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In our disscusion in class about the defiantion and the changing defination of what it means to be a women's college I came to the realization that I have never thought of what it means to be a women's college.  For me personally I did not apply to Bryn Mawr because of the fact it is a women's college, I applied and chose to attend because Bryn Mawr has one of the top archaeology programs in the country.  So when thinking about coming to Bryn Mawr the fact that is was a women's college didn't really matter to me. I have been meaning to ask in the class: why did you apply to Bryn Mawr and if the main reason for applying is because Bryn Mawr is a Women's college?  

In the class so far one of the things that I’ve been interested in the most is intersectionality.  It seems that for many groups intersectionality is seen as a bad thing. There is pressure to identify with one group. Whether it is religious, able -bodiedness, sexuality, gender or race.  People want to put you into a box so that you are simpler to understand. That identifying as something else as well makes you less of a part of the other group. It makes you choose, which makes it seem like one aspect is more important than the other.  Are you this or that? Most people identify as a variety of things.  Many groups that are inclusive of people frown down on intersectionality. Why would groups that help people find their voice hold back the same people from exploring the different aspects to themselves? Why is there pushback against identifying with several groups? Is it the worry that the group’s ideas and goals will conflict with the other groups?

            I really like the idea of multi-cultural feminism and I think that it a great way to identify because it encompasses many different aspects. It takes into account that there is more to you then one idea and that all these ideas shape your view. I strongly believe that it is important to embrace your points of view together and not separate them because it’s easier.  Even if the groups don’t go together they don’t have to go together. There is no universal rule that your beliefs have to fit perfectly together.

         A few months ago, a new commercial from Cheerios surfaced which surprisingly had a terrible response from many viewers.  The commercial showed a biracial girl asking her white mother if “cheerios really were good for your heart” who later goes on to pour them over her black father.  The cynical comments came from both white and black viewers who were disgusted by the thought of a biracial couple.  One of Zadie Smith’s lead couples in her novel NW is also biracial and faces similar negative reactions.  The overwhelmingly negative feedback from both the commercial and the characters in NW led me to question how accepted it was to be in a biracial and bicultural relationship along with the problems and barriers that stand in between.

A recent report from the Babson Survey Research Group and education company Pearson, reviewed by Faculty focus, found that college faculty member's use of social media has continued to increase in the last year. Their results, which are based on an annual survey of 8,000 teaching faculty, looks at both personal and professional use of social media, and found increases in both areas.

On a personal level, faculty's use of social media is on par with the usage level of the general population, reporting in at slightly about 70 percent. Use of social media in professional context has increased almost 11% from last year, up from 44.7 to 55 percent. These gains also reflect an increasingly diverse use of sites and platforms, fulfilling various personal and professional needs.

Ellen Cohn

Play In The City

10/27/2013

Structured How?

     Zadie Smith, throughout her novel NW, frequently changes her style of writing depending on whose perspective and voice she is speaking through. This is seen many times throughout the book, and is also mentioned by her in an interview with Cressida Leyshon, a writer for The New Yorker. Smith, while writing the novel NW, set up a rule for herself, which she claims structured her writing differently in the various sections. In the interview with Leyshon, she responded to a question about structure by saying that she looked at “how we experience time,” and how it differs depending on whose perspective we look through (Leyshon 1). Smith mentioned Natalie’s chapters, and how they are structured more chronologically because, in Natalie’s mind, “life is a progression toward some ultimate goal…‘success’” (Leyshon 1). The chapters about Natalie seemed to move more linearly, as we followed her to her successful life, and then back through her fall into her old “Keisha” identity. However, did Smith stick with this rule throughout the entire novel?

