A Father's Letter

Dear Madelynn & Emily,

As I write this, I’m sitting in the makeup aisle of our local Target store. Mom texted me from a different makeup aisle and told me it felt like one of the most oppressive places in the world. I wanted to find out what she meant. And now that I’m sitting here, I’m beginning to agree with her. Words have power, and the words on display in this aisle have a deep power. Words and phrases like:

Affordably gorgeous,

Infallible,

Flawless finish,

Brilliant strength,

Liquid power,

Go nude,

Age defying,

Instant age rewind,

Choose your dream,

Nearly naked, and

Natural beauty.

When you have a daughter you start to realize she’s just as strong as everyone else in the house—a force to be reckoned with, a soul on fire with the same life and gifts and passions as any man. But sitting in this store aisle, you also begin to realize most people won’t see her that way. They’ll see her as a pretty face and a body to enjoy. And they’ll tell her she has to look a certain way to have any worth or influence.

But words do have power and maybe, just maybe, the words of a father can begin to compete with the words of the world. Maybe a father’s words can deliver his daughters through this gauntlet of institutionalized shame and into a deep, unshakeable sense of her own worthiness and beauty.

A father’s words aren’t different words, but they are words with a radically different meaning:

Brilliant strength. May your strength be not in your fingernails but in your heart. May you discern in your center who you are, and then may you fearfully but tenaciously live it out in the world.

Choose your dream. But not from a department store shelf. Find the still-quiet place within you. A real dream has been planted there. Discover what you want to do in the world. And when you have chosen, may you faithfully pursue it, with integrity and with hope.

Naked. The world wants you to take your clothes off. Please keep them on. But take your glovesoff. Pull no punches. Say what is in your heart. Be vulnerable. Embrace risk. Love a world that barely knows what it means to love itself. Do so nakedly. Openly. With abandon.

Infallible. May you be constantly, infallibly aware that infallibility doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion created by people interested in your wallet. If you choose to seek perfection, may it be in an infallible grace—for yourself, and for everyone around you.

Age defying. Your skin will wrinkle and your youth will fade, but your soul is ageless. It will always know how to play and how to enjoy and how to revel in this one-chance life. May you always defiantly resist the aging of your spirit.

Flawless finish. Your finish has nothing to do with how your face looks today and everything to do with how your life looks on your last day. May your years be a preparation for that day. May you be aged by grace, may you grow in wisdom, and may your love become big enough to embrace all people. May your flawless finish be a peaceful embrace of the end and the unknown that follows, and may it thus be a gift to everyone who cherishes you.

Madelynn & Emily, you both love everything pink and frilly and we will surely understand if someday makeup is important to you. But Mom and I pray three words will remain more important to you—the last three words you say every night, when we ask the question: “Where are you the most beautiful?” Three words so bright no concealer can cover them and even though Mom is not with us right now, we both ask this question after we say our prayers.

Where are you the most beautiful?

On the inside.

From our hearts to yours,

Mom & Dad

Would you like to have a single gender class? why or why not? And what classes do you think would benefit from being separated by gender?

Study Guide for 1st Test which will be no later than Oct. 31st. DO NOT RESPOND!

Study Guide

Sociology

The systematic study of social behavior in human groups.

Examines the influence of social relationships on people’s attitudes and behavior.

Studies how societies are established and change.

Sociological Perspective

Looking beyond commonly held beliefs to the hidden meanings behind human action. A point of view o the way you interpret the meaning of an image or event.

Your perspective comes from your beliefs and values and it influences how you see things (perception)

            Current Perspectives

                        Functionalism - society as an integrated whole

Parts of society (e.g. family, economy, religion) contributes to the whole.

If one part breaks down, the other parts are affected.

Example -  Functionalist may blame an increase in teen crime to a breakdown in the family.

dysfunction is an element or a process of society that may actually disrupt a social system or lead to a decrease in stability.

                        Conflict Perspective - looks at class, race, & gender issues

Conflict, competition, change, & constraint.

Disagreement between different groups in society.

Each want to promote their values & interests.

Struggle - those groups with the power control others

Example - Race & Gender Issues

Symbolic Interaction - examines how group members have shared symbols.

