Final Blog

This semester in sociology has taught me a lot about concepts I already knew about but this time, I was learning them in a much different way. The idea of race or gender to me was something I took for granted. It was a social norm to think of race as the color of ones skin or gender as whether you're a boy or a girl and this is exactly how I thought too.

When we were given the prompt in the beginning of the year about who we are I only talked about the individual that I am. Although many of the characteristics I had listed were probably true, there is a lot more to me than what I wrote. I did not talk about all the other aspects of my life that made me the person I am today. I didn't talk nearly enough about my background, the different enviornments I've lived in and the ways that those enviornments made me who I am today. I also left out a lot about the people around me. I have learned over the course of this semester that while you might be who you are or percieved in such a specific way, there is reasoning behind it and that reasoning is almost just as important as the actual charateristics itself.

I have began to think in a much different light about this than I did before I took sociology. I question more and find myself thinking more outside of the normal social box now. I think this is because of all of the lessons I've seen in the last 18 weeks. They have made me realize that although people perceive the world to be a certain way, it is ok to question it and find out more because you might take a whole new approach to an idea after learning more about it which can help and individual grow tremendously.

Race

This week in sociology we watched the movie Crash. It tied together all of the concepts of race we had been talking about in the past few weeks. A lot of the characters while they were being stereotyped into a certain race were taking offense to it but doing it right back to another race which I found interesting and the more I thought about it, the more I believe that really exists in our society. These people create such harsh judgements based on a persons skin tone or people they surround themselves in and the movie shows how these people are actually very different from the way people portray them. 

I see it everywhere around me people being portrayed in a specific way. Blacks as the bad kids, asians as the smart ones, whites as the good ones and these stereotypes mean nothing. We learned that the color of someones skin does not determine their race and in America we have a very broad generalization for what race a person is. I think it is also unfair to think of these people in a certain way because while there may be a few black trouble makers or a few really smart asian kids, there can also be extremely intellegent and successful people who have dark skin (for example our president) and people from asian descent who are not smart at all. The color of ones skin should mean nothing about their personality, morals or beliefs, something that I feel like the movie we are watching represents very well.

Race

This week in sociology we talked about race. We discovered that race is a creation of society and there is no clear definition of race because every society thinks of race in a different way cWe learbed how some countries have over 50 (in some cases) descriptions of what race is which, living in the United Stares is something I have never thought about doing before. I also found it interesting how America categorizes race by a few main categories such as White, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, or Latino. Although it was common to see most of those on applications and questionarres i never really put much thought into how discriminatory that actually was. And it doesn't have to be done like that.

This new concept of race I want to apply to my life. I want to start thinking of people more in the way that other more accepting countries do. I realize it is hard because in the United States we think completely differently but doing my best not to automatically categorize people by the race they were given is a very good start.

Students Helping Soldiers Community Service

For my 9th and 10th hours of community service I helped out Mr. Moran and Ms. Bush in the Stevenson ran Students Helping Soldiers club. They were preparing for the Veterans Baseball Game against Buffalo Grove High School so me and some of the people in the club wanted to help out since it was such a hit last year. We went out and bought all sorts of things and found restaurants that wanted to donate to the baseball game. We also decorated the field with cups in the fences and american flags all around the baseball field, after school, the day before the game. Some people in the club made a Facebook event that people could RSVP to and we did our best to get the word out there about the game. We spent a lot of time preparing for the game and it ended in a total success. I was not able to attend the game because I was out of town but from what I heard the turnout was amazing, it was a nice, warm and sunny day so tons of people came and the veterans were proud to be able to be there and all of the members of Students Helping Soldiers were glad they were there too!

Kildeer Book Fair Community Service

For my 1st and 2nd hours I helped out at the Kildeer Book Fair by selling pizza. Each year the school puts on a book fair and the proceeds go towards the school to help with projects within the school and the money sold for the pizza does too.
When we got there we met the women in charge of the book fair. They showed us around a little bit and then took us to the cafeteria where we had to set up. We put up the signs showing where the pizza would be so that parents could find us and then took some of the pizzas out of the warm oven and cut them up. There were a few people there also volunteering so some of us handed out pizza, while others passed out napkins and others collected money. I was mainly in charge of the pizza but we all switched off a little. We interacted with the kids and their parents, learned about the books they got and had a lot of fun. At the end of the two hour shift we took down the signs, and distributed the left over pizza to people still in the building. We also cleaned up the cafeteria and in the back where we kept the pizzas and other things we were selling.