Since the discussion on Tuesday, when Kevin mentioned how accomodating everyone's needs ended up disasterously for a number of the students, I've been wondering to what extent accomodations should be made and in what order. For example, when he mentioned the lack of deadlines, I thought of an article I'd read some time ago on the Summerhill School. Controversial in its image as a school where lessons were optional, it nonetheless turned out high grades. Because of its loose guidelines, it feels like a complete counterpoint to their results. Of course, it's a school in service for nearly a hundred years rather than a one-off program - but how did they come to perfect it? On the other hand, what accomodations take precedence over others? I had a short-term injury that made it difficult to go to classes, but a friend has deathly allergies that make eating in the dining hall nigh impossible. While this is a very grand-scale example that hardly overlaps (as opposed to learning techniques, like fast-paced and slow-paced classes, visual versus audio learners, et cetera), when you're in a position when accomodating everyone starts to hold people back, how do you decide who to cater to? Does it depend on the severity of the condition, or of the number of people with a similar disability? Does a disability mean a person is fully disabled? How do we decide that, and how do we act upon that?

I found the discussion we had on "queer time" in class interesting because it really brought to mind not only how Western society views the idea of time itself, but how Western society views success and "milestones" in a person's lifetime. Many of these ideas of success and milestones revolve around very traditional concepts, such as the idea that everyone should be married and reproduce at a certain point. The issue with this "normative" time is that it is exclusive of certain people, such as those who choose not get married, or those who cannot reproduce, and so on. That is where the idea of "queer time" might come into use. When I was learning about it, I was pretty confused about how "success" would be measured in queer time. Then I thought "Why does this idea of success have to factor into it? Is life really just a sum of successes and failures?" I may be simplifying it too much, but that's what we're often told life is: success and failure. We're constantly under the pressure to perform in order to succeed, learn from our mistakes the first time, and place value on who we are based on these things. However, if the ideas of success and failure were taken out of the picture entirely, I don't believe I, or many other people, would be productive or want to learn from experience. Both "normative" and "queer" concepts of time have their problems, but it was good to learn about ideas of time outside of what I've always known.

I thought the idea of accountability in the context of queer time was really interesting.  There seemed to be a debate in class about whether or not a person would have to be more or less accountable for themselves if they subscribed to the idea of queer time.  During our small group discussions on Thursday, my group touched on the topic of queer time in an educational space.  It seemed difficult to wrap our minds around the idea of having the personal agency to decide when or if you would attend a class let alone decide when you have completed a course, when you have reached your full potential in a subject.  In Anne Dalke and Clare Mullaney's essay, in the passage that we analyzed in Tuesday's class, the idea of an unconventional "form of education that is less driven by the clock" (11) was presented.  In theory, this all seems like a great idea that would really help a student control the way in which they learn by taking the time to discover what truly interests them in the world of academia.  But this idea makes me start thinking about whether or not there is a certain kind of person that can effectively make use of queer time.  Queer time seems to ask for a certain amount of patience, flexibility and resistance to social constructs all at the same time.  Are we all capable of this mixing these different traits?

For this week’s post, I wanted to comment on our classroom structure reform because I don’t think the 5-second pause worked last Thursday. Topics, ideas, comments were lost amid the silence and confusion. Quickly it became difficult to keep organized who had just spoke and who was waiting to speak. I don't think we should be focused on restraining the oppurtunity to speak. Instead of sitting in shared silence, maybe we could promote more talking for the continually quiet by bringing back the ice-breaker activities we did in the first week of the class. We could use prompts from the weekly readings or from our Sunday Serendip postings and have one-on-one or small groups discussions to start off class. That way people who want to continue talking about a topic from Tuesday’s class have the opportunity to, and people who usually don’t speak during class can raise some questions or comments to someone in the class so at least on a small scale so they can be heard, then after 5-10 minutes, we can start the full-circle discussion and bring some of these smaller discussions to the forefront.  

Zadie Smith’s NW mulls over how our neighborhood, clan, and race affects the path your life takes. None of the main characters are satisfied with how their lives turned out, even if in society’s view, their lives turned out rather well. They all feel various degrees of agency to do something about it. While I was reading the book on the Amtrak back to Bryn Mawr, I started thinking about where their biology fits into their predicaments. By biology, I mean how and why their brains are wired. For example, if Leah is wired to have a deficit of agency, is it still her fault?