Focuses on the interaction between people.

We learn the meaning of symbols from how we see others reacting to the symbol.

We then base our behavior on the symbols.

We use the meaning of symbols to imagine how others will respond to our behavior.

Example - Burping after a meal is considered rude in the US but in other countries it is a compliment to the cook.

In the US, we stand & face the flag during the national anthem

Sociological Imagination

An awareness of the relationship between an individual and the wider society.

It is the ability to view our own society as an outsider might, rather than from the perspective of our limited experiences and cultural biases.

            Troubles - personal  challenges

            Issues - Larger social challenges

            Social Fact - social processes rooted in society rather than in the individual

Culture

Is the non-biological or social aspects of human life, basically anything that is

learned by humans is part of culture.

Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior.

Culture provides orientation, wards off chaos, and directs behavior toward

certain lines of action and away from others

  

Culture includes

stories, beliefs, media, ideas, works of art, religious practices, fashions, rituals, specialized knowledge, and common sense

Culture also includes, norms, values, beliefs, or expressive symbols

Material Culture - the physical or technological aspects of our daily lives, including:

           

--food              --houses

--factories        --raw materials

Nonmaterial Culture - refers to ways of using material objects as well as to:

--customs             --beliefs                  

--government       --patterns of communication          

--philosophies

  

How does Culture affect ones perspective?

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis claims that when we learn a language, we also learn a framework for understanding and interpreting our social reality and environment.

  

Define

Social values - are our collective conceptions of what is good, desirable, and proper–or bad, undesirable, and improper–in a culture

            Beliefs - are how we think the universe operates

            Norms - are the way people behave in a given society

Norms are established standards of behavior maintained by a society.

Types of Norms

--Formal norms - norms written and recorded from which the behavior of society’s members can be judged

--Informal norms – unwritten norms but still enforced

--Mores - are deeply held, informal norms that are strictly enforced

--Folkways - a traditional or customary norm governing everyday social behaviors

Culture Shock

Is experienced if one feels disoriented, uncertain, out of place, or fearful when immersed in an unfamiliar culture

Cultural Relativism - views people’s behaviors from the perspective of their own culture

Cultural universals

All societies have developed certain common practices and beliefs

Athletic Sports

Cooking

Funeral Ceremonies

Medicine

Sexual Restrictions

Mourning

Sadness

Anger

Sub Culture - is a culture shared and actively participated in by a minority of

people within a broader culture.

Subcultures bring together like-minded individuals who feel neglected by

societal standards and allow them to develop a sense of identity

Counter Culture - is a subculture with the addition that some of its beliefs,

values, or norms challenge or even contradict those of the main culture of

which it is part

Culture Change

Diffusion - The process by which a cultural item spreads from group to group or society to society(exploration, military conquest, missionary work, mass media)

Hockey & baseball, Christianization

Innovation - The process of introducing a new idea or object to culture. may take the form of either discovery or invention

Birth control pill, television

Why Kids Bully: Because They're Popular

By BELINDA LUSCOMBE Tuesday, February 8, 2011


- All Sociology students need to respond to this article!


The text in red below are links to other articles you may want to read before responding

Mean kids, mothers tell their wounded young, behave that way because they have unhappy home lives, or feel inadequate, or don't have enough friends or because they somehow lack empathy. But a new study suggests some mean kids actually behave that way simply because they can.

Contrary to accepted ruffian-scholarship, the more popular a middle- or high-school kid becomes, the more central to the social network of the school, the more aggressive the behavior he or she engages in. At least, that was the case in North Carolina, where students from 19 middle and high schools were studied for 4.5 years by researchers at the University of California-Davis.

Authors Robert Faris and Diane Felmlee interviewed public-school kids seven times over the course of their study, starting when the students were in grades 6, 7 and 8. They asked the students to name their friends and used the data to create friendship maps. They then asked the kids who was unkind to them and whom they picked on, and mapped out the pathways of aggression.

 (More on Time.com: The Tricky Politics of Tween Bullying)

What they found was that only one-third of the students engaged in any bullying at all — physical force, taunts or gossip-spreading — but those who were moving up the school popularity chain bullied more as they went higher. Only when kids reached the very top 2% of the school's social hierarchy or fell into the bottom 2% did their behavior change; these kids were the least aggressive.