Feed My Starving Children Community Service

For my 5th through 8th hours of community service I went and volunteered at Feed My Starving Children in Libertyville. Since each session is only and hour and a half, I went twice.
When you get there you have to sign in on the computer for the party name and sift you signed up for. Then you go and sit down and wait for the presentation to begin. The people who work at the organization put together a video informing the volunteers what their company is all about and what their food and our help can do to impact these hungry children around the world. Once the video is over you have to go and wash your hands so none of your germs get on the food you are packaging since the people in these countries may not have the immunities we do to certain things. Then we stand around and the lady who is in charge, Kathy, talks about what we will be doing. She explains the different things that go into each bag, how much of what to put in each bag and how many bags go into each box. Then we split up into tables and get to work.
I traded off my position a lot and went from pouring the vegetable pieces to sealing bags mainly. After an hour and a half of working we had to clean up. The person doing each job in the creation of the food bags is assigned a clean up job. I had to wash the dishes so I took the dirty supplies over to the dish washers, waited for it to go through their cycle then I had to dry them and bring them back.
Once everyone was done cleaning up all of the volunteers had the option to go into the storage room and pray. After that, we all went back out to the main area where we watched another video as they tallied up how much we had boxed that night. I was amazed when I heard the numbers! We had boxed 97 boxes which they said would feed 57 kids for an entire year.

Donating Blood For Community Service

For my 5th hour of community service I donated blood. My dad has always gone and donated every few months for as long as I can remember so when I heard about the blood drive at school, one of my friends talked me into doing it with her. Although I was extremely nervous, I decided to go with her anyway. After watching a small mishap with her veins and the doctor, I became way too nervous, wimped out and left before I had the chance to donate. After I left though, I was so mad I did.
A few weeks later my dad went and took me with as a way for me to redeem myself and I did! When I went and donated for community service this was the second time that I had done it.
When I went inside I signed in and waited for my turn. They called me back and I answered a lot of questions and they had to check my blood for the correct iron levels. Once they cleared me I went and sat in the chair. They poked me with the needle but it wasn't too painful and it only took about 10 minutes. When it was over they put a bandaid on it which I had to keep on for a few hours.

Project Dance Community Service

For 4 of my community service hours I participated in Project Dance. A Dance-A-Thon put on through Stevenson and U-Give that raises money for Riverside Foundation. I have done this all four years of high school so I knew what to expect going in to it this time.
A month or two out, we had to pick a captain and she went to the meeting and told us what we needed to do. She ordered our shirts and told us we needed to collectively donate $300 which happened to be $15 per person in our group. I asked people around me to donate a dollar or two and people were overall very nice and generous about it so I was able to raise my money relatively quickly.
On the night of the dance-a-thon we got to school around 5:30 and all checked in and were given bracelets. The rest of that night we danced, hung out with people we knew, ate pizza and watched performances from people who belong to dance clubs in and outside of Stevenson. They also played a video at the end of the night talking about what Riverside is and what the money we were raising was planning on going towards. It was very inspirational to see some of the people that we would directly be affecting and how happy they were with our contributions. In total, Stevenson raised over $60,000 that night!

Social Classes

This week in sociology we talked about social classes. We looked at lost of comparable houses, in drastically different neighborhoods and watched as the prices dramatically rose and fell. This went along with movie we watched that talked about different social classes from people of those different social classes. Seeing people from such dramaticly different social classes talk about the samentopic but in very different ways was very eye opening. We then shifted our focus towards people in poorer classes and what life is like for them. They get by with basically nothing and do things people in other classes wouldn't dream of for very little money. When we watched the movie about the guy who lived with his wife on minimum wage jobs for 30 days, seeing what they went through made everything much more real for me. 

I see people all around me, growing up, and at other schools not too far away that are really struggling to get by. You just see it though for a few minutes and walk away and think about how hard it must be for them but then go on with your life. For these people it is their life and they can never just walk away and forget about it. I want to make more of an effort now to help these people who are for absolutely no reason other than luck, less fortunate than me. Very small actions I could do could dramatically change their life. 

