom safe and my teaching accessible for every student if that is the level of discomfort some feel.

Note: It felt wrong to take any photos while in the gym because no matter where I turned there would have been someone else in the picture, and no one wants their picture taken while working out, right? Oh, wait, that's wrong. I think gym selfies are a thing for athletic people. So I made do with taking a selfie (also a new thing for me) of my workout outfit before heading off to the gym. I've also added a picture below from the BYU website describing the gym so you can get an idea for how it looks.

Assignment 2: Cultural Snapshot

1. Uniball Pen Commercial

2. Frame from 'Jessica Jones' comic series

3. Still from 'Luther,' a BBC Crime Drama 

4. Or this article from Fortune magazine.

5. A hugely popular Drake music video.

6. Still from 'The Hateful Eight,' a critically well-received 2015 film

7. And even this initially deceptive article from NPR.

Discussion

I chose to examine how African American men are portrayed in hegemonic American culture. The messages sent by the media about what an African American man is / should be like are even more consistent and narrow than for American white men. The image of an African American man is one that is highly gender socialized-- typical ideals of masculinity abound and include a muscled figure, gruff demeanor, warlike / aggressive tendencies, uneducated or urban speech patterns, highly sexualized interest in women with large bottoms and breasts, and susceptibility to racist treatment to law enforcement (implying, depending on interpretation, history of contempt for the law making such racism justified).

Examine the artifacts above, which I believe represent America's 'single story' of African American men extremely well. The only activity not traditionally solely restricted to men which they participate in is music. The style of music associated with the group however, is notably associated with masculinity in our society: music with sexual themes, rap, etc. There is mostly one body type presented in the examples above, as well, not just with reference to their figure, but also the skin tone. There is a huge range of hues that is classified as African American, but when the media needs a stock black man to fill a diversity need, why is the jump automatically of one of the darker shades? Furthermore, only one of the figures above is presented as educated or intelligent. One is actually in prison, but several of the others seem to intimate or actual commit actions that would merit prison time. None of the above artifacts make it clear that plenty of the African American male population could actually be lighter-skinned, gentle, skinny, effeminate, notably law-abiding or supportive, or brilliantly intelligent.

The impact these kinds of messages will have on my students is clear. It will form both expectations of African American young men themselves as well as their peers.  Their peers might continue to supportive the invisible and visible structures of racism still built into our society by believing and expecting such children to become men like they believe to become the norm. Role-fulfillment in this way might not turn my African American male students into Frankenstein's monster, but it will limit their choices or cause them pain if they don't fill the role prescribed for them. And that's the hurt that I see most clearly caused by this story-- that those African American young men who I teach that might otherwise go on to be doctors and engineers and teachers and artists and dancers and chefs and stay-at-home dads won't be able to fulfill their dream or I-never-realized-it-was-my-dream, but will try so hard to fit themselves into the mold set for them that it will cause them stress, depression, and despondency / lack of fulfillment. These feelings can crop up very early in life (I know from personal experience), so I need to be prepared to help my students examine this representation of the media. It's important for teachers to do this, after all, because that is the only way such hegemony can be recognized and overcome! Awareness of cultural hegemony enables the fight against it.