"Seemingly normal well-adjusted kids can be aggressive," says Faris, whose results are published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review. "We found that status increases aggression."

While the authors are not ruling out psychological or background influences as underlying causes of the bullying, they believe that popularity is at least as important. "It's one of the few times I can recall in social sciences where race and family background seem to make very little difference," says Faris. "Those demographic and socioeconomic factors don't seem to matter as much as where the kids are in the school hierarchy."

(More on Time.com: A Glimmer of Hope in a Bad-News Survey About Bullying)

Faris also found that the more kids cared about popularity, the more aggressive they were. Ironically, that's pointless; hostile behavior did not cause rises in status. "The evidence suggests that overall aggression does not increase status," he says. Then again, it's not whether it works that's important. It's whether the kids believe it works.

Another stereotype the study jabbed at was that males and females bully differently. Boys spread gossip only marginally less often than girls did. And girls were negligibly less physically violent to each other than boys were. Gender-on-gender bullying was more prevalent among girls than boys, but boys were more likely to be hostile toward girls than the other way around.

Gender wasn't entirely a neutral factor, however. If a girl knew a lot of boys, or a boy knew a lot of girls at a school where there wasn't much intermingling of the sexes, those kids' status would go up, presumably because they provided a bridge to contact with potential dates. And, yep, the "gender-bridge" kids, as the study called them, seemed to be more aggressive than others.

If bullying is actually more of a result of hierarchy than of psychology, Faris believes there might be a more effective solution than trying to change the behavior of the bullies. "The majority of kids who witness this, either give it tacit approval or outright encouragement," says Faris. "Those are the ones who give these kids their status. We need to change their minds."

Find this article at:
http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/08/do-popular-kids-bully-more/

Survival of the Nice Guys

http://www.sociology.org/evolution-21st-century-darwins-theory-penetrates-society/

Prime and Prejudice: Why We Are All a Little Bit Racist

Can culture take the blame?

Published on October 14, 2011 by Paul Verhaeghen, Ph.D. in Mind: The Gap

(Co-written with Shelley Aikman)
Everyone, or so the song goes, it a little bit racist.
    This can be easily verified by giving folks one of those the sneaky tests we psychologists excel at designing. Lexical decision, for instance. Is 'nug' a word? What about 'gun'? How long does it take you to make that decision? Now, let's prime you. Let's precede the word 'gun' by the word 'black'. See, now you're faster: When you think of black, you think of violence. What if we first show you the word 'white'? No speed-up at all. You are now officially racist: Only black makes you think of violent things. 'Woman'-'weak'? Bingo! 'Old'-'forgetful'? Indeed!
    This stereotype priming effect, so many a social psychologist claims, reflects real attitudes in the real individual's head. It is, in a sense, a gut-level reaction, and gut-level reactions, so the reasoning goes, show who you really are.
Is this so?
    One curious finding in the social psychology literature on prejudice is that, tested with these priming measures, the supposedly downtrodden agree to the stereotype with remarkable ease - black men unflinchingly endorse the view that blackness equals violence, women are quick to find women weak, and the one thing older folks happily remember is that they forget.

This finding has always puzzled us. Why would these folks so willingly put themselves down?

