Sasha De La Cruz's blog

As I'm reading pages 26-27 in Brothers and Keepers, I could not help it but to pause and write. The part where he begins by writing, "The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us" (26). This line really struck me. Although I am still trying to tie this theme/topic to silence, I'd like to reflect a bit on what he continues to say as he writes. 

Saturday was a very long exhausting day for me. I loved the mural tour; even though I found myself paying more attention to the people I saw rather than the murals itself. My favorite part of the day though, was the Eastern State Pen tour. As the tour continued I kept getting more and more frustrated, not with the tour, not with the tour guide – but with society. Walking around hearing the stories reminded me of how someway somehow society finds a way to turn good into bad.

I kept imagining these prisoners in those cells and kept connecting it to modern day incarceration and how inhumane it has become. The numbers of incarcerated people still shocks me no matter how many times I hear them. It also made me think about how prisoners first started being all White, and then there was a complete 180-degree turn that flipped the population in prisons from White to those of color. It makes me wonder if there will ever be a way of stopping this without giving birth to another type of modern day slavery.

As I re-read the prompt for this paper (which was about a thousand times), I still have trouble understanding it and even coming up with an answer. Ever since we started class, I have been having trouble visualizing silence. I understand it to be the inability to speak/express yourself, either because you do not want to or because someone/something won’t let you. I read almost all the papers that are already posted to see if I can get an idea of what to write about, or what the question is asking. After reading the papers, I still do not have an answer, which (with a little help from Sarah) led me to conclude that the openness/vagueness of the question is silencing me.

 I guess I can relate this predicament to my academic life here at Bryn Mawr. A lot of the times, if not all the time, when there is an assignment, it takes me a while to completely comprehend what is being asked. This makes me think of our last class when we spoke about the different levels of comprehension and “education” in all of my classes. If there were a time where I am silenced in a classroom, it would definitely be when I am being asked to reason or think about something that is fairly foreign to me.

While reading The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children, there was not a time where I did not find myself connecting to the concept she writes about.

I first began connecting with her text when she speaks of the difference between students of color and the white students in a classroom. Although it made me uncomfortable at times, specifically when she spoke about the difference between Black and White mothers (although I find it to be true), I loved the way she explained the standards needed to be met for the teacher to have authority between these groups. I loved it because I can completely see this taking place in my high school. I use teacher subs for example; there was not a student in my school that gave them authority. The subs simply sat there and took attendance – but that was is. I spoke to a friend of mine that attended a suburban school; she said that in her school this was nowhere near to be the case.

After reading "Prisoners of a hard life" I felt very uncomfortable for a very long period of time. Although I knew, or have heard of, many of these statistics it is still an issue that makes me extremely uncomfortable and unhappy. All of the stories of these incarcerated women include some type of abuse or neglect, even though I'm pretty sure there are some stories of women committing crimes without having such abusive background history. That is to show that there is more than just the crime; that something has happened to these women that made then make the decisions they did. A lot of them didn't even seem to have a choice. I noticed that in a couple of these narratives, there has been some type of systematic "aid" that instead of helping, they caused more damage - foster care for example.

As I mentioned in class, I believe that prisons and jails are simply a method of immediate response, an unfair one. I attended a workshop during the summer where we spoke a lot about these immediate response methods. The analysis they gave us about these immediate response: there is a river. You see a baby in it; you pick it up and hand it over to someone to take care of it. Then there is another baby, you also pick that baby up and hand it over to someone else to take care of it. Then there is another baby, etc. You take in all these babies and hand them over to someone to take care of them, but when do you stop to think about: Where in the world are these babies coming from to being with?!

In "What Is The 'Dialogical Method' of Teaching?", a lot fo interesting reasons for dialogical education being a good teaching style, most of which I agree with. But I really wanted to focus my post on specific lines and parts of the text. First I wanted to focus on Isa's point of "if public resources were transferred from the military to education to fund smaller classesm, that would make dialogue easier to have in school" (98). I am not sure if the  way I interpreted this line is the message Ira was trying to convey, but I completely agree with the fact that less money should be going to the military and more should be put in schools. As I mentioned in my earlier posts for Anne's class, a lot of public schools are extremely underfunded and are then expected to perform as well as any other elite school. Making it personal, my high school was one of the schools that was used as an "experiment" to prove that smaller schools will be more beneficial for students. The fact that my school was smaller did help A LOT with the learning experience, only problem was that my school was still underfunded which meant we did not have the adequate materials and resources we needed to excel - leading to the closing down of my school. If some of the funding for the military went into the education system, I believe there would be a huge improvement in schools.

Hey everyone!

For some random reason I was reading this commencement speech and I couldn't help it but to share. It may have NOTHING to do with our classes, but I really enjoyed reading. Reading is not really my thing, so that I found this interesting and worth sharing is a miracle :) Just a little glimpse of it, he talks about societies "natural default" of self-centeredness and how Liberal Arts College help unravel that. 

I know we have a ton of readings to do for other classes, so only read if you can - no obligation :)

If you want to read clock here. 

I decided to write about the first situation that came to mind when the prompt was given to us. During my senior year of high school, the superintendent, Dr. Carol R. Johnson, and the rest of the Boston Public School (BPS) committee “proposed” that the best way to deal with “underperforming schools” was to simply close them down; my high school being one of the seventeen on their list. Their reasoning behind this decision or proposal was based on our MCAS scores (Massachusetts standardized tests). The main problem (and reason why I put the phrase underperforming schools in quotations) with their reasoning was that not only were the scores of a lot of these schools increasing every year, but that most, if not all, of these schools on the list were lacking the resources to even prepare their students for these tests. A lot of these schools were overpopulated and economically struggling.

Something I found very interesting as I read Fire in the Mirror was the section where Smith asks, “To what extent do people who come to America have to give up something about their own identity to confirm to an idea of what an American is?” When I read this line it made me think of the idea that America, or as I like to clarify, the United States is a melting pot. A lot of people like to take this adjective as a good thing, where I on the other hand think of it as being something negative.

When you are melting things in a pot, you lose the taste of the individual ingredients. Same as United States, when people come from their countries to the United States, to a certain extend they automatically lose a bit of their culture. Small ways that begin depriving someone from their culture can be as small as by automatically having to start learning English, or not being able to run to any market and getting the ingredients they need to make the food they made back home. What I liked about Cliff’s piece is that she brought some of these issues to light, specifically in language.