In “Race by the Numbers,” Orlando Patterson supports his claim with statistics, history and political analysis. All these three evidences are persuasive and give him a high level of credibility but I think it also depends on the audience that reads him. Statistics are more credited to those who follow their lives and beliefs by numbers and rates, but sometimes mathematics is almost helpless when the information collected from surveys or the census, in this case, is misused or the facts are not straight enough. History is a very accurate source of evidence. It is limited and has no changes. It is objective in a sense that it can’t be based on personal interpretations or assumptions; it’s just what literally happened in the past. The political analysis is probably the most likely to be challenged because it consists of a series of personal subjective conclusions. It’s based on people’s beliefs and self-experience not on written texts impossible to be changed. This kind of support that Patterson uses can also become biased and fall on persuasive fallacies because it uses a lot of self opinion and sometimes prejudiced language.
Eric Zorn states in his article “Family a Symbol of Love and Life, but Not Politics” that we need to take family back. What this means is to stop looking at the family structure as monopolizing viewpoints have come to define it and pretend to have everybody believing in one specific conservative form of family. The word “family” has a special resonance in all of us and to have family and represent family for others is what being wholly human is. No matter what kind of situation a person is in, if it’s a single-parent household, an homosexual relationship with adopted children, grandparents raising grandsons as their own children, heterosexual couples with natural biological families, older siblings helping the young ones to succeed and providing for them, etc, family is always something subjective. People need to take back the meaning of family, what they individually think it is, or how they personally want to define it.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Pre-reading Blog #3
Eric Zorn was born on January 6, 1958. Zorn is a 1980 graduate of the University of Michigan, where he was an arts section editor at the Michigan Daily and an imaginative writing/English literature major. After he served an internship at the Miami Herald for four months, he came to work at the Chicago Tribune from 1980 forward. After five years as a feature writer and TV/radio columnist in the Tempo section of the paper, he went to the metropolitan news staff, where in 1986, he became a news-feature columnist.
His column, Hometowns, developed gradually into his eponymous news commentary column. It moved from Metro to Commentary in July, 2009, and now runs Tuesdays and Thursdays on the front of the metropolitan section and in the Sunday Perspective package. In August of 2003, he started the Tribune's first Web log, which appears five days a week at chicagotribune.com. In July, 2006, highlights of that web log began appearing in the Sunday print editions of the paper.
He is a co-author of the 1990 book, Murder of Innocence, a study of the life and tragic disruption of Winnetka schoolhouse killer Laurie Dann.
Zorn and Mary Schmich, who is a fellow Chicago Tribune metro columnist, occasionally write a week of columns that consist of a back-and-forth exchange of letters. An apprentice folk musician, each December Zorn joins with Schmich to host "Songs of Good Cheer," holiday parties at the Old Town School of Folk Music to raise money for the Tribune Holiday Fund charities.
Sources:
http://wikipedia.org
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/about.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-ericzorn,0,3641457,bio.columnist
His column, Hometowns, developed gradually into his eponymous news commentary column. It moved from Metro to Commentary in July, 2009, and now runs Tuesdays and Thursdays on the front of the metropolitan section and in the Sunday Perspective package. In August of 2003, he started the Tribune's first Web log, which appears five days a week at chicagotribune.com. In July, 2006, highlights of that web log began appearing in the Sunday print editions of the paper.
He is a co-author of the 1990 book, Murder of Innocence, a study of the life and tragic disruption of Winnetka schoolhouse killer Laurie Dann.
Zorn and Mary Schmich, who is a fellow Chicago Tribune metro columnist, occasionally write a week of columns that consist of a back-and-forth exchange of letters. An apprentice folk musician, each December Zorn joins with Schmich to host "Songs of Good Cheer," holiday parties at the Old Town School of Folk Music to raise money for the Tribune Holiday Fund charities.