Something is afoot here.
    Now, it turns out that if you dig a bit into the literature, you can find quite a few other oddities of priming. Show folks a lion, and they recognize the word ‘stripes' much faster. Weird: Lions don't sport stripes. Lions are, however, associated with stripes through linkages - lions tend to have tigers as zoomates, and share the savannah with zebras. Lion: meet stripes.
    The technical term for this type of association is (semantic) co-occurrence. That which is presented together often will stick in the mind together. (Plus, we humans are natural pattern detection machines. Throw a handful of diamond dust in the sky and we will see constellations. Any basketball fan will tell you the hot hand exists. Any gambler in Vegas knows her lucky streaks.)
    This lion-stripe business: Maybe something similar is going on in this prejudice-priming stuff? In its journey through life, the mind gobbles up all kinds of information about how things hang together; when requested, it spits it all back out, no malice intended. How often don't you hear that blacks are more athletic, that women are caring creatures, or that older folks are wise? (Positive stereotypes, but stereotypes nevertheless.) Hear it often enough and you might start believing it.
    This idea of primed prejudice as semantic co-occurrence struck us as so simple and so utterly plausible that someone else surely must have done that study, we reasoned. Turned out nobody had. There were plenty of musings, but no hard data.
    The study itself (now published in the British Journal of Social Psychology) was trivial to design: What we needed was a set of prime-target pairs that reflect prejudices (like old-wise, black-athletic, woman-caring; old-forgetful, black-violent, woman-weak), the associative value of those pairs, and then we needed a set of non-social pairs that matched those values (something like lion-stripe, or, probably better, lion-mane). In the end, that turned out to be not trivial at all. Mike Jones from Indiana University helped us out by making his database for semantic co-occurrence, BEAGLE, available. (BEAGLE calculates the co-occurrence of words in a database that supposedly encompasses everything the average undergraduate student in the US has read by the time they enter college; it has no fewer than 90,000 lexical entries. Thorough.) When we checked out prime-target pairs, we quickly found out that there are very few associations in American English that top the typical prejudiced pairs (say, black-poor, or black-violent) in associative strength—our very first cue that we were on to something.
    Just to make sure, we replicated our experiment three times, each time with a different group of folks, and each time with a different task—Is the target ('poor' or 'poar') a word? Is the target something good or bad? Do prime and target fit together?
    We found the same result in all three experiments: Folks are faster to answer any of our three questions when the pair of words is more closely related, but the nature of the pair doesn't make the slightest difference (i.e. summer-sun primes just as nicely and just as much as black-poor—these pairs have about equal associative value). And the speed of response to our prejudice pairs did not correlate at all with the standard measures of racism, sexism and ageism our subjects filled out afterward.
    The implication is clear. We may all be racist and sexist and ageist at heart, but this is not our doing—we have merely internalized what we have been hearing and reading and seeing our whole life, that is, we are thirsty sponges, and we pick up the patterns that culture happily spoonfeeds us, and we haplessly store it all in our thirsty memory banks, gladly retrieving the connection and filling in the blanks.
    One conclusion from this study is clear. For most of us, the racist/sexist/ageist inside us may not be a monster of our own making; s/he is not a reflection of who we are, but a reflection of where we've been. Being faster to associate ‘black' with ‘violence' doesn't imply that you are a hardcore racist, it sadly just means you're American.
This conclusion is both reassuring and sad.
    Reassuring, because now we can understand why we are all a little bit racist (and sexist, and ageist). And understanding is half the battle against it.
Sad, of course, because we indeed are all a bit racist (and sexist, and ageist). There is power in knowing, fortunately. Those gut feelings do well up from time to time—you walk through town late at night, a tall black man approaches, you feel like crossing the street, and you realize you wouldn't have this feeling this if the man were white. See these gut reactions for what they are: Responses you've acquired from too much exposure to your culture. What's important is ultimately not what you feel, but how you deal with those responses, how you transcend them to meet your neighbor as a real human being rather than as a member of a category.
    Sad too because it shows how much influence the media might have on our implicit knowledge structure.
    Doubly sad, perhaps, when you consider the state of these media, and how little sense of responsibility there seems to be concerning these issues. (On the contrary, maybe: The more media pundits play into preconceived notions, the larger their audience, the higher their ratings?)
Maybe triply sad because results like these could be easily misused to excuse inexcusable behavior.           The consequences of bias and prejudice and hate are all too real, even if their origin must at least in part lie in the surrounding culture. Society's influence on its individual constituents, however, does not absolve these individuals from their own personal responsibilities.
    Perhaps this, then, is one more reason for joy: Now that we know the Beast is there, and It's not our fault, we can at least look It squarely in the eye, and scare It away, or else tame It.

