Culture Differences

This week in class we talked about cultures, and about how people who are not exposed to different cultures will find it very surprising how different we are from everyone else. We learned about a Danish mother who left her child outside of a restaurant in New York, and as a class we all shocked and right away judged the woman for being "stupid," when really, she thought the Americans were stupid for bringing their babies into closed places that are not as healthy for the child as being outside. Both the Americans and the Danish woman, in this case, experienced ethnocentrism, which means they were harshly judging the other simply because it  was not what they were used to. My dad was telling me about when he went to Japan a couple of years ago, and he was in major culture shock for the first few days he was there because of how everything that seems like a normal, or every-day thing for them, is "weird" or "out of the ordinary" in the United States.

Social Construction of Reality- A Bronx Tale

In Calogero's neighborhood, just like in many other neighborhoods, there are a lot of "unwritten rules," and things you are expected to do and to believe. People of a certain race or nationality are expected to only hang around other people that are a part of the same nationality. For example, C was criticized for hanging out with Jane by everyone who was close to him just because she was African American. This construction came about because as people grow together, especially when their ancestors grew up together, they sort of learn to accept that you should only be around people who are similar to you and you learn to believe that anyone who is different should not be accepted. I definitely think that things like that have gotten better since the 50's, which is when this movie takes place, but still if you look around the hallways of Stevenson, you would notice that many people of a particular race, tend to linger around with others who are the same. I understand that people still grow up learning that people of the same background as you will understand you better, or are more likely to get along with you, but I do not agree with that. I choose the people that I hang out with based on their personalities and attitudes, and not their background.

Abandon Ship

Yesterday in sociology we did an activity called "Abandon Ship," and it was basically that 16 students got different characters that they had to be, and we were all stuck on a life-boat, but only 9 could stay on because it was too small. together, we had to choose who the 7 characters who would be thrown overboard were. The characters were a sailor, the ship's officer, a quarter master who had two broken hands, a self-made millionaire who was over weight, a college student with epilepsy, a nobel prize winner in literature, a nobel prize winner in physics, an ex-football player and his wife the pregnant cheerleader, an army captain with a prosthetic leg, a draft evader aka drug dealer, a peace corp volunteer, a med student, an elderly couple, and a traveling poet. After a little bit of all of us being on the "boat" we had to choose who was going to get thrown off. We figured that because they were getting life vests, the stronger people would survive on their own so we threw off the healthy, strong people, and kept the sick, old, or pregnant people along with the med student, the peace corp volunteer, and the physics prize winner. Today, after a discussion in class, we realized that we were actually the first class to operate that way. Sal said that most classes in the past, unlike us, threw off the unhealthy and the old people, figuring that they were going to die anyway. I found it interesting when looking at statistics from past classes that the Nobel Prize winner in physics, and the med student were never thrown off the boat. We were talking about why this might have happened, and came to a conclusion that sociologically, most people value usefulness and practicality, so therefore they kept the med student, who would be able to help others, and the physics winner, who could make a difference in the world and invent something important.

Freak and Geeks... How Others Affect Us

The past couple of days in sociology class we have been watching an episode from the TV show, Freaks And Geeks. It is about a group of high schoolers who are a part of different social groups and go through a bunch of different events having to deal with people from other groups who do not get along with them. This relates to sociology because the students are affected by the people who surround them. One of the girls, Lindsay, is surrounded by a few different social groups that affect her sociological behavior. Around her group of "burnout" friends, she tries to act very cool and careless, but when she is around her brother she acts tough and protective. Around her parents and authority she wants to seem like she is a good kid, and she ignores her best friend Millie because she is considered to be a "nerd". All these different groups expect different things from her, so therefore, all of them shape who she really is. This relates to my life because I know a lot of people, myself included, that act differently around different people. I highly doubt anyone acts the same around their parents and their teachers as they do around their best friends. This just shows how much our environment really affects who we are.