Response Blog FEBRUARY 1st

Right now my major is undecided, but since I have an elementary education minor, my major has to be declared in the college of Arts and Sciences. I am very interested in Sociology, but I also like Communications. Unfortunately, Communications is not in the College of Arts and Sciences. When I read “Sexism in English: A 1990s Update,” I was extremely excited because it opened my mind to the idea of linguist Sociology, or better, linguistic evidence of sociological observations. That, to me, is a slight mixture of the two subjects I am interested in, so it therefore brought me hope. I like to consider myself pretty observant, maybe about unimportant things, but I do find studying people interesting. The way we Communicate interests me, but I never realized the connotations my language in particular often suggests. I do normally put a masculine form of a word before an feminine, but I have never seen a problem with that. King and Queen, boys and girls just comes naturally to me.
In class, when we discussed “Put Down That Paper and Talk to Me!”, we got on the subject of equality, particularly the equality between today’s men and women. In the last paragraph, Tannen says that “Being admitted to a dance does not ensure the participation of someone who has learned to dance to a different rhythm”. I totally agree. We fight for equality, but we don’t often realize that there are differences, so a man’s equality and a woman’s equality often encompass different things. An example that is slightly off, but still proves my point is an episode I remember of Good Times. The black kids were allowed to take the same standardized tests in the same setting as the white kids, and though the black kids were no more or less smart, their test scores were low. This was due to a language barrier. The children could do math, but the question went something to the effect of ….If there were 4 kids and 3 went into the dining room and 1 stayed in the living room, how many kids were in the living room? The math was simple, but no black kid at that time in that community lived in a house and none had heard of a living room or a dinning room. They were not stupid, but they simply had not been introduced to that type of living. It was not an equal opportunity test. That also reminds me of the movie that we have to have watched by Monday. The black kids thrown into a sea of white kids for equality were not equal in learning. The same goes for men and women. Just because a man can do something doesn’t mean a woman should. This is true for lifting extremely heavy objects; there are women who are body builders who can do it, but our bodies are made differently than men. When the women mentioned in Nilsen’s article cut off their breasts to shoot their arrows better, it proved that having breasts made archery slightly more difficult for women. Certain things should be considered when determining equality.