How consumerism has enslaved us

By Rachel Suet Kay Chan 

It used to be identity was to be found in the way we thought, the groups we were a part of, and the things we held dear. More and more, however, we exist in a monotonic world where our identity is provided by the things we display (cloths, watches, smart phones, stinky chemical scents), our thinking is remarkably conformist and identical, and we all belong to the same social group knowm as “the consumers.” It is a brave new world world where the pain of our shrinking sense of self can, we are told, be easily be mitigated and managed with the appropriate product purchase (booze, antidepressents, social phones) . But in case you haven’t realized, more product purchase doesn’t help. The anxiety and malaise continue to grow.

Slave to fashion

Just take a stroll to the nearest mall (or the nearest upcoming one) on a weekend and what do you see? Hordes of shoppers pushing their way through a gigantic stampede of other shoppers lulled by the power of the brand name and the “discount” price tag. Count yourself lucky if you can complete that shopping trip unmauled by the forces of “nature”. Shades of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Mecca flash before one’s eyes as one struggles to meander the unnavigable terrain of merciless consumers hunting for yet another generic Osim chair or “that new outfit by Forever 21 that I simply must have”.

Brand name consciousness, certainly, is the mantra by which we eat and breathe these days. From designer bottled water to purified mountain air, Nokia, OSIM, Nike, GAP, Levi’s, and its likes make up the Ten Commandments of the materialistic sub-culture we inhabit. One is easily compelled to wonder why of all things does one need to brave the throng yet another Sunday in the “largest shopping mall in (insert continent)” to purchase yet another little black dress and phone accessory to match when others can scant tell the difference whether its really Pucci or Grada or what the Ah Beng in Petaling Street said was ‘in’ this monsoon.

Nevertheless it is an untiring business as thousands of Ah Lians with boyfriends and butt-crack revealing jeans (and boyfriends in their butt-crack revealing jeans) join forces every other weekend to ensure the struggle does not fade from light. From ‘romantic’ strolls in bookstores while snogging each other and glaring at any poor soul who happens to read in their way, to snatching the last fur-coated cropped cardigan from any poor soul who happens to be paying for it in their way, the quest for more material goods continues. And again next week. Like what Arnie in good ol’California would say, “I’ll be back.”

Indeed, yours truly, a former avid shopper and holder of the longest shopping marathon award has now been relegated to a shadow of her former self. One is not ashamed to say that one is now terrified of malls due to the fear of the impending mindlessness and lack of consideration of others from the first step into the shopping sphere. A twilight zone of apathy mixed with feigned blindness engulfs as one takes that hesitant step. It is as though one is cloaked by the hands of evil – the evil of money, surely – as everyone else pretends to see no mercy, hear no mercy, and of course, speak no mercy as they bump you nonchalantly out of the queue you’ve been standing in since an hour ago. (Just try GSC Mid Valley on a school holiday).

You want to say you’re sorry for not letting them jump queue – you poor little kind soul – rare as you are like a gem in the rough. But they give you the eye and you shrink back – only to bump into the bouncer from Hell who is so dedicated to his night job, he lives it out during the day. So you scurry into the only refuge you think still exists – only to see that the toilet is now a war zone – or at least Daniel Craig must have had his first victim up as James Bond in there. And you’re at a total loss.

Don’t blame yourself, folks. Welcome to the realm of mass consumerism and the rebirth of Fordism, camouflaged in brand names. You can have any colour you want, the ads say, as long as its branded. Look at Paris Hilton’s twinkling lips. Of course its just an Ah Lian with blond hair and Japanese contacts in blue taking a puff. But the colour stays, like what they say at Maybelline. Or Revlon. Or any other brand of lip gloss, really. The product doesn’t really matter, it’s the tagline, dah-ling.

The extent of which corporations will go to in order to sell their products can be no less baffling. A number of these unashamedly breach the reins of political correctness, going all out to produce sexist ads. Sex, for them sells, and apparently, sexist-ness does too. Just watch TV for a night. You’ll see that nine (and I may be wrongly optimistic) out of ten ads featuring household products have women starring as doting housewives, inane smiles plastered all over their more-than-willing to play Stepford wife faces as they scrub yet another kitchen tile while the ‘man’ goes out to battle it out in the corporate warrior’s battlefield. When he (in all his glory) returns, he is treated to a spot-free house and dinner, with his wife all the while smiling that inane smile.

