TOW #19 IRB Post

Reading goal: read for the overall purpose
Writing goal: effectively analyze examples to show how they help the author achieve his/her purpose

     Race and family heritage play a substantial role in the formation of self-identity as it affects how we see ourselves as well as how others see us. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama examines how this issue developed in his own life. The first four chapters of this book, part of the first section titled Origins, detail the beginning of Barack Obama's life and a little of his family history. He first goes back to his Kansan grandparents experiences and the life of his mother's family. Then he describes how his mother, whose family had finally settled down in Hawaii, fell in love with and married a Kenyan student, his father. Throughout the course of Barack Obama's childhood his father left, his mother remarried and moved them to Indonesia, and eventually he came back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and go to school. In these chapters, Obama develops portraits of family members, uses a lot of personal anecdotes (as it is a memoir), and compares his experience as a young black man with his friend's to explore the family and personal history that shaped his struggles with his own racial identity.
     Obama talks a lot about his grandparents who helped to raise him. He gives a lot of background on his grandfather to show the kind of person that raised him. For example, he writes "...my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar... he had come to consider himself as something of a freethinker - bohemian, even," (Obama 1). The description presents Obama's grandfather as someone always searching for the new, with typical American ideals such as individualism and freedom, but also someone who thought his own thoughts and lived his own way. This portrait helps Obama to show that he grew up in an open minded family that accepted people despite racial differences in ways others at the time didn't, but at the same time was raised by people who had a different perceived status in the contemporary American society because of the color of their skin.
     As this is a memoir, Obama mostly uses anecdotes to portray his ideas. Some describe his experiences at the almost all-white private school he attended in Hawaii, including his first day when his teacher asked him about his Kenyan father. Obama describes how the other kids asked him questions and how he felt isolated at school. These anecdotes showed how as a young kid Obama was singled out as different as a black boy in a world of white children.
     And yet, Obama also felt out of place among his black friends. He writes "Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this, or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother's smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false," (Obama 81) and later "I was different, after all, potentially suspect; I had no idea who my own self was," (Obama 82). Obama contrasts his experiences with his friend Ray's, who seems to have solidified his identity as a black man in a white man's world. Obama, as the son of a white mother and grandson of white grandparents, did not have the same security of identity as his friend, which complicated his issues.
    Obama has so far effectively weaved all these elements together to create a compelling and engaging memoir which helps the reader to think about the way race affects our personal and public identities.

TOW #18 "Can a Woman Be a 'Great American Novelist'?"

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/09/can_a_woman_be_a_great_american_novelist.html

This is an article from the online magazine Slate by Meghan O'Rourke. Published in 2010, the article explores an issue that has been and continues to be a troubling one in our society: the literary gender gap. The article begins by referencing a cultural debate that had sprung up at the time, centering around the novel Freedom, which had been recently released at the time, and its author Johnathan Franzen. O'Rourke then poses the question of whether the book would have received the same praise and attention had it been written by a female, and arguably, she writes, it would not. The article then goes on to describe how gender bias affects who we tend to attribute merit to. O'Rourke effectively uses the contemporary example to start the discussion, and then incorporates other examples of female and male authors and how their work is received. She also includes several anecdotes to show how gender bias is present in how women are viewed and treated in the literary world. For example, O'Rourke writes "to sit with female writers... is, inevitably, to trade war stories...There's the author who sent out a proposal about John Lennon and learned that editors worried readers might not believe a woman could write with authority about a musician" (O'Rourke 2). These personal and all-to-real stories demonstrate how ensconced bias is in our society and how it influences the way editors and publishers, the media, and the general public view female writers. O'Rourke also connects the issues she explores in this article to how the implementation of blind auditions improved the representation of female musicians in orchestras. This was something I found very interesting, as it was an issue described in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink which I read as my IRB last semester (http://rebekahapengblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/tow-14-irb-post.html). As O'Rourke shows, we tend to think highly of a man's ability quicker than we are of a woman's, whether it be in writing or in music or some other area entirely, and I already know from Gladwell that it is because our unconscious thinking can easily be influenced by prejudice and stereotypes. Ultimately, O'Rourke points out how gender bias is active in the way we view and treat books and their authors. Though not trumpeting a call to action, O'Rourke does imply that we should be aware of this and work on counteracting it.

IRB Intro Post: Third Marking Period

For the third marking period I have chosen to read Barack Obama's memoir Dreams From my Father  for my IRB. Though Obama is obviously well known as the current president of the US, he wrote this book before he was even elected senator. According to the book flap, Dreams From my Father is "the story of Obama's struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and a white American mother." My parents happen to own this book and I have been meaning to read it, so I thought I would take the opportunity to do so with the new marking period. President Obama is arguably the single most important person in American society today and I am interested to read the story of his personal journey before he rose onto the US political scene. Dreams From my Father has been highly praised and I am looking forward to reading it.

