"In The Service Of What?" Quotes

Quote 1: " . . . ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
This quote is from President John Kennedy's inaugural address. He is challenging the people of the nation to turn to themselves instead of the nation itself for betterment. That is one of the main goals of service learning and volunteerism. It is doing something for others selflessly, and trying to create something better than before, instead of just expecting something to come to you. "Many agree with Sen. Kennedy, who writes that democracy "means . . . the responsibility to give something back to
America in return for all it has given us." It may be something small, but to one person it may mean the world. All it takes is trying to make a change, and working together as a nation to make things better for everyone.

Quote 2:"Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"
This quote was in a campaign speech given by Ronald Reagan, two decades after John Kennedy. While it is addressed to the individual, and it remains important to better one's self, I think it can be used in the context of community as well. Is the community you are a part of better than it was in the past? With service learning and volunteerism, people are learning and getting opportunities to make their communities better than they were in the past. People are becoming the change we need to see in the world, and four years from now people will look back and try even harder to make things better. Like the video mentions, the work done as a part of service are not permanent solutions. They only forge the bonds that encourage us to build solutions. We alone can not be the solution as to why service learning and volunteering is necessary, but we can certainly make the world we live in a better place and inspire a solution for the future.

Quote 3:"Maybe this [community service] is what citizenship is all about, acting in a decent way toward people who live where we live."
According to this article, and the many programs of service learning around the country, part of being a good person is being decent and helping those who need it. I think this is the message Kennedy, Reagan, and many other influential people have been trying to get us to work at all along. Working as a community is the only way we can create a better tomorrow for ourselves. We need to work together in order to see the improvements we want to achieve.

"Unlearning The Myths That Bind Us" Reflection

     Growing up in a home with six sisters, Disney movies and Barbies were pretty much what our lives revolved around. I remember playing with them and I always had to be Belle because I had brown hair and my sisters got to choose who they could be because they were all blonde. And at the time, I began to hate my hair because I wanted to be Cinderella and I couldn't.  Never once as a child did I question the underlying messages of those movies, but now that I am older I can see what damaging affects these may have on younger girls and boys. I can see now that these movies were ultimately teaching me what to consider beautiful and desirable.
     These movies, along with other forms of media such as magazines, ads, television and newspapers are trying to tell people how to act, dress, talk, and look. According to a lot of media, in order to be attractive girls must emulate super models. This includes being very skinny, with lots of makeup and fancy clothes. Even the Barbie has changed in the past decade to meet the beauty standards people have imposed. It is really scary to see just how much things have changed, and even worse is what is yet to come. If this is what people consider to be the standard of beauty, I don't know what we could be telling the next generation. What I once considered a harmless toy, is teaching girls that if they want to be pretty, they have to look like a plastic doll.

     Disney movies also teach girls to change themselves in order to find happiness. And in order to be happy you need to find a man. It does no justice for teaching boys either, it is sending them some pretty awful messages about what to expect from women. Again, the women are always categorized in these movies. The beautiful, young women always turn out to be the princesses and the women we know as ugly, old, overweight, or have any unusual physical features always turn out to be the villains.
     It also teaches children the differences between gender, race, and class. All of these movies show a woman going after a rich, handsome man to marry. And in almost all the movies, the men and women are white, inadvertently showing that only white people can obtain these things. I remember when the new "Princess and the Frog" came out and the leading lady Tiana and the prince were both African American and people were beyond happy that there was finally a "black princess". I don't think it should have taken as long as it did, and whose to say it didn't happen because of so much pressure from that community? But after seeing the movie, it still shows the African American characters as being poor (the prince having been cut off from his family's wealth, and the new princess growing up poor and earning a living). Her best friend, a white daughter to a very wealthy man, has all the money she could need and originally wants to marry the prince. Her servants include Tiana's mother (also a black woman), and shows all the African Americans in that town as working people. I never saw this as a big deal, but now I realize that in many other movies that share the same audience we are teaching our children to segregate races and classes.
     These movies teach children to stereotype and categorize people, and to this day I know that people still do it. As Christensen puts it, "Many students don't want to believe that they have been manipulated by children's media or advertising." These movies and many other forms of media have taught us how to behave and what to expect from others, and as the author mentions, we have been ignorant and happy. This video shows a fathers perspective to the whole popular movie craze and how it affected his children and their upbringing. Like Justine from the article, is it unpleasant to decode where a lot of our identity comes from, but it is necessary if we want to create a better future for ourselves and our children. My question to the class is this; Do you think we should stop our children/younger generations from watching these kinds of movies or cartoons? Or do you think we should let them enjoy such things with the innocence we probably all had at one point and explain it later?