Economic Inequality

This week in Sociology we talked about economic inequality not only within the world which is usually what's talked about when inequality is brought up but also the amount of inequality in the United States and also in a much smaller scope, within our districts and the ones around us. Because we are so used to our surroundings we don't always take the time to step back and realize how good we have it. Our district and neighborhoods we live in by going to school in this district, while they may seem normal to us, are actually far exceeding the level of wealth in our surrounding areas and especially in the scope of our country and world. It's pretty crazy when you step back and actually look at the amount of money and life that the majority of people live with even within the same
country

I have grown up living in many different areas. I went to a Chicago Public School for 9 years of my life and have lived in several different neighborhoods in Chicago so I have been around lots
of different people and their living situations. I was used to it because that was the environment I grew up in. Lots of the kids I went to school with qualified for free or reduced lunches and when lunch cards were passed out each day in our classrooms, everyone knew who those kids were but it meant nothing to is because they were our friends and we didn't think of them any differently. There were so many situations like that where kids showed how they were from different socioeconomic class levels but until now when I step back and think about it, I hadn't even realized this was the case. 

Deviance

This week we talked a lot about deviance which is where someone goes against the social norm. This norm though, exists within the place and time that the event is occurring though because norms change so frequently and depending on who one talks to or interacts with. For example, someone over a 100 years ago may walk to school because their school was close by and cars weren't as common as they are today. Today though, someone walking to school may be deviant because most people have their own car or can easily get driven to school. We also talked about how their can be such thing as positive deviance and we were given the task of doing some act of positive deviance at some point throughout the week.

This assignment was very different than most assignments I usually do for school. I believe in doing nice things for people in general and going out of my way because I see how it impacts them and makes them feel good. Even if it's something as subtle as holding a door or saying thank you when someone goes out of their way to do something for you, that positivity can go a long way and spread through others. That's why for my assignment I chose to say hi to anyone I saw in the hallways that was in any one of my classes, no matter how much I talked to them during class. People responded surprisingly very positively. I could tell it made people happy that I said hi to them, especially if they were just walking alone. I know if someone did that to me it would make me very happy so I wanted to reciprocate that and make someone else's day a little better too.

Male Gender Roles In Society

This week we talked about gender roles and since last week our main focus was females, thisweek we
focused on males. We talked about how important it is for men in our society to act tough, strong, and the way men "should" according to our society. We watched a few videos about how to break that mold and how men and women can both help change society's feelings towards gender. We also talked a lot about how we feel about boys and men and what their dominant characteristics should be and as it turned out, we all had very similar beliefs and those beliefs were in line with society's as well. It is weird to think about how strongly ingrained these characteristics are in our brain because I have never once sat back and thought about gender roles in the ways we have in class this week.

I have never stopped to realize how strongly we push men into a certain mold especially since I have been in a situation almost my entire life where that goes against that mold. My parents got divorced when I was 4 years old and since then, during the time I have spent with my dad, my dad has taken on both the mom and dad role. Growing up like that for so many years has made me closer to my dad and even when he got married just a few years ago, I still think of him in the way I always have even though he has a wife now. He used to make me my lunches and is the one who coordinates all of the things going on in my life. This isn't the typical role of a father in society but at the same time, this is all I know because this is what he has done my entire life and even though my dad is a man, he can do the same things just as well. Society needs to learn to accept that.

Mass Media and Socialization

This week in Sociology we talked about the mass media as a socializing agent. We started out the week by doing an UNTV assignment where we did all sorts of experiments with turning the TV volume off and staring only at the TV. Then on Tuesday we discussed it and came up with some ineresting realizations. Like the fact that the camera angles switch so frequently but it's not noticable because of how much people watch tv, it has become normal. Also, watching the tv woth the screen off has showed me how much tome I waste spending tv and how little I actually do while watching tv.
Another thing we talked about this week was how the media creates these perceptioms of how girls vs boys should act and the types of things they should like and play with. We looked through a toy catelog and saw that all the girl pages were pink and had toys like kitchens, then went to the boy pages and realized thatthey were all filled with kids being active and getting dirty outside. They were playing with tools and strong machines that associate with masculinity. It was so weird because up until then, I has never noticed the blatently obvious messages that commericals and toy catalogs were sending. We have just grown up in a world accepting those things and paid very little attention to them.
This made me start to reflect on my life, I have lived in 6 different houses and in 5 of my 6 houses my room has always been painted pink (the one other time it was purple). It started out when I was born, my parents knew they were having a girl so of course, they had to paint my room pink because that was the normal thing to do. Then as I got older, although my favorite color wasn't always pink, I felt like my room had to be that color because all of my friend's rooms were pink and I was a girl and that's just what we do. So room after room, they were all painted pink.I don't think I ever conciencely thought about why I painted my room the color I did though, up until now and now I'm realizing I am just as much a product of the media socializing people as any of my other friends with pink rooms are.