Or you get ads featuring some blossoming young girl, books in hand and all, apparently on her way to some educational institution. On the way she meets love. Love, as it is, is a boy riding a bike who crashes into a wall, mesmerized by our heroine’s beauty. Next scene we see her happily scrubbing child-stained walls, still mesmerized husband coming home from work. And its all thanks to some brand of paint. Need love? Desperate to become a housewife? Want a goofy husband who’ll promise you that dream job of wall-scrubbing? Discover paint. Period.

Some ads try to appear a little more “politically correct”. The woman, now, is some corporate warrior herself. She battles it all day at work. Then she comes home to see Mr. Househusband not doing too well in the domestic sphere. She loses temper. After all, which warrior doesn’t scream a battle cry or two occasionally? Husband makes her coffee. Its named after some sort of lighthouse. She wavers. She is drawn to the carrot. Now the man is back, wielding power in his hands. A woman, as it is, has to be tamed. Otherwise she is nothing but a screaming shrew. And the screaming shrew says, “Never mind, darling, you sit down and relax. I’ll do all the work.”

Of course, the most unpretentious ones tell the truth. Or the constructed ‘reality’ as they so often name that new brand of voyeuristic TV shows like The Simple Life. Some girl tries out a new brand of beauty products. Its named after some fabric that resembles satin. By implication the metaphor describes girl as ‘soft’. Of course. Then there’s an old man of a photographer, 90 or so. He is asleep on a chair. Initially sensibly dressed girl is now a sprightly beauty (one that many CCTV cameras would automatically wake up to, if a particular Minister gives the go) and her enthusiasm wakes the sleeping old man up. Old man is stimulated, girl is ecstatic, and they dance the dance of Eros, our old photographer all the while snapping away. Humbert Humbert would feel so betrayed.

It seems true, at times, the joke about TV shows “being those annoying breaks between endless runs of TV commercials”. What with Petronas ads and all. But sadly enough these too often fall into the trap of parochialism and bad taste. But see one, and you see ‘em all. After all, its all about the brands, not the contents, my dear.

Is Shyness an Evolutionary Tactic?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26shyness.html?pagewanted=all?src=tp&_r=0

Parents and Teens Aren’t Embarrassed by the Sex Talk Anymore

http://time.com/3503458/parents-teens-sex-talk-smart-phones-internet/

Perk Up: Facebook and Apple Now Pay for Women to Freeze Eggs

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/perk-facebook-apple-now-pay-women-freeze-eggs-n225011

Questions Rise on Preparations at Hospitals to Deal With Ebola

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/us/questions-rise-on-preparations-at-hospitals-to-deal-with-ebola.html

Web-Era Trade Schools, Feeding a Need for Code

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/us/web-era-trade-schools-feeding-a-need-for-code.html?_r=0

AP: 2,500 teachers punished in 5 years for sexual misconduct

http://www.komonews.com/news/content/10690766.html

Female high school teacher in Austin fired, accused of sexually assaulting student

http://www.startribune.com/local/278398091.html

Are we Raising a Generation of Helpless kids?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/Mickey-goodman/are-we-raising-a-generati_b_1249706.html

Looking Glass Theory

Looking Glass Theory

1. We imagine how we must appear to others.
2. We imagine the judgment of that appearance.
3. We develop our self through the judgments of others.

How do you appear to others?
How are you judge because of that appearance?
How has your idea of self been developed because othe other peoples judgments of you?

Can You Come to Jesus Without Church?

Read the article below by clicking on the link then watch the video.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204468004577169261488307448

Response:

Catholic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dqnfz4y8uA&feature=youtu.be

The Next America

http://www.pewresearch.org/next-america/#Two-Dramas-in-Slow-Motion

How American feel about Religious Groups

http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/

Ebola, a Nurse's Perspective

http://dtolar.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/ebola-a-nurses-perspective/

Are You a Liberal or a Conservative?

http://www.quiznatic.com/are-you-a-liberal-or-a-conservative/index3.html

Supreme Court term starts slow but could 'explode'

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/05/supreme-court-2014-term-history/16768045/