9th Grade - Meeting Mr. or Mrs. Right

I think the most interesting thing about all of the pieces we looked at is how they either scrutinized women as a population or men as a population. There was never a piece that made fun of the idea of a 'Mr. or Mrs. Right'.

In the one-act, the men are extremely degrading to the women. The attorney makes snarky comments about the women, insinuating that he believes them to be silly and only worried about sewing and cooking and other household nuances. In reality, it was the women who solved the mystery to who is the murderer - or for the most part. At the very least, the women came closer to any interesting evidence than the men did. And how did they do it? By simply discussing the situation sympathetically, and thinking about a woman similar to themselves like women do. Another thing I found interesting about this piece is how sympathetic the women were. They wanted to see the best in her. It was almost as if they were fighting for her innocence for the sake of women in general. The constant chastising from the men may have sparked some resilience in the women, and made them want to be sympathetic and hide the canary because maybe they understand on some very small level that she was fed up with her husband and his coldness. She needed some light in her life. The women probably felt similar about the men, and therefore were more sympathetic to her.

In the piece on CNN about the online dating profile, men as a population are chastised. They do say in the video that she did not want to isolate men completely, but one cannot help but make implications based on the fact that hundreds of men messaged the most terrible woman on the planet for a date. Was it because she is hot? Regardless, the men still messaged someone with zero morals. What does the say about these men? Or, maybe in this piece there are more implications about dating in general. Is it so impossible to find a date that men are messaging women at random to try and get one? If so, it is seemingly extremely difficult to find 'Mr. or Mrs. Right' and if students saw something like this, they might be inclined to lower their standards or start dating at a very young age because they are afraid of being alone for the rest of their lives if they ignore some opportunities.

Similarly, the YouTube video "It's Not About the Nail" paints a picture that women are infuriating ad unreasonable about the world and the way they seek sympathy. Viewers would see this and think: if I get married to a women, this will happen to me. She will be unreasonable and illogical, and there will be no getting through to her. It's a common stereotype that women just want to be sympathized with, they don't actually want help. This is a ridiculous notion that all women are like this. While people may feel this way sometimes, no one really wants to go about their life without any solutions and feeling sorry for themselves. When someone is down, they will eventually want it fixed.

So- after seeing that these pieces all isolate and scrutinize one gender, how does this relate to Mr. and Mrs. Right? Are our standards too high? Are we too critical? I would say that the media paints a picture of marriage in a way that isn't always accurate. People joke about their wives or husbands as the "old ball and chain." Why is this? Well, perhaps its the cynics out there that aren't married or who do have a failing marriage that like to make these jokes to make their situation seem better. But in general, I think the message I would want to get across to my students is that people are extremely critical of different gender types, especially when it comes to marriage. I would encourage my students to not feel as though they need to grab on to someone as soon as they can - the media inflates the idea that marriage is impossible. While it isn't easy, I guess I'd want to give them a little hope and not always buy in to the stereotypes of marriage and married men and women they see in popular culture.

10th Grade - Back to the Future

10^th Grade blog – Back to the future

The most common theme I see between the different videos and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is the creator asking questions about our fears, such as: how do our fears affect the way we construct and live in society? I think our fears play a large part in how we live our lives – on some level we are constantly avoiding our fears to make ourselves happy. So, people use their collective fears to construct society in one way or another. 

For example, “Harrison Bergeron” is a perfect example of society using their fears to construct a society in a certain way. The people in Harrison Bergeron’s society had a fear of competition between people, and having inequality in abilities. What they failed to understand, however, is that different people have different positive qualities – and that’s okay. They equalized everyone so no one was exceptionally good at anything. While this made everyone equal, it did not celebrate the different abilities people have. There is a line we must draw with equalizing; it is okay to let people be exceptional at certain fields, because other people are exceptional at other fields. However, inequality becomes a problem when only one or two abilities are celebrated, and other abilities are ignored. I went to a high school where the starting quarterback for the football team was just as cool as the kid who played water polo and had a knack for playing the game Magic. I am extremely grateful for my high school, because I had the privilege to grow up in a community where whatever you did was okay and cool; there wasn’t one or two abilities that were celebrated – each person’s ability was equal in its “coolness.”

The message I would want my students to understand here is that people develop fears and let them govern their lives. And I’m not just talking about being scared of spiders or zombies – but rather broader and more complicated fears like failing or not fitting in. The fear of inequality led Harrison Bergeron’s society into the ground; everyone was so equal there was no celebration of some of the things that make life beautiful – like the arts.

I would transition from Harrison Bergeron to the Dystopian Timeline by discussing this idea that our fears dictate our lives and in a broader sense, our society. I think one of the things that made The Hunger Games so successful, as the Dystopian Timeline discusses, is the fact that this heroine was able to come up from nothing in the worst society imaginable. Suzanne Collins was able to create a dystopian world that would make anyone cringe – I mean, it can’t get much worse than sacrificing kids to slaughter each other while the whole country watches. Then, out of this terrible government and society, comes Katniss, a strong-willed female that people can also relate to because her main goal is to save her family. She’s humble. So – the point here is that the societies in these novels create a world based off our worst fears – sacrifice, harm to children, lack of freedom, etc – and highlight a character that rises above it. I think instead of teaching the Dystopian Timeline I would teach an entire dystopian book, so the students could really analyze the character and see how their actions helped them conquer the fears of their society. 

I would use the zombie videos as further examples of fears dictating society. In a way, Night of the Living Dead highlights the fact that we cannot just ignore our fears and shoot them away. We need to recognize our fears in order to understand what we don’t want our life to entail, but then be able to put them aside enough to not allow the fears to dominate our decisions. The “Why Do We Love Zombies?” video falls perfectly into the subject I am discussing. The creator believes that zombies are reflective of technology, something we are afraid of but not necessarily aware we are afraid of. The same goes for fear of failure or fitting in – we might understand that these are real fears of ours, but it’s hard to see the fears manifest themselves in our everyday life. I would use this video to highlight this fact.

Honestly, I was pretty thrown off by the podcast as I usually am by at least one of the texts. But one of the things I thought of as I was listening to it was that it painted a picture of a kind of creepy and foreign place – Night Vale. Maybe Night Vale could represent one of those societies constructed around fear? I don’t know – it jumped around a lot. Maybe the fear that is manifested in this podcast is a fear of not understanding… knowledge is a very important component to 21^st century US society, and without it I think without our thirst for knowledge our society would kind of break down. The way the podcast jumped around in time and subject may be reflective of us not being able to have a firm grasp on every aspect of the world – there will always be mystery in the world we cannot understand. I think this thought would scare some people, and therefore construct society in a way that tries to eliminate any guesswork or mystery… sort of like 21^st century US society. We try to apply science to almost every situation, when in reality science does not apply everywhere.