Socalization

This week we started our new unit called Socialization. We focused this week on children and using the Growing Man Metaphor we were able to understand how children start out with a certain biology and what comes from nature then grows up and through socialization, grows up into a more aware and conscience person. We learned a lot about how important nurturing children is and we watched a few videos of examples of children who were never nurtured and therefore, they developed at a much slower rate than any other child their age. I was shocked to see how drastically different they were just because of the lack of human interaction they were given. They could not see, speak or move right because they had never been taught how. Simple tasks like chewing and swallowing food that many people probably assume babies are born knowing how to do, is now shown that that is not the case and there are very few things that babies can actually do on their own without learning from someone or imitating someone.

Since my siblings were all born after I was already ten years old I feel like I am one of the few people my age that has seen a baby every day from the time they were born to the oldest one who is now seven. There are so many things that each minute tiny babies need that people may not understand until they spend long amounts of time with a baby. Although I realized all of these things were very important, I didn't understand how crucial the jobs of parents really are. It's so interesting to me to see how strongly just touching a baby's back (out of instinct to many) when they are upset or tired can impact their lives and by doing it frequently enough, the person touching their back is actually making them grow. This unit has already put a whole new perspective on the way I look at parents and the way they raise their children.

Cultural Values

This week we talked more about Cultural values and going along with that we watched Tuesdays With Morrie. He talked a lot about values of American's and how they don't always even realize that they're avoiding or so obsessed with specific values. For example people avoid talking about death because they find it sad and seem to think in a materialistic way when they chose to work the extra few hours every day because it will give them more money and therefore they can spend that money on more things. The main character of the movie, the man who Morrie shared his wisdom with every Tuesday was a product of those American values and without even realizing it, he lived in the culturally normal way. He never wanted to admit that Morrie was really ever dying because it was sad but Morrie and our class discussion proved that a death could be a happy thing too. It can be a celebration of life and the fact that Morrie died the way he wanted to was positive. The main character also spent most of his time working or thinking about work until he lost his girlfriend and realized how messed up his values really were.

Another thing we did this week was read an article called Thrive that explained the ways that people should live if they want to neglect a lot of the American values that people get wrapped up in and do things to genuinely make you happy. One that stood out to me the most was the idea of not over working themselves. This applied not only on the movie we watched but also to my life. I have experienced both sides of this because my parents are divorced and my mom is someone who works a lot and travels 2 to 3 times a week and my dad is the complete opposite. He's rather spend his time doing things that interest him more than his job. Growing up in both environments I can completely see both perspectives. Stevenson  and the world we live in is competitive therefore people become more naturally competitive so it's harder to break away from that. I understand both sides and each has plenty of it's own costs and benefits, it's just up to me to decide what other values are most important to me.

Cultural Values and Subcultures

This week in sociology we talked about cultural values. We learned how even though a lot of the things we do are normal to us, that is only because we have grown up thinking these things are important because the people surrounding us think so too. We read an excerpt from The Values Americans Live By and a few values stood out especially strong to me. Self Help/Initiative was one. In high school you are surrounded by people who either are active in school and get good grades or are lazy and do nothing. People who don't take initiative in school would be characterized as "lazy" even though that may not be the case. America is so competitive where if you're not constantly trying to climb higher and higher then there is something wrong with you. Americans need to take a step back and realize though that not everyone thinks that way and just because they aren't constantly climbing doesn't make them an underachiever. Another example is Action/Work Orientation which implies that people need to always be productive and efficient to be able to be successful. I have stepped back and realized that this is apparent everywhere especially in Stevenson also. Some students have such a jam packed day or stay up really late studying that they forget how important sleep is and automatically make that their last priority. Many people feel it isn't productive to just go to bed when there are lots of things to be done but in many other cultures, the idea of sleeping or resting is actually favored because it is productive in a way that helps restore your mind and body.