Sources:
http://wikipedia.org
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/about.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-ericzorn,0,3641457,bio.columnist
Pre-reading Blog #2
Orlando Patterson was born on June 5, 1940, in Westmoreland, Jamaica. He was the son of a local police detective and a dressmaker. He was raised during the time when the national decolonization movement was happening. Jamaica became independent from England in 1962; therefore Patterson’s early years were always exposed to the subjugation and imperialism that Jamaica was suffering from. Even though slavery had been abolished already, the plantation system made Patterson study and understand the alternate faces of economic helotry shown by slavery in the educated world.
After attending Kingston College, Patterson was awarded a scholarship to go to the University of West Indies, where he earned his B.S. degree in economics in 1962. After this achievement he became politically active and engaged with a political freedom. He debated the improvements the constitution of a country that was about to grow independently from England should adopt. He also brought up an increasing interest in cultural decolonization. Patterson began to have a strong introspection over England and this helped him shape the views he had about the connection between slavery and freedom and made him especially interested in the ways that cultural processes relate to poverty and other social outcomes
His academic interests include the culture and practice of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; the sociology of underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean; and the problems of gender and familial relations in the black societies of the Americas. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world.
Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and 5 major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); and The Ordeal of Integration (1997) where he explains the process by which institutions such as slavery shape societal values and belief systems.
According to Patterson, “Using a musical metaphor, Patterson argues that freedom can be seen as a chord with three elemental notes: personal freedom, the ability to act as one wants without interfering with the personal freedom of another; civic freedom, the capacity to participate in government and determine the nature of societal institutions; and sovereign freedom, the perceived right or privilege to dominate others.”
Currently, Professor Patterson is a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University known for his work regarding issues of race in America, as well as the sociology of development.
Sources:
http://www.answers.com/topic/orlando-patterson
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/patterson/
http://en.wikipedia.org
After attending Kingston College, Patterson was awarded a scholarship to go to the University of West Indies, where he earned his B.S. degree in economics in 1962. After this achievement he became politically active and engaged with a political freedom. He debated the improvements the constitution of a country that was about to grow independently from England should adopt. He also brought up an increasing interest in cultural decolonization. Patterson began to have a strong introspection over England and this helped him shape the views he had about the connection between slavery and freedom and made him especially interested in the ways that cultural processes relate to poverty and other social outcomes
His academic interests include the culture and practice of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; the sociology of underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean; and the problems of gender and familial relations in the black societies of the Americas. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world.
Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and 5 major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); and The Ordeal of Integration (1997) where he explains the process by which institutions such as slavery shape societal values and belief systems.
According to Patterson, “Using a musical metaphor, Patterson argues that freedom can be seen as a chord with three elemental notes: personal freedom, the ability to act as one wants without interfering with the personal freedom of another; civic freedom, the capacity to participate in government and determine the nature of societal institutions; and sovereign freedom, the perceived right or privilege to dominate others.”
Currently, Professor Patterson is a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University known for his work regarding issues of race in America, as well as the sociology of development.
Sources:
http://www.answers.com/topic/orlando-patterson
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/patterson/
http://en.wikipedia.org
Friday, January 29, 2010
Analysis Blog #1
In a “problem-posing” class, regardless if it’s English, History, Psychology, Math, or any other solid subject, the teacher needs to pass the information to the students in a way they feel engaged with it. Students not only need to remember everything the teacher has deposited into their brains but rather, they need to understand it, process it and truly learn it. Here is when it’s really important the instructors focus on teaching first the critical thinking skills the students will need to employ once they’re given any kind of information on a lecture. They need to develop a high level of critical consciousness that will allow them to intervene and question not only what they don’t get to completely grasp but also what they feel they don’t completely agree with or what they might have learned differently before. “Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation” (Freire, 9).
“Problem-posing” education goes beyond the typical static class where teachers lecture and discharge a high volume of facts and information which the students are much more interested in getting it all and rapidly write as much as they can on their notebooks, rather than really grasping the concepts and allowing time and mind to make the questions they consider important for their own learning process. “Problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality” (Freire, 9).