TOW #17 "This Is Irrefutable Evidence Of The Value Of A Humanities Education"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/the-unusual-college-major_n_4654757.html

In our society today, higher education in the humanities is often looked down upon in favor of areas such as law, business, medicine, engineering etc. These are considered successful career areas because they are money-makers, while an education in the humanities is associated with unemployment and lack of income. This article from the Huffington Post by Carolyn Gregoire challenges these stereotypes by demonstrating how education in the humanities is important and leads to success. First, the author points out that future income is not necessarily the best way to determine what is a good major, and that it is more important for students to study what they love as they will be more likely to work to success in that area. Then Gregoire spends the rest of the article supporting her argument with 10 examples of well-known figures who were humanities majors in college and who have since been very successful. Some of the people she cites include 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (English major), former CEO of HP Carly Fiorina (Medieval History and Philosophy major), famed author J.K.Rowling (French and Classics major), director Steven Spielberg (English major), and host of "The Daily Show" Jon Stewart (Psychology major). For each example, Gregoire included a picture of the person and a brief education and career history. Some of the people ended up in successful careers very different from what they actually studied in college. As Gregoire shows, the background education in an area of humanities gives students and wider experience base to build on later in life, one that can be applicable to many different areas. Philosophy major and co-founder of Flickr Steward Butterfield, another featured person, is quoted as saying "'...if you have a good background in what it is to be human, an understanding of life, culture and society, it gives you a good perspective on starting a business, instead of an education purely in business,'" (Gregoire par. 24). This quote helps to demonstrate how an education in the humanities can be important and useful no matter what career a student may end up in, while other career specific skills can be picked up in later training. Gregoire uses these ten people as living and, as the title says, "irrefutable" evidence that a humanities education is important to the future success of a student.

TOW #16 "A Time to Break Silence"

Today being Martin Luther King Day I decided to read one of his speeches. The "I have a dream" speech immediately comes to mind at the thought of Dr. King, but I wanted to read one of his less famous speeches, so I chose an excerpt from "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". In this speech, Dr. King protests the war in Vietnam and calls on the government and people of the United States to bring an end to it. He begins by explaining why he protests the war. Among his reasons he lists that the expense of the war is detrimental to the attempts to help the poor in the United States, that it forces the poor to fight in Vietnam for rights or privileges that they don't have at home, and above all that the fighting is not on behalf of the Vietnamese people and it is destroying their society. After enumerating the crimes of the war, Dr. King calls on the US government to put an end to the war. He lists five steps to achieving this goal, to show that it can and must be done. He also appeals to the American people and asks them to peacefully protest to pressure the government to end the war. Throughout the speech, Dr. King uses many rhetorical questions. For example, he asks "What do they [the Vietnamese people] think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?" (King par. 19). These questions serve to drive home the points to the audience, to get them to seriously consider the US actions in Vietnam and what should be done about them. They also question the motives and morality of the US government, and call for change. Ultimately, they help Dr. King connect to the thoughts of the audience and to call them to help bring an end to the war.

Here is where I found the excerpt of the speech: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

TOW #15 "The Book of the Future" Visual

This is a comic by cartoonist Grant Snider depicting the rise of the book of the future: really the regular paper books that we already have. In the nine panels Snider describes how e-readers would, in a futuristic society, inspire the need to revert back to normal books. It makes an ironic statement by parodying the modern excitement of the e-reader. Though most people still read regular books, the e-reader fits into our generation of excessive technology. At this time we are continuing to develop technology, but the cartoon describes how we will be unsatisfied by that technology and and will "create" a new one in going back to our old "device". It parodies the promotion of a new technology by exemplifying the issues of an e-reader, including ones about which people regularly complain. It proposes a solution to that problem by presenting the book of the future, which is really the book of the past. This irony continues to be played out through the cartoon by noting how the book solves the problems of the e-reader in ways that we have already used and taken for granted. Overall, the cartoon amusingly achieves its purpose by reminding people that we already have what we need with our old "technology". Though in the last panel, the cartoon concedes that e-readers are more convenient for travel (especially by jet-pack, in the potential future) it ultimately reminds the audience that while e-readers are useful and good for somethings, in our excitement over them and need for technology, we should not forget the merits of a good, old-fashioned book..

TOW #14 IRB Post

In the second half of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell continues to explore how the brain's unconscious thinking works, as well as the power and implications of this kind of thinking. Though the unconscious has the ability to pick up on details and rapidly make accurate assessments, there are times when it can be wrong. Gladwell explains how one can become "mind blind" when one's thinking narrows during high stress situations, or how judgement can be influenced by stereotypes and prejudices unconsciously. Again, Gladwell uses anecdotes from real events and evidence from studies to convincingly support his ideas. Each chapter in the book is organized around one main story that deals with an aspect or idea of unconscious thinking, and then throughout the chapter it is analyzed with support from other anecdotes, events, or research. For example, in the chapter "Seven Seconds in the Bronx", Gladwell tells the story of a police shooting in New York City in 1999, in which a young man was killed by the police because they thought he was acting suspiciously and they thought he had a gun. In the chapter, Gladwell goes into depth on the story, then cites cases of other police brutality stories and introduces the idea of mind-blindness. Ultimately, he analyzes the anecdote to show how our unconscious can drastically mislead us in fast moving situations of overwhelming stress, and how we need to understand this and be able to control it. In the conclusion of the book, Gladwell writes about a female trombonist who made it into the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in a blind audition, but was demoted and discriminated against when it was discovered that she was female. With this story he explores the issue of the lack of women in professional orchestras before the blind audition process was established. When the judges could see the performers, their opinions were unconsciously influenced by the gender of the performer, as well as their posture and demeanor, and their instrument, thus letting their personal prejudices affect their decisions. The important part of this story, Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes, is that the problem was fixed by the implementation of blind auditions. This story at the end of the book, ultimately reinforces Gladwell's purpose: to make the audience aware of how their unconscious thinking works so that they can understand it and train it to use it better. He gets his message across strongly and effectively because his evidence and research and his analysis of these shows the reader the ideas and how they are influential in real life.