Another thing we talked about this week was all of the Subcultures or, smaller groups that people in society can fit into. We used Stevenson as an example and talked about the different types of material culture, mores, folkways, unique language, unique symbols and values that the people at Stevenson all posses. I began thinking about the other subcultures I might be apart of and realized I belong to a lot of them. One of them would be the town, Buffalo Grove, that I have lived in for the last four years. There are lots of trends that all of the people living in the area wear or have which could be part of our material culture. Living here with all of your friends there are always places that you shouldn't or should go at certain times, names for parks or places to go that people not from around Buffalo Grove might not understand and specific values that the majority of us all believe in to some extent. It is cool to think that just within the area I live in, there are so many people that I can still be connected to that I may not even know but they follow the same set of unwritten rules as I do because we belong to the same subculture.

Culture Part 2

This week we continued talking about different cultures. We watched a movie called God Grew Tired of Us. In the movie, we were able to follow a group of boys who not only escaped from their homeland alone, without their family and many of their friends, but many years later were taken to the United States to create a better life for themselves. To see what they went through back at home every day and then coming to America not knowing anything about how anything works really puts things in perspective. I have lived in America my whole life and the stresses for me of deciding between two amazing colleges and dealing with parents who are divorced and live 30 miles away to me are the types of things I spend a lot of time worrying about but in the scheme of things they are nothing. The young men who came to America couldn't preform basic functions like turning on lights without being taught how and they, after a few short months, were expected to make it out in the world just as I am. I feel so lucky though now for the advantages I have been given.

Another thing that has really personally affected me about watching this movie was seeing firsthand the hardships these people are going through. I have heard a lot about it because the nanny me and my sister had for a lot of the time we were growing up was from Ghana. Although the conditions she was in were much much much better than anything that the people in Sudan and the boys in the movie had to go through,  it showed me how different her life was before she moved here and how much help her family needs. She moved to the US over 10 years ago but all of her children still live in Ghana with the rest of her family because she cannot afford to fly them here. They also cannot afford a lot of things where they are and me and my sister have, for many years, sent them the clothes that no longer fit us. When she would call her relatives she would speak a very different language than what she spoke to me and my sister and she would constantly talk about how much she missed her family. Although I again will admit, she and the boys in the movie are in very different situations, there are a lot of parallels that I can notice. For example, they both decided on coming to the US to make their families proud and be able to make money to send back home to support them, also while they are doing the best they can, a lot of them was left back in their home country therefore they miss their family and home very much.

Culture Intro

This week we started our new unit about Culture. We started the week out by playing a card game where we weren't allowed to talk and as the winner or loser moved from table to table, the rules changed but because no one could talk, no one was able to explain it. I was the loser from my group so on the second round I had to switch tables and play with new rules. At first everything seemed normal but then when I thought I was supposed to win a round, a different person in the group took the cards. I was confused and thought I was right but there was nothing I could do about it since we couldn't speak.  That was the whole point of the activity.

We later defined three terms and I had realized that they each applied to my situation while playing the game. First, Culture Shock, this is the moment when someone sees something new or different and is surprised because it was different than what he or she was used to doing. In my case, when I thought that I won a round but someone else took my cards without hesitation. Then, Ethnocentrism, this is the idea that the practices that the person is used to is the right way, they feel that everyone doing something different from them is wrong and that they are right. When the cards were snatched by another person I felt this way. I "knew" that according to the rules that I had read on my sheet, I was playing correctly and then just assumed that the people all around me were wrong. Then lastly, Cultural Relativity, which is where one adapts to the environment around them, considering all aspects (what they believe is right and what others believe is right) and make their decision based on that. I experienced this too when I began to understand the trends that were going on in the new game and eventually started playing according to their rules.

