The Future of Education

After the recent protests and media up-rise of Governor Scott Walker's abolishment of collective bargaining in Wisconsin, I decided to ask my grandmother, who was a teacher, what she thought about this decision. Though she did disagree with Governor Walker's decision, she did admit that many teachers took advantage of the Union and received more than they gave to the school and to their students. Before I asked her, I had heard about an incident in Rhode Island where all of the teachers of a certain high school were fired. If you want to read further into this, I have posted the link to the article here. After reading this, I started to see what my grandmother was saying. The article states that the firings "came after the district said it failed to reach an agreement with the teachers' union on a plan for the teachers to spend more time with students to improve test scores." With this plan, the teachers were asked to work a longer school day of seven hours, tutor the students weekly for one hour outside school time, have lunch with students more often, meet for 90 minutes a week to discuss education, and set aside two weeks during summer vacation for paid professional development. To me, this conditions seem reasonable, because many of these things are already done at New Trier. Also, with the school's low graduation rates (half the students are failing every subject), one would think that the teachers would want to improve their teaching methods for their students, and give them more motivation. From the information I was given, it really does seem like a change in the union is necessary for the future of education.

How Do People Become Proactive?

Recently in class, we had discussed what needs to be present in order for social issues to be brought into the light in America. Examples of this included Civil Rights for African Americans and Gay Rights. How did these become important issues? What did it take for the victims of these movements to become proactive and fight against the injustice?

My idea on this topic is that the people who fell under the category of African American or Gay had to speak up more in order to create a crusade against the people who victimize them. It has always been said that there is power behind numbers, so when more gay people spoke out, they probably felt more empowered to act against their discrimination. Once blacks were united under the common goal of defeating racism, that's when the proactiveness arose. I think unity of the mistreated people really motivates them to become proactive.

Theatrical Tokenism

A few months ago, I attended a great performance of "A Christmas Carol" in which I remember my grandmother asking me if there were any characters played by people of a race besides Caucasian. When I asked her why she wanted to know, she proceeded to defend her question by explaining that it was not a racist stand point because any race other than Caucasian would not be true to the setting and original portrayal of the story. I kept this in mind when I went to see the cast of Les Miserables in downtown Chicago, and noticed that the lead character, Jean Valjean, was African American. Another principle character, Eponine, was also African American after her parents in the show were Caucasian, and the younger version of herself earlier in the show was also white. I thought about my grandmother's question during and after the show, trying to decide whether or not it was racist.

Sure, it was not typical to portray Jean Valjean or Eponine as African American, considering the show takes place during the 1800's in France. I thought about my past theater experiences, and all of the times I had been told that you have to "look the part." For example, when auditioning for the famous show "Guys and Dolls" I was told that the character Adelaide was traditionally portrayed as a blonde. Is discriminating by means of skin color the same as by means of hair color, body shape, height, or voice range?

At the same time as wondering whether their races were true to the story, I also asked myself whether Jean Valjean and Eponine's race actually took away from the credibility of the show. I tried to create arguments for both sides. On one hand, like I said before, African Americas were not common among the French at the time. But both cast members also had incredible voices and as the show continued, the thoughts of race in my head eventually dropped and I no longer separated the cast members by race on stage.

I also recently put in to question the tokenism that may have been involved in the show. The character of Jean Valjean is a former convict, who changes his identity, as well as his morals, and eventually becomes the mayor of Paris. He is close to a saint with all of the sacrifices he makes for others and his positive moral direction. He is the center of the show, seen as the protagonist, and is a very complicated character. Of course the story of Les Miserables was written many years ago, probably with the assumption that there would be a white Jean Valjean. I have never heard of a Les Miserables with a black Jean Valjean, and in fact, out of all of the professional productions I've ever seen, a black male or female has never been the center character of the show. After studying examples of tokenism in AS for a solid week, my first thought was that the casting directors of the show were trying to use Lawrence Clayton (Valjean) to draw an audience to show how diverse they were, therefore casting an African American Jean Valjean. However, the story is so old that there is little to tamper with when it comes to creating a token character. What do you think?

Black Trash vs. White Trash

The other day in American Studies, we discussed the term "white trash." For those who don't know, "white trash" is a stereotype thrown around to describe a generally vulgar, cigarette-smoking, teenage-mothering, trailer park caucasians with bad teeth. However, the fact that this stereotype only applies to white people may imply that for races like African American, the race in just assumed to be trashy. What do you think?

Race In Classrooms

After discussing racial stereotypes and connotations a lot in our AS class, I got to thinking if are discussions would be as in-depth and interesting if there were actually an African American in our class. Would people hold back more for fear of offending this person? Or would it spark interest in the discussion with a new point of view?
I believe that if there were a Black person in our class room, people would definitely be a lot more cautious of what they say in our class for fear of offending the person. I don't think that what we say in class is offensive or far from the truth at all, but I do think that people would over-think saying things about race in class and not put everything they have to say on the table, which could sway a discussion at least a little bit. What do you think?