Blog Post #7: Identity

When asked to pick words that I identify with myself, I chose woman, student, czech, and friend. All of these words describe me and I am proud to identify with them. First of all, I enjoy embracing my femininity. I am proud to be a woman even though I do realize that there are still many ways that women are treated unequally to men. I enjoy presenting myself as a strong woman and proving to others that women are not inferior to men. While at times I think that women feel the need to step up and represent the strengths of all other women, I think it is important to help all women to realize they can achieve all of their goals despite what men say. I am proud to be a woman and I acknowledge how lucky I am to live in a time when women are very close to being respected on the same level as men. Another word that I identify with is Czech. I was born into a 100% Czech family and I have been raised to embrace my heritage. I am a member of multiple Czech heritage based organizations that allow me to stay close to my heritage. I have often thought about what my life would be like if I was not Czech or at least if I wasn't so in touch with my heritage and a member of these groups. I have come to the conclusion that without the Czech influence in my life there is no way I would be where I am right now. My heritage makes up such a large part of my life that I could honestly not even imagine what my 18 years thus far would look like without it. My strong bond with my heritage allows me to proudly identify myself as 100% Czech and to continue identifying myself as this for the rest of my life. While being czech is something that I will always identify with, the word student which I also identify with will not always hold true. I am currently a student and have been for as long as I can remember but this will not always be the case. I have only ever known a life with school present in it and this should be the case for my future as well because I plan to be a teacher. The difference in my future though will be that I will hold a different role in education. Currently, my profession is learning and growing. I spend a majority of my time either in class or studying. Even when I am not doing these things, I am still labeled as a student because I live on a college campus. This identity will change for me in the future but I find it ironic to think that it will switch to the opposing role. Lastly, I identify myself as a friend. I think it is very important for me to always act as the best friend I can be to those close to me. I genuinely enjoy the company of all of my friends and I believe it is important to recognize these strong relationships often. I can never let myself forget that I am a friend to many people and they are also friends to me, so we need to feed off of each other and maintain our relationships. After my own analysis of identity I realize that the way I identify myself is probably much different from those around me. While I'm sure there are many people who have common identifications as me, no two people have the exact same identity. All of us have traits that come together to make a unique person. It is important to acknowledge these differences in identity when entering the world of education. As a teacher in the future I plan to take time to learn about the identities of all of my students and to put an emphasis on the similarities and differences of everyones identities and to treat all students as unique individuals.

Blog Post #6 Response to McIntosh Article

I found the article by McIntosh to be very intriguing and eye-opening. It brought up issues that had never occurred to me before and made me think about and analyze my own life. One of the points that really stood out when reading this was the one that said "I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group". This is something that I have noticed happens quite often in the classroom. I have been witness to many of my teachers asking any of the minorities in my class to speak of their experiences. I never really thought about it until now that I never really feel obligated to speak for a large group of white people. While there are teachers who ask students to represent all the people of their racial group, I have met many people who voluntarily do this on their own. The fact that a person might feel in a place where they need to represent an entire group of people that may only have the common bond of skin color with them is upsetting to me. This makes me realize that I have more White privilege than I ever realized. I never even thought about the fact that there are so many people that cannot actually match their skin color to what we refer to as "flesh" tone. I have now started to think about more instances when I have been at a racial advantage. As a kid I never had trouble finding a Barbie doll with the same skin color as me, television shows commonly featured kids who looked like me, and I never felt like a minority in my classroom. While I always befriended any of the minority children in my classrooms, I never really put myself in their shoes let alone examined how much easier my schooling might have been. I think this issue is something that could be contemplated for a very long time and I almost feel ashamed that I never thought about it much until now. White privilege is something that may be very hard to get rid of but I think it is possible for us to work towards leveling the playing field for all races. We need to act more aware of not only refraining from racial discrimination, but of not taking advantage of the privileges that are linked to our races.

Blog Post #5 Response to chapter 3 of Spring book

The discussion we had in class today sparked my thoughts for blog post #5. The issues of race, gender, and special needs in schooling are extremely important and have caused a lot of controversy in the past. When asked the question in class, should we do away with the recognition of race on testing and other types of surveys, I started thinking about what I truly thought about the issue. I believe that we should change the way that people are viewed because of their race. The options that people are given when asked to declare their race are very limited. How does one decide what race to be identified with when they come from a mixed family? It is possible to identify with whichever race is most dominant in one's blood but that doesn't mean the others don't exist. Also, why should it matter what race we are? If we eliminated this question all together I believe it could lead to a path of equality. While at first people would still be stereotyped and discriminated against because of their race, I believe that over time things might start to change. Currently, there are many statistics floating around linking minorities to poverty and stating other facts associated with race. These figures lead many people to stereotype entire ethnicities based on the lives of a few of the members. Once race association is eliminated, people may start to forget about these statistics, and possibly in a few generations from now individuals will be linked to lifestyles instead of entire races being linked to them.

Not only is there an issue with racial equality in schooling, but gender equality is not always existent either. Women have fought for equality for a long time and have come a long way but there is still progress to be made. I think that title 9 is still important for schooling and extra-curriculars so that we never have to go back to a time when women don't have equal rights to men. Student with disabilities have also faced struggles in the school system. In my opinion, disabled students should be given opportunities to interact with all students at school. I don't necessarily agree that all students with disabilities should attend normal classes just because of the distractions that may occur, but I believe that everything should be done to make their schooling experience as normal as possible. It is important to make an attempt at equal schooling for everyone no matter their race, gender, or mental capacity.