CTW 1-Dougan

One more thing I learned in my archive adventure in the Santa Clara Library is that Santa Clara used to be a single gendered school. It used to be only men.

Now this is fairly common for universities to start off this way as it took a while for schools to accept women, but it took until 1961 for Santa Clara to allow women to roam “claradise”.

This surprised me, but as I looked through advertisement’s during this time and articles on women I became frustrated at the blatant sexism that was present.

Sexism was clearly rampant at this time and I found one article in particular that caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. The article was focused men’s reaction to the integration of women.

The part of it that made me really frustrated was one photo where a young man and young woman were studying together and the caption read something along the lines of:

“How have male students dealt with the added distraction of women”

The Daily Dot

Excuse me?

Female students at this time were considered to just be a distraction to males. Instead of judging the integration of women on how they bring a level of perspective and fresh thought to the school, it’s more important to judge how distracted men are by women.

Because instead of women having any value on their own we always must sexualize them and knock them down a step by inferring that they are here as a companion for men.

This makes me sick.

The thing is, this type of thinking isn’t a thing of the past.

There still is a wage gap between men and women, women still face constant sexual harassment in the workplace and beyond and women are still shamed and blamed for being victims of rape.

Feminism itself is a trigger word! Smh.

If you type feminism into google the definition given is, and I quote, “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes.”

WOW PRETTY RADICAL STUFF!!

No it’s the most basic of human rights. The idea that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men should be a given, but its not and even today way too men are afraid to call themselves feminists.

How is it that calling yourself a feminist is such a revolutionary idea??

We all need to be feminists because America is a place where we are supposed to have equal rights for all.

Calling yourself a feminist doesn’t make you an enemy to men, but instead, a supporter of women, who by the way don’t need our support.

We have to put an end to hurtful stigma such as saying guys “throw like a girl” or assuming women have their period whenever they are not overly pleasant. Throwing like a girl should be a compliment and women shouldn’t be pleasant with men all the time because I know we don’t deserve it.

As G.D. Anderson said: “Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives their strength.”

We must stop shaming, discriminating and sexualizing women because women are just as important to this world as men, if not more so.

So maybe next time someone asks you to describe yourself, use the term feminist.

Our school’s drama club is putting on a play called the Vagina Monologues. It’s a play about Sex, Sexuality and Rape. You can read a summary of the original play here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vagina_Monologues

The thing is, the school isn’t allowing the students to really advertise it.

From Tenor

I know…I had this exact reaction.

I couldn’t believe that we still live in a culture where censorship of this kind is appropriate or acceptable. I also did not expect to see it at Santa Clara University where they make a point of looking like they allow students to stand up and speak out on major issues. Hell, when I went through freshmen orientation, we all had to watch a movie on sexual assault.

So why is a school that promotes standing up for victims of sexual assault and has it in their mission to stand up for justice, censoring a play around these very topics?

This question still stumps me and it doesn’t seem in line with everything else the school stands for.

It bugs me that I’ve had to hear about the play from my classmates who have had to interrupt class to advertise this play. They’ve clearly worked hard on this play and it’s an important play to watch especially on a college campus where, sadly, sexual assault is common.

Where’s our freedom of expression?

Is it that students can speak out on certain controversial topics, but not others?

Is the school worried that plastering the word vagina all over campus would scare away potential students?

What does this say about Santa Clara as a school and a community?

I haven’t looked into the schools reason for this censorship, but I personally believe it’s a mix of scaring away potential students and the school worrying that the Vagina Monologues is a little bit too R-rated for campus.

Both of these reasonings drive me crazy.

Hiding parts of the school that may seem to risky or abrasive for visitors is ridiculous to me. It paints the school as a place where the image of a beautiful campus and smiling students is more important than allowing students to talk about real issues. Having a campus support play such as the Vagina Monologues doesn’t fit with the schools carefully crafted image.

Or there is the even more ludicrous possibility that the Vagina Monologues are too inappropriate for a college campus.

From Giphy

Almost makes me laugh. The hypocrisy that a play that talks about real issues in our world would be more inappropriate than the things that happen every weekend off campus. But come to think about it the school employs the same tactic with drinking and drug use. Out of sight, out of mind.

Clean campus my ass.

Now I love my school, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes the schools actions and policies frustrate me.

That’s a whole other tangent, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the school is hiding a controversial, but important play. I’m not saying the school should become Berkeley with demonstrations left and right, but sweeping a play under the rug is unfair to the students involved in the production and to anyone who possibly could’ve learned something from the play.

On a quick side note, but not exactly a side note this is something that influenced my research into the topic of women’s rights at SCU and made me interested in the article that I found about abortion at SCU.

Anyways on the previous topic,

It’s disappointing.

Woohoo! Another interesting and insightful post about research!

From Photobucket

Probably not what you’re thinking, but research is everywhere and I believe it to be central to most things in the world. And almost all kinds of research should be regarded as useful and productive ways to spend time.

Take an argument about Lebron James and Michael Jordan for example.

From ClickHole

Two basketball greats who have often been compared to each other. Michael Jordan is considered to be the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time). Recently, however, many people have started to argue that Lebron is better.

I love basketball, and in middle and high school, my friends and I would often get in heated arguments debating this exact matter.

Our arguments would take place anywhere and everywhere, and would often go on for hours and hours. By the end, neither side was convinced of the others point, but, in the process,we were inadvertently researching a thesis and data to support our claims.

We would scroll pages of data that looked like this…

From Cleveland Media

…and compare their stats for each category. We’d look at their shooting percentages, rebounds per game, assists per game, blocks per game, titles won by a certain age and on and on and on.

