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After the class discussion last Thursday, I discovered about how class issues are reflected in two texts and thought about myself. I recognized a characterestic of human nature "People always want more". Lower-class women in Luttrell's study desired a stable life and the social recognition. Tompkins, who got all of them, desired something more - a fulfillment of her inner side. It is somehow associated with my life. When I was a kid, our family's desire at that time was a realistic one- a stable financial life. The purpose of my education in the past was also very practical - getting into a business school. I focused on the subjects required for the university entrance exam rather than learn what I really liked. When I got into a top high school and my opportunity to get into a good college was nearly guaranteed, I realized I did not take care of my human side. I used to love reading and creating poems but now I can rarely write a good essay. Compared to my middle-class classmates, I am just a nerd who knows nothing except for study. I feel like I am one of the students in Tompkins class who are forced to pursue some practical careers without being interested in them. However, if I compare myself to a woman in Lutrell's study, to many poor children on the streets and to myself in the past, I may be a lucky girl.

I hope you will enjoy my map!

Hey Everyone!

Hopefully you'll be able to view my "map"/path!

Enjoy!

-Jillian

Attached is my map

Happy Reading

Rae

While reading the mountain, I was reminded of a puzzling thought that occurred to me while doing a problem set for my Introduction to Linguistics course in the fall of 2010. Though most of the specific terms I learned oh-so-long-ago are fuzzy, I remember working on a syntax unit in which my professor asked us to examine a particular sentence and determine which words seemed naturally related to one another. A small example would be: A big, red balloon. I will not pretend that I can teach any of you reading my post about the syntactic rules we learn and practice, but basically, there is something about the relationship between 'red' and 'balloon' that draws our attention. One might associate 'big' and 'red' together before associating 'balloon' with 'red', but it would seem unusual to assume an immediate relationship between 'big' and 'balloon.' I'm not as interested in the reasons behind these associations we are linguistically socialized to believe and practice as much as I am interested in how these kinds of relationships impact our perceptions of language as they refer to disability and impairment. 

Filed Attached =]

... a PHYSICAL copy of your "access map" to class on Tuesday, so we can compare notes in small groups.

Hello everyone! I'm Jia.

My educational map is inside the attachment.

One or the Other

I grew up in a middle class home with a family who believed that I was destined to be great. With that set predisposition, I was placed on an assembly line of the public education system and before I knew it I was already separated from the other students. My ideas were in more demand than the others and I was marketed to the adult audience as gifted unlike all the other kids who were marketed to their fellow classmates as cool. Luckily, my parents didn’t neglect my artistic side and I didn’t have a problem with making friends unlike all the other nerds. Once again, I was separated from another group of students and I began to be a rare commodity. But I wasn’t the only one transforming; the environment around me was too. Every time I moved onto the next level of education, the student body became more diverse. When I reached high school, all the products of Battle Creek Public Schools collided with each other. We were then packaged and labeled over the four years. This was our last stop before we were all shipped out to the colleges and jobs.