community service

I compleated my community service with my water polo team. I would help out with the scoreboard and the concession stands. After hearing everyone elses stories with their community service, I felt really underachieved. I feel like I could have done something more interesting with my time, something with a better story to it. Everyone else told stories about how they helped homeless people or mentally challenged people, and I don't feel as if I have done enough. Yes, what I did was helping my team out, and giving others a break, ordinary working people that would have volunteered anyway if i hadn't. I don't regret what I did in any way, I know I helped out, but I wish that I had also done something else as well.

implicit racism

When i took the survey for the harvard demo on the racism(European Americans v. African Americans) demo that we did in class, I got that i had a moderate automatic perference towards African Americans over European Americans. Only about 4% of people who took the test got this score, and I'm pretty sure that I took the test right, I never got any of the questions wrong. I'm so supprised with these results, I never considered myself racist towards black people, but I did expect some preference towards whites since that's what the majority of people get when they take this test. It's just interesting that I have a moderate perference towards blacks, I wouldn't have expected that.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1

mobility?

The brookings Institute study that shows that other countries are more economically mobile than the US, such as canada and european countries. I think that this is true to an exent. There is almost no economically mobility for the people in poverty and the working class, but I think there is some for the people who are mid to upper middle class. Over the years I think my family has become mre economically mobile, there was a time when we weren't well off, right after the 9-11 attacks, I think everyone went through some hard times. I think that in the US there is the most room to economically grow if you're very wealthy.
I think I am growing up in the same social class as my parents and maybe a little up from them, just considering what colleges they went to, and where I plan to go, and what I want to do with my life in comparison to them. Our family has efinatly moved up since my grandparents. Most of my grandparents didn't even go to college, and some not even high school. I still expect to be in the upper middle class when I grow older.

blue collar stereotypes

The way the movie portrayed the blue collar people and how the middle class people were treating them, it seemed more like they were making fun of them rather than "glamorizing" their lifestyle. The dive bars in the city were a great example. I saw that the working class people were very kind to the yuppies that came into their bar and their lifestyle, but I don't think it was because they really wanted to get to know or be friends with the middle class people, I think theey only acted that way just to be nice, and to get the richer peoples buisness(the working class profited from them). I do find this condescending, because it cannot go both ways. For example, the working class people wouldn't be able to go into a middle/upper class club or bar, they just wouldn'y be able to afford it or fit in with the rest. So why should the middle class yuppies be able to go into the lower class lifestlye just to make fun of them, and have a good time? It would be a totally different story if the yuppies kept in contact, and stayed friends with the people they met, but in this case they didn't, and that's totally caondescending and shallow of the middle class peoples.

Tammy's story and her son

Tammy's poverty story is devistating to anyone. The fact that Tammy works at Burger King as a Janitor all day, and has no car to get her there, shows how desperate her family is. She and her family do have goals though, she stated that she wanted to be a teacher and one of her sons wants to go to college and become an architect or a lawyer. Statistically speaking neither of them has a chance of reaching these goals or ever comming out of poverty. Once in poverty, it's almost impossible to get out. Personally I think that the son has more of a chance at his goals than his mother. The mom works all day and has no car, there's no way for her to get ahead and go to school again. But the son is in high school and is already makeing changes to his lifestlye, and the lifestyle that his mom has portrayed to him. I think that if the son really wanted, he could get ahead and out of their povery striken life.

class interaction

In the movie, one man explained that the last time he interacted with someone from another social class was when he was in high school, and it wasn't a very good experience either because the working class felt they were being looked at as inferior. If someone said this about our high school, I would totally disagree. I think that most people at our school are already mid to upper middle class, and in fact I've never really seen anyone at Stevenson nor interacted with anyone who looks to be part of the "working class". In a way I feel that Stevenson is sheltered from the rest of the country by our class. If anything the class differences that I have noticed from day to day at school have been the differences from middle class to extremely wealthy.
If lower class people feel invisible I would understand why. Their lives are sometimes based off of the negatives. For example being told over and over again that a person cannot have the job, or the appartment, or the clothes that they want, it turns people negative. Time after time being told No, it can make a person numb to reality and life. This numbness can be seen as feeling "invisible".

devience

Even though I think money is a contributing factor, I don't think that Stevenson really follows that factor. This might be because most people that go to Stevenson are wealthy, and it's hard to judge who might be devient based on how much money they make. I think that being devient is based more on what kind of student you are, and your appearence. If a student is in higher classes and gets good grades, I think that administrators are more likely to think that the person isn't devient. But sometimes one cannot really tell weather someone is a good student or not if they're just walking down the hallway, so I believe in most cases that Stevenson doesn't really fall into the saints and roughnecks categories as much as other schools might.