I have experienced different cultures throughout my life but one of the most extremes was when I spent two weeks as an exchange student in Barcelona, Spain. I lived with a family that knew very little English and while I thought that that would be my biggest challenge, I was very wrong. They live very differently than I do in America. For example, their main meal of the day is lunch, not dinner. Something that was very hard for me to get used to because I was not hungry for a large meal during the middle of the day but rather at night, like I had been brought up doing. Another example is that they had a lot more freedom going out then I did at the time. When I went I was only 13 and living in Chicago where I could not always go and roam the streets at night because it just wasn't safe. In Spain though, these kids parents allowed them to be out later than I was used to and could walk from house to house as they pleased. Both of these concepts to me were weird and unusual but as the initial Culture Shock went away and my Ethnocentrism started to fade, I became more Culturally Relative to the customs that they had and started becoming more accepting of them.

Unit One Summary

The movie we watched this week was not only entertaining but covered all of the topics we discussed in class during the last five weeks. It showed characters who were sociologically mindful, a concept we spent a few days learning. The main character Calogero is definitely the most mindful throughout the movie. He is one of the few people who are against racism and do their best to see the other side of the situation (black perspectives) and at the end of the movie, even dates a black girl named Jane. He knew that when he was in the back seat of his friend's car, on their way to go beat up a black neighborhood that it was not the right thing to do and that set him apart from the rest of his friends.

Another thing we spent a few days discussing were the different groups many people are apart of. A big emphasis in class was put on the fact that everyone belongs to lots and lots of different groups throughout their day and life. We spent time thinking about all the different groups we were part of and wrote them down. I was surprised to see how many groups I fit into every day without even realizing it and the main character in the movie was no exception. He not only was part of his family's group and friend's group, but he also had a completely separate life with Sonny and all of the bar guys. To go even further Sonny and him had their own separate relationship from everyone else so they had a group as well as the main character and his father.  Another big theme in the movie was race and ethnicity which played into groups as well. Whites and blacks were highly segregated at the time so he was very much a part of a white group, as well as an Italian-American group and even more specifically, part of a Sicilian group.

Seeing the divide in black and white neighborhoods was very different because in the time I grew up in, racial diversity is much more accepted. At the same time though, I look at the cultural neighborhoods I have grown up around from living in Chicago and now feel that I have better insight into their worlds after seeing what it was like living in an Italian neighborhood in America. Each year in elementary school we would take field trips to China town and Pilson (a mexican neighborhood in Chicago) and go to their restaurants and experience their culture. My mom's house is in Greek Town where the greek letters that spell out Walgreens are written under the big Walgreens sign on the building. Each of these things I have seen in my life but never really thought much of them. After watching the movie in class, I feel like I can understand these different neighborhoods a little bit better.

Macro Sociology

This week we learned about the ways that individuals are shaped by society. They are shaped by things all around us that we may otherwise not have realized. The idea of macro sociology is the thought that the values of an individual person, although they may think are made completely on their own, are really shaped by the values of the community around them. We spent a lot of time talking about the different characteristics of people and deciding how important they were when we did the Abandon Ship exercise. We characterized older people as not as important in our society versus many other societies where people of a higher age are praised for their experience and wisdom in life. Then a few days later created a web of the different groups we belonged in and how being in those groups affected our society.

For me this was a meaningful exercise, I belong to a lot of different groups of people and even being in a family with divorced parents creates sub groups even within my family group. At times I feel like I am living a completely different life when I am with my mom and step dad's family versus my dad and stepmom's family. I have different friends when I am with each different family and although I am a sister in both families, my number of siblings is different. On top of all those differences though I do belong to some very big groups such as being an American, being a girl and being Jewish. This goes to show me that while at times I feel like my life is being divided into smaller and smaller sub sections, at the same time my life is growing and I am expanding my life and sharing similarities with people that I don't even know. I had never really thought about my life in that way before so I took some extra time reflecting on the lesson in class and it has helped me realize how big and evolving my life is and that it'll just get bigger and bigger as my life goes on.

Social Construction of Reality

This week we learned about the Social Construction of Reality. By breaking the phrase apart you can figure out the definition pretty easily, social meaning society or people in society, construction meaning creation and reality meaning one's experience, it becomes clear that the definition for the social construction of reality is the way society perceives a specific experience. In class when we saw the spit on the spoon we thought it was gross only because that is what society believed to be gross, just as society has a belief that saliva, inside of someone's mouth is completely normal. We learned that there is no clear explanation of why these very similar items are described as drastically different, but they are. Everyone around us thinks so, therefore we all think the same without even realizing it.

