NEW HOMEWORK for 2/14/14 meeting of  the Bryn Mawr Book Group

Read to p. 202 of The Glass Castle.
Write 3 pp. describing the kind of education you got outside of school.

This writing assignment steps off from our discussion about how Mom’s philosophy of schooling, in The Glass Castle, is like her philosophy of mothering: in both areas, she thought kids flourished best if they had no rules, no discipline, and lots of freedom….

We want you to think about the relationship between what you learned in school and what you learned outside of it. In giving you this assignment, we’re drawing on a book by Wendy Luttrell called Schoolsmart and Motherwise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling.  It describes the difference between “book learning” and “commonsense knowledge,” and says that  "real intelligence" can be attained outside school, from life experience.

Lesson Plan for Riverside, 2/7/31

I. Sasha:
Welcome! We’ve brought two more students with us…
we want to introduce them. Some of you may be new, too,
and we want to learn your names.

--everyone have a name tag?
--anyone need a copy of The Glass Castle?

Take a moment to find one sentence in The Glass Castle that stood out to you.
Go around, say your name, and read that sentence. Don’t comment on it,

One of my good friends on the rugby team came to Bryn Mawr her freshman year with plans to join the soccer team. On her first day the team seniors talked to the new players and one of the things that they took pride in/ bragged about was how they were the only "straight" team at Bryn Mawr. This made my friend really uncomfortable and she quit the team that week.

I don't know all of the soccer players but I do know that this isn't the first time that I've heard from players on the soccer team that the team has some homophobic people on the team. This summer I worked at Bryn Mawr with a girl on the soccer team and we would occacionally talk about our teams. So one day I brought up the story my friend told me. The girl I worked with admitted that it happened and that she didn't think it was right.

I'm surprised that this is a thing at Bryn Mawr and really want someone to explain this to me because I don't understand how it wasn't addressed.

I’ve never understood the variety of Whites or Caucasian as you may point out. In Malaysia, the media often portrays a single type of White, the privilege one. There’s no such thing as poor whites, Latinos or a Jewish background. As long as you have white skin, you are considered “Guai Loi” which means ghost guy or white person. My experience at Bryn Mawr has taught me otherwise. A lot of my close Jewish friends taught me that Jews have been through a lot to get to where they are now. One of my most memorable lectures that I saw my Jewish friends fall into tears was a speech by Norman Finkelstein’s “How to Resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict”. As a fellow Malaysian who indirectly supports Palestine based it’s cruel history, seeing my Jewish friends blamed for being Jews was quite heartbreaking. I can never understand the true power dynamics that was involve. I find it quite interesting how a significant number of Jewish people I know come from hardworking families but are also blamed for their cruelty towards the Palestinians. I can see some form of grudge sometimes through silence. This will forever remain a sensitive topic at least in my circle of ‘diverse’ friends.

Something that I would like to focus on is Customs week at Bryn Mawr. Last year  I was a customs person at Bryn Mawr and several very distinct conversations about Divertisy arose. The fisrt thing and something that has stuck with me since was a seemingly random questions about what populations were at group. The talk started off with asking about how many students of color attended Bryn Mawr. 60%, 50%, 40% or 20%. As it turned out most people who were people of color guessed lower than the actual percentage and the students who were not people of color guessed a higher percentage of attendence. This contuined until we had a real chance of looking at our preceptions and how they corresponded to our own backgrounds and identites. After about a half hour, they asked how many students who identified as 'full' native american had attended Bryn Mawr in the past five years. There was the option of 100, 20, 10 and 2. Most people guessed around 20... the actual numer was 2. two students in the past 5 years had identified as native american. Now I understand why this is such a low number as there are not large native american populations near or around Bryn Mawr, but this stood out to me. This fact shocked me as I grew up in New Mexico and have grown up with such integrated native american culture into my own, also for the fact that this is a population that contuinelsy is forgotten and overlooked and marginalized by society. I do admire that the customs week brought this up in conversation and was willing to really think about how weak our own diversity really is.

In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that "Fixation on place impedes a truly ecological view," that "we want ecology to be about location, location, location. In particular, location must be local: it must feel like home; we must recognize it and think it in terms of the here and now, not the there and then" [but that] "ecological collectivity decisively can’t be rooted in 'place'....'my place in the sun' marks the beginning of all usurpation. 'Place' contains too much “at-homeness,” too much finality, for the ecological thought. Localism, nationalism, and immersion in the ideological bath of the lifeworld, won’t cut it anymore…We need collectivity, not community….it must be a collectivity of weakness, vulnerability, and incompletion."

What do you think? Post here a paragraph of your initial reactions to Morton’s idea, reflecting, from the p.o.v. of an environmentalist, on your own investments in and search for home. We’ll start class on Wednesday with these thoughts….PLEASE USE THE ECO-LITERACY TAG  "English" on these postings.

Reading through the tasks David assigned for this week, I was intrigued by his mention of alternative measures of welfare, including Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index. My brother-in-law, an environmental consultant in Portland, Oregon, was happy to point out that ideas like this get taken seriously in Oregon (did you know this, Lisa?). Another brother-in-law, a Maine environmentalist, called my attention to two other rankings of national happiness, apparently inspired by Bhutan's index, but using different criteria. The "domains" used in the U.N. study appear to be primarily the conventional economic ones; i.e. rich and ecologically wasteful countries rank high (U.S. 17th behind other developed countries), while the New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index gives more attention to ecology; e.g. how much happiness is currently achieved at the expense of future generations (U.S. ranks 114th; 9 of top 10 are Caribbean basin nations, with Costa Rica #1).

One of my favorite meetings of ASA was when we were helping make posters for the ASA Culture Show. We all wrote quotes on papers referring to something memorable that happened to us or a stereotype that we wanted to disprove. When we were sharing these quotes that we made, someone talked about something that happens a lot. It’s when people ask us “where are you from?”

It's a difficult question to answer, and my answers vary depending on where I am and who I'm talking to. At Bryn Mawr, I always answer this question by saying “I’m from Taiwan,” just because it’s simpler than explaining how I’m American but moved around a lot growing up. But it’s also funny when people say “wait, but you don’t have an accent when you speak English…” 

My friends who is Japanese American grew up her whole life in California. She’s never been doubted for being from California until she came to Bryn Mawr. It’s happened multiple times where people ask her “where are you from?” And once she answers “I’m from SoCal.” They say, “no, where are you really from?” It always frustrates her when people doubt that she’s American, or when the question isn’t clear enough.

Are you asking where I grew up in? Or are you asking what’s my ethnicity? It sometimes feels like being denied of our own identity.

My freshman year at Bryn Mawr, there was a large controversy within the African American and Latino community. Bryn Mawr College decided not to renovate Perry House, which is home to three of the infinity groups on campus. Sisterhood, Mujeres, and BaCaSO decided to form a Perry House coalition and speak out about the issue that deeply affected them, us. We tried to involve the whole community, however there was resistance.

One day, I was in the room with two of my roommates, both were white. They must have forgotten that I was in the room or a part of Sisterhood infinity group, for they spoke about the issue. One roommate said, “So what do you think about the whole Perry House thing?” My other roommate responded by saying, “ well, there isn’t a Turkish house, so why should there be a house for them, they aren’t special.” They both laughed. My other roommate responded saying it didn’t really relate to her so she had no opinion, and when they finally noticed that I was I the room, they said, “but it is sad they are closing it down.” I then laughed, but only because of their facial expressions when they finally noticed me sitting at my desk.