"Speaking the Unspeakable" Reflection

For many people, the topic of introducing young children to the LGBT community has become taboo. For many parents now a days, they struggle trying to find the best time to bring it up with their children, and what would be considered appropriate for their ages. But as the article indicates, I think it is extremely important to make this topic a part of these young students lives. By educating these children, we are allowing them to make their own informed choices and helping them to be accepting of others.

All people throughout the United States should be considered equal, or at least that is what we are constantly told. However, that is not what we practice. To this day, people who identify themselves as part of the LGBT community fear for their jobs, homes, and in some cases lives because of that label. The teacher of the third grade class felt she could be open with her colleagues about her home-life, but not with her students. But it is apparent that straight teachers do not have the same worries as she does. This teacher also has concerns on how to bring it up to her students and how they will react. People have become virtually silenced, and can not express who they really are.
Why are we treating these people as second class citizens? In this Tedx talk video, iO Tillet Wright talks about how no one should feel constricted to a label or a box that society tries to force them to fit into. No one should feel like a second class citizen because of how they chose to identify their sexuality. She proves that these people are like everyone else, they look like us, they work for their money, they have a life outside of their sexuality. They are part of what makes this society work. Yet they are not equal. And some people are working to fix that, but others are still working hard to oppose this. And in the world today, just one voice can change the minds of many. One voice can be powerful.
One voice that holds a great deal of power is a teachers. Children spend a great deal of time with these people and look to them as role models. If they can not educate them about the world around us, then who will? I grew up not hearing anything about LGBT until about middle school and continue to learn more up to this day. The subject was never brought up in my household or school, and looking back I think it should have been. There is no way to go through life without learning about it, so by putting it off you are only hindering the child. In a society where we pride ourselves on opportunity and freedom of expression, we are certainly sending mixed signals when it comes to the topic of LGBT. It is sad to see people not treated the same as all other humans, based upon a label society has created. I think it is crucial to educate our children not to follow in the footsteps of those before them. When this "unspeakable" topic is no longer taboo, that is when all of the people in America will know equality.

Meier "Why Can't She Remember That?" Extended Comments

Books are able to give children a way to escape from reality, a way for them to learn life lessons, or even build relationships in a whole new way. This short video explains the magic books can do for children. http://youtu.be/86YLsEfKA4U  It gives them power, to explore, learn, and interact with the world in a whole new way. 

After reading Betsy's and Tanya's blog posts, I have to say I completely agree with them. Reading to children is vitally important to their growth, imagination, and learning. But when they can connect with a book, and feel as though it relates to them as an individual it makes all the difference. Even as adults, we have favorite books and stories, and these are based on things we like and things we feel a connection to. It is far more difficult to pay attention and learn something from a book we have nothing in common with or that we do find engaging. So why should we expect anything different from a young child? As a teacher, it is crucial to find books to use in the classroom that your students can relate to. Books are a wonderful tool, but work so much better when applied properly. 

As a student, connecting with a book can be a powerful thing. That child now has something in common with a fellow classmate that maybe they did not share before. The book could also be applied to other lessons throughout the school day to make it more interesting. There are endless possibilities in which stories can be used in the classroom and I think is absolutely necessary that we continue to use them in this setting. 

Meier also mentions the advancement of language skills from reading stories to children. She gives the example of the little girl in the car with her mother and wanting her rice cake. She asked one way and her mother told her to wait, but when asking in a way she remembered hearing from a story her mother pulled over and got her the rice cake. Her mother was impressed with her daughter's use of the language she had learned and wanted to reward her. Books are full of new ways to use language, and that is just another benefit, especially to children of multicultural or bilingual families. They are learning ways to adopt these uses of languages into their lives and apply them. And all it takes is just finding the right story for them to be able to connect with and expand upon.