The spit demo was just one example of the many things we think about in our daily lives without even realizing it. After realizing how strongly I conformed to society without even knowing it I began to take a step back and try to figure out what other things I am doing or thinking just because the people around me are too. Money, stop lights and even the simple act of wearing clothes are normal to us because it is what our society is used to. To people who lived in times before real streets and roads, to them a stop light could be just a range of colors, attempting to tell some one to stop or go but because it is not normal to them they may not think it is necessary to be followed. They may not understand why the computer generated light pattern should be able to have priority over their want to go if the light was red. To us though, we have become so used to street lights in our society that we would never think to question it. Seeing the Social Construction of Reality is a difficult to do but when you step back for a second and think, you start to notice life in a whole new light.

Sociological Mindfulness and Sociological Imagination

This week we learned a lot about sociological mindfulness and sociological imagination. Sociological mindfulness is when someone thinks about the impact they have on their society and how the small things they do can change the world around them. It is important to be sociologically mindful because many times people don't know how powerful their actions can have towards the people around them. We were shown a video where Obama explains the story about the time one woman changed the mood of place he came to visit, simply by chanting "fired up, ready to go". He then went on to explain how she not only motivated the room he was in, but then he in turn left fired up and wanted to share how he felt with the people around them, as the feeling spread, her words became more and more powerful.

On the other hand, ones sociological imagination is a little different. A person's sociological imagination has to do with when and where a person was born and how that impacted their life. My mom who was born in North Carolina and grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama had a much different upbringing than I had growing up in downtown, Chicago 30 years later. The people surrounding us were different, along with the different morals and values that people had then versus 17 years ago when I was born. Even my little sister who is now 7 is growing up in a different time than me, just 10 short years later. Paying attention to these details and being aware of the different situations one is placed in by the environment they are surrounded in helps one connect with their sociological imagination much more.

Overall I feel that both of these concepts are very important. I am a big believer in positiveness and I think when someone is positive and happy, their emotions can rub off onto others. I have noticed that being sociologically mindful can have a big impact on people around you even if it goes no further than them seeing you doing a good deed and them thanking you for it. In the hallway yesterday I was walking and saw a girl knock over a big cone, she did it and saw what happened, thought about picking it up for a second then continued on with her friends down the hallway. I was walking in the opposite direction as her and when I walked by I picked it up because I knew it was the right thing to do. I didn't know anyone saw me but then after walking 100 more feet a security guard came and stopped me and thanked me for picking it up so he didn't have to walk all the way down the hallway and do it himself. Because I was being sociologically mindful I was able to do something nice for someone else without even realizing it!

Who Am I?

Who am I?

If I had to start with basics I am a 5' 6'', brown haired, brown eyed, 17 year old girl who is a senior in high school. I am like many of the other girls around me, I love my friends, am dedicated to my school work and come from an exceptional family but under all the basics there are some things that make me very different.

I have grown up living in lots of different environments. I spent the first 13 years of my life living in the city with my mom. My parents have been divorced almost my entire life so I am completely used to the situation and now I have 3 little siblings (2 sisters and 1 brother) all under the age of 7 who mean everything to me.

Then, my freshman year of high school I moved to the suburb that I now have lived in for four years. In the beginning, I was really unsure about the change but as I started going out of my comfort level and making new friends, I began to experience new, fun and exciting things. This experience has made me become a more optimistic, social and curiosity seeking person. Life is full of options and choices and something I have learned in the last four years is to take advantage of them because it pays off.

Additionally, I love to draw. Since I was really little that has always been something I've really enjoyed but as I started taking art classes in high school I began to do more with my art. I spend a lot of my free time drawing the people and objects that surround me.

I have four parents and eight grandparents who have all impacted my life in so many ways especially sine they are all so different. In different ways they all influence me and the choices I make. While some of my grandparents are more quiet and conservative, others are louder and like to voice their opinions at no cost I think I have a mixture of all of them in me.

Next year I plan on going to Indiana University and can't wait to see what life has in store for me in the future!