Meta-Post: 2nd Quarter

Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor - I'd like you to grade "Raised Hands of Girls Decreasing Over Time?"

This quarter my blog has developed into pieces of complex writing. I've noticed that in many of my most recent blogs I am analyzing numbers. This doesn't surprise me considering I love math. But what I think makes these posts particularly better than ones in the past is that I write a complete analysis of those numbers. I am not giving the readers a statistic and then immediately asking readers what they think. Instead I answer the question I pose and ask my readers for their opinion. In my blog post "North, South, East, or Race: Teen Pregnancy", I ask the question, "Why do certain regions have higher [teen pregnancy] rates?" and go on to explain that I believe its just purely a cycle. In one of my first quarter posts, "Slavery in Modern Day America", I give a statistic about the number of prostitutes in the US and then immediately after, ended my blog with a question. It didn't leave any opinion for someone to comment on which is something I've tried to work on this quarter.


Something I'd like to work on in the future is making my blogs more controversial so that I won't need to ask so many questions but instead have people comment because my statement compels them to add their opinion. The one post I think I did a good job of this is "Body Scanners: A Breach of our Freedom?". I ended this post saying, "I'd rather go through  body scanner than have a plane blow up." I didn't need to pose a question in order to receive responses. I got 2 comments. I am going to try and do this in more and more of my posts in the future. 


Even though I am disappointed in the number of posts I wrote this quarter (I wish I would've done more than 1 per week), I must say that I am proud in the fact that most of my posts are well thought out and even encroach on the side of being too long. One of my more recent posts, "CEO", is lengthy but at the same time I do not feel as if I ramble on and on. First I give statistics about what I'm going to be discussing, next I set up the problem that I'm going to be analyzing, then I give my analysis and back it up with evidence. I feel like this is a dramatic improvement from my "Life Graphs" post from the beginning of the year where all I did is describe what we are talking about in class and posed a question. 


Blogging has definitely forced me to explore the issues in the news and I am glad that we get the chance to connect school with the world around us. I am looking forward to writing more blogs!

Raised hands of girls decreasing over time?

Continuing the topic of girls in present day society, I've come across an interesting question about myself: why don't I raise my hand as much any more? When I was in elementary and middle school, if I knew the answer to a question my teacher asked (which, trying not to sound egotistical, was quite often), you could be sure that my hand would shoot straight up at an alarming speed. Remembering my former years in school, my "childhood", I feel strange thinking about how much I loved to raise my hand. I was never aware nor did I care about what other people thought. And come to think about it, I'd like to say that more of girls raised their hands more often too. But why then and not now?

I can think of two specific instances where girls dumb down in the oh so popular movie Mean Girls and Disney's popular High School Musical (one of my favorite of all time no doubt). "Mean Girls" portrays an intelligent and also beautiful high school girl wanting a relationship and this relationship is with one of the popular jocks. In pursuing the relationship, she deliberately fails math tests so she can get him to tutor her. The other instance in "High School Musical" is when Gabriella, arguable one of the smartest girls at the school, covers up her intelligence to win over Troy.

In this book online (you'll have to log into your school account to see it, sorry), the author compares girls in mixed gender classes compared to all female classes. It states that women in womens colleges have "greater self esteem at graduation, have less gender-stereotypic career aspirations, are more engaged in college activities, and are more likely to enter traditionally male professions." This doesn't surprise me. In an atmosphere where girls do not feel the need to dumb down they could reach their full potential at school. This book suggests that boys are the cause of girls dumbing down and I also believe that to be the cause. Teenage girls are usually very self conscious in general so it makes sense that they would hold themselves back seeing that many girls might feel that if they show how smart they are, a guy won't like them. This article quotes a book saying, "Girls in grades six and seven rate being popular and well-liked as more important than being perceived as competent or independent." (Bailey). If this is true, which I believe it is, then girls are dumbing down thinking that guys will like them, so that they can then be "popular and well-liked". Its sad that the reason for this is boys, especially when women are making so much progress in today's society.
But maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?

(To all the guys: please don't hesitate to respond. I'd like to know what you think.)


Reference:
Bailey, S. How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report. New York, NY: Marlowe & Company.

CEO

In As this week Mr. O'Connor told us about an award winning magazine piece that was about women in today's society. It was called The End of Men. This very "feminist" article gave many interesting points about how women are essentually excelling in the jobs force much more then men. The author, Hanna Rosin, writes, "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast." Another interesting fact, "Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation." The statistics that women are climbing the job latter are staggering. I am so glad to be living in a society where men do not take up the large majority of the workforce as they have in decades past. But one thing is still grossly unequal: women in high powered positions.

The End of Men article states that only 3% of CEO's of Fortune 500 companies are women and the number has never risen much above that and how " Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities". How could this be? If the number of women in the workforce is mostly equal/more than that of men, why are such a small percentage in high powered positions?

Personally I attribute this to the difference in what men and women are willing to give up. What I mean is that I feel like more women do not want to give up having/being with their family. Being a CEO of a major company is a 24 hour job for sure. When it's a painful choice between the client crisis and your child's birthday party, I feel like the employee most likely to put company over family is the traditional, work-oriented male. Now this definitely does not apply for all men. I also feel like more women want the ability to have a career and still have a family and would rather not push to move up in the corporate world if it meant less time with their family.

Marta Cabrera, the former vice president of JP Morgan Chase, was working 12 hour days and one day had the realization that she was missing out on her childrens' lives and quit. She said, "There's a different quality of what men give up versus what women give up" when they attempt to reconcile the demands of a senior job with those of family responsibilities.

But who knows? Maybe women have just not climbed the CEO latter yet.

Art Therapy

In AS, when we were watching the movie The Cats of Mirikitani, it was interesting to me that Jimmy Mirikitani, the main character, repeatedly drew pictures of the Tule Lake internment camp where he spent 3.5 years of his life. Why would he want to paint a memory that was so painful for him, over and over and over again?

Later I realized, it was his form of therapy. A few years ago in Wilmette there was a walk called the Kirathon. It was in dedication of Kira Arney, who would be a senior this year, who died of a malignant brain tumor. It raised funds for art therapy at Children's Memorial Hospital. (Read more about it here). Art therapy for cancer patients has been proven to help the quality of life and reduce the pain and anxiety in cancer patients. In this article, a doctor is quoted as saying, "Art therapy provides a distraction that allows patients to focus on something positive instead of their health for a time, and it also gives patients something they can control." Now I don't mean to say that Jimmy Mirikitani is like a cancer patient or vice versa but his art may act in the same way for him as it does to a cancer patients. Drawing the camps also might relieve his pain because he knows that he survived it and that his life has moved on.