What the teachers might really expect to learn from their students is different ways of seeing and understanding the world. Every person in a group may have a total different point of view towards the same exact concept, image or thing. This happens because everyone has lived, and grown differently and those different experiences shape the way we look at things and understand reality. If the teachers paid more attention to what they could learn from students’ experiences they could even have a wider and richer perspective of the topics they’re about to teach and that way they could communicate things allowing and inviting everyone to take their own position and develop their own ideas according to their beliefs in the first place. “Problem-posing theory and practice take the people’s historicity as their starting point” (Freire, 9).
“In Problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves… the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world” (Freire, 9). To me an “authentic form of thought and action” would be the consciousness one can adopt after applying critical thinking skills to the way we think about life and also the way we behave and our day-to-day actions. In conclusion, it’s the practice of a ‘problem-posing’ lifestyle.
“Problem-posing” education goes beyond the typical static class where teachers lecture and discharge a high volume of facts and information which the students are much more interested in getting it all and rapidly write as much as they can on their notebooks, rather than really grasping the concepts and allowing time and mind to make the questions they consider important for their own learning process. “Problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality” (Freire, 9).
What the teachers might really expect to learn from their students is different ways of seeing and understanding the world. Every person in a group may have a total different point of view towards the same exact concept, image or thing. This happens because everyone has lived, and grown differently and those different experiences shape the way we look at things and understand reality. If the teachers paid more attention to what they could learn from students’ experiences they could even have a wider and richer perspective of the topics they’re about to teach and that way they could communicate things allowing and inviting everyone to take their own position and develop their own ideas according to their beliefs in the first place. “Problem-posing theory and practice take the people’s historicity as their starting point” (Freire, 9).
“In Problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves… the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world” (Freire, 9). To me an “authentic form of thought and action” would be the consciousness one can adopt after applying critical thinking skills to the way we think about life and also the way we behave and our day-to-day actions. In conclusion, it’s the practice of a ‘problem-posing’ lifestyle.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Pre-Reading Blog
Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Brazil in 1921. He was born to a middle class family that experienced the poverty and economic issues of the Great Depression during 1929. This experience clearly shaped the way he thought about the poor and helped him to develop his particular educational viewpoint. During 1946, Freire worked among the illiterate poor and started to have a non-orthodox form that can be considered as liberation theology which was first applied in 1961 when 300 sugarcane workers learned how to read and write in only 45 days; this way the Brazilian government approved the cultural circles across the country. In 1967 he published his first book followed by his most popular book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This work was very successful but it wasn’t published in Brazil until 1974 because he was a Christian socialist and the country didn’t allow the work to be published until a political liberalization took place.
Paulo Freire was concerned with a philosophy of education that came from classical thoughts from Plato and also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers that followed a way of thinking based on educating native populations not with traditional teaching that was just an extension of the culture of the colonizer, but with new, modern, and anti-colonial education. Critical pedagogy was the foundation of Freire’s practices, this is contrary to the “banking concept of education” in which the student is viewed as an empty recipient to be filled by the professor. He thought that there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship but most important he suggests that a deep reciprocity needs to be inserted into the teacher and student notion, this way the teacher can learn and the learner can teach as the main role in the education activity, and the authority the teacher holds must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism. This way the educational method can be a practice of democracy.
"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
—Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire was concerned with a philosophy of education that came from classical thoughts from Plato and also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers that followed a way of thinking based on educating native populations not with traditional teaching that was just an extension of the culture of the colonizer, but with new, modern, and anti-colonial education. Critical pedagogy was the foundation of Freire’s practices, this is contrary to the “banking concept of education” in which the student is viewed as an empty recipient to be filled by the professor. He thought that there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship but most important he suggests that a deep reciprocity needs to be inserted into the teacher and student notion, this way the teacher can learn and the learner can teach as the main role in the education activity, and the authority the teacher holds must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism. This way the educational method can be a practice of democracy.
"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
—Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire
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