Friday, January 27, 2012

Connection: Challenging the Status Quo

Today when people take the risk to challenge the status quo, they often have a strong passion for why they don’t fit in with the “norm”. A great example in today’s society is the gay community. In the past being gay was not accepted at all. But as time has gone by more and more people are admitting to be gay. It is still not acceptable and against the “norm” mainly because people don’t see how a person of one sex can be attracted to the same sex. Being gay is often thought of a bad thing or weird. Society has made fun of the gay community up until today. Because of all the over whelming harassment recently in the news there are many cases where gay teens have committed suicide. The gay community is still standing up and protesting against the crude commentary and not being allowed to have gay marriage.  

In many cases people are weary about challenging the status quo. And when a group like the gay community stands up for themselves it causes an out roar and will eventually escalate into chaos, because they are not giving up just like the African Americans did to fight against desegregation.

This debate and fight for the right to be gay and it be acceptable and become part of the “norm” I would personally like to see how this turns out. I think of the mindset that people can do whatever they want in terms of who they decide to be in a relationship with and sexually active with. I do see both sides of the debate I think that over time it will become a part of the “norm” or socially acceptable to be gay.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Learning This Semester

This semester has been crammed packed with a bunch of things. At the beginning of the year this class I noticed off the bat that this class was going to be very different than what we are used to. Since this class was different I knew I had to find new ways or better ways to improve my learning.

      One of those ways is working on my book annotations. Since I had never been in a class where the teacher forced us to annotate; I never really learned a good way as to how to annotate, and when I did everything seemed so important. But Mr. Allen really stressed how important it is and how much it will help me in the end when having to take a test or write a paper. He gave us multiple examples on ways to annotate and I took those examples and tried to follow his pattern while I was reading. It was a struggle at first because it’s hard for me to focus on both the book and annotating while keeping a look out for the patterns and key things. But I started by doing a couple pages of each chapter that way in order for me to get the hang of it and would add more pages each time. I am not perfect at this yet but I have hope with enough practice I will be very successful.

      Another way that helped from another angel was the Mindbook has a whole because for all these assignments it forced me to think outside the box. It was hard for me at the beginning because my mind wasn’t used to thinking so divergently. But with practice it became easier for me to switch between the two divergent thinking and convergent thinking. This assignment also helped me a lot because it helped me use some of the ideas we talked about in class and work them into my own life which made me understand the material much better. I also would like more practice with using these kinds of thinking because I enjoy thinking this way and it helps me with the way I like to learn.