What would you do?

AJ asks,

In class the other day we watched a video on the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. This was unlike other videos in which it didn't give most of the praise to Martin Luther King Jr. but intsead to the children of Birmingham. It showed D-Day in which all the students left school and went on a march to the 16th Street Baptist Church. They continued to go back and do civil marches and cause interruption in the white streets. They eventually had dogs and fire hoses sprayed at them yet they continued to go back.

My question to the class is that if you were a black teenager in this time period living in Birmingham, Alabama would you have participated in these stands and marches against the white police? Would you have risked getting kicked out of school, getting in trouble with your parents and going to jail? Would you have been brave enough to stand in there when dogs are being brought in and the hoses are being brought out?

Stuff over break

Couple of things to do over break:
1. Kennedy blog - after doing the "Several Ways to Look at JFK" exercise (based on the book, Forty Ways to Look at JFK by Gretchen Rubin), complete the blog by answering the 2 questions. Due April 27.

2. Read Ch. 1 -5 in The Secret Life of Bees.

3. Extra Credit: Watch The Armenian Genocide, a PBS documentary, on Monday, April 17 at 10 p.m. (and at 3:30 a.m.).
- minimum 1 page summary of the show
- minimum 1 page make connections to Darfur, Night, Rwanda
20 pts. max.

Due April 29.

Men - bashing? Nick doesn't think so.

I’ve been thinking about the whole “how men are portrayed in the media” thing, and I don’t think that men are portrayed as bad as a lot of people think. Even though there is still that “tough guy” image that is seen in almost every movie and on many TV shows, there are plenty of regular men in the media as well. For example, even though real, masculine men aren’t supposed to cook, one of my favorite TV shows is Iron Chef—a show in which top chefs (usually men) duke it out in a kitchen, trying to defeat an Iron Chef. Also, Emeril is pretty popular (although I don’t watch him myself), and isn’t considered to be any less of a man because of his mad cooking skills.

Next, that guy on Extreme Home Makeover cries almost every show but is still respected by many people and is considered more of a man because of the things he does to help people.

There’s lots more examples of these media men who don’t fit the masculine figure that we talked about in class, but I think that there should be more so that the view of men in the media can change and young boys have more to look up to than just tough guys.

Catcher isn't all that

The book, The Catcher in the Rye, to me wasn’t that good of a book. I felt like all Holden did was explain and show how depressed he was. I think the biggest part of his depressed state was not only that Allie died, but so did his childhood. Through out the book you can tell his desperate acts of childhood. But as the book went on in Holden’s life it reveals that he actually started to get better and realized everyone has to grow up. Despite the fact that in the end Holden gets better, the book it self to me was boring. If I wanted to see or hear about depressed people I can just walk around in Groves. So then here are some questions I was wondering.

How did you feel about the book? Good or Bad?

Did you think the book was interesting or boring? Why?