Sometimes, the debates would rage on for days. We’d return from school and continue to search for new statistics to back up our claims and find new statistics to make a new claim.

It got so bad that our dad’s began to weigh in on the issue. We quickly discovered they too had opinions and arguments of their own.

As a side note, through these debates, I learned whose dad made unreasonable claims without data, and whose dad could support an argument through data.

These arguments bonded us as friends, but they also built our rhetorical skills without us even knowing it. We were developing a thesis based on who we believed was the true GOAT and we were developing our claim through research and statistics.. If you asked any of us to write an essay expressing our thoughts, we all would have easily had enough material and knowledge to do so.

The thing is, this type of research and thesis driven argumentation is not recognized enough as being productive and a useful step in child development.

Why isn’t this type of research and debate considered to be as important as a debate on politics? Why can’t educators and parents alike consider these passionate arguments to be useful building blocks to a child’s education rather than an annoying debate about a meaningless topic?

Shouldn’t students be able to research what they please? Might this account for more engaged, passionate students?

Maybe if educators allowed assignments to be more open ended and allowed students to research topics they care deeply about, students wouldn’t dread writing papers.

On my classes famous trip to our library archives on campus, I began to think about what purpose libraries will serve in the future.

Everything is becoming digitized. You can find just about any book or article or fact or resource online. A google search is all you need most of the time.

Are the days of flipping through book after book to find material that might relate to your topic gone?

Is everything bound to be scanned and exposed on the web for all to see?

Will future generations not spend rainy summer afternoons immersed inside the stacks of the library?

I think not.

Books are lovely.

I’m a old school reader when it comes to books. I go to bookstores and read books front to back while the rest of my family looks for their books. I love the feel of a book in my hand and I love the thrill of physically turning page after page the story develops. I never invested in an e-reader, and when I’m forced to read articles on my computer, I find it to be tasking on my eyes.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think I’m completely alone in this. There’s no way books will completely go out of the vogue. Not only because there are plenty of traditional book lovers still out there like myself, but because print research and online research are quite different things.

Print research is its own beast.

This is something I’ve recently noticed. I never really paid much attention to the fact that print research involves hands on digging and a completely different mindset than online research.

Generally, in online research, the process consists of a narrow search that ends up with extremely broad results. Millions of results show up in less than a second when using the Google search bar.

In print research, the process is the opposite and it tends to consist of a broad search that yields specific results. Print research is much more of an adventure because you never really can know what you’re going to find. Online research allows for selectivity and the top result will usually correlate very strongly with what you’re searching.

When you search for something in a book you might find something entirely different and that’s part of what makes print research so interesting and valuable.

Libraries are free.

The other great thing about libraries is that they are free! Free things are always good as my brother says, and in this case, I couldn’t agree more. Libraries allow anyone to have access to wealths of knowledge. I believe that this increases the intelligence of our nation.

Also most libraries have computers! Which means that anyone who doesn’t have access to wifi or a computer at home can go to the library for no cost at all. With libraries there is no excuse for students to not have accessibility to any book or website that can help them in their studying.

I can’t say for certain if Libraries will be around in ten or fifteen years, but I do know that if they are replaced or removed from our country, it will be a great loss.

Response

After writing this blog post one of my classmates Jack Bedard (you can find the post here) commented on the post and wrote his own blog stating that libraries are outdated and not important due to everything being online.

I disagree wholly and even though research is becoming more and more technology based, print research is a different type of research than internet research. So I’m sorry Jack I have to disagree

P.S. just another quick side note he most likely wrote the blog post in the library.

In class, we read an important article talking about the BEAM method which I explained earlier. After initially reading the article, I initially didn’t really think it was widely applicable… until we read an article in one of my Environmental Ethics course.

The article was written by Edward Abbey, an extremely controversial author who wrote about national parks and how government shouldn’t have a role in protecting nature. His views are anti-establishment, anti-government, and anti-rule abiding.

But, the key thing about his article was the writing style and how he used an exhibit source (which is the E in BEAM). A quick refresher on Exhibit sources, Exhibit sources are an example of using someone else’s writing style or ideas as a lens to get a rhetorical point across.

Abbey wrote using an interesting style and used a “character” to exaggerate some of his points.

This character is known as Cactus Ed and it’s a terrific example of an exhibit source because he’s writing from the perspective of the character instead of from his own perspective.

Edward Abbey was quite the character with his Ron Swanson-like view of government.

If you do not know who Ron Swanson is then you should immediately leave this blog and queue the first episode of Parks and Recreation. It’s a hilarious show and perfect for all types of people.

This is Edward Abbey:

From Wikimedia

And this is the glorious Ron Swanson:

From Odyssey

They are both extremely strong willed nature lovers who believe that no government is the best kind of government.

Sorry for the shameless plug of Parks and Rec… nowack to business.

Along with the “I don’t give a f*uck” attitude he emitted, everything he did or wrote about seemed like an exaggeration. Sometimes it appeared as though he was living his life using Cactus Ed as an exhibit source.

His writing is fascinating and although his ideas were radical and often racist, his use of this rhetorical device to get his point across makes for extremely effective writing. It feels like a novel even though it’s a factual story. Conversely,when it feels like a real example of a personal story, it’s actually a fictional story from the Cactus Ed point of view.

Perhaps I should try using a persona similar to Cactus Ed in my next essay for class.

One of the main themes in the course that assigned this blog is education. Specifically, higher education and how it shapes everything in our world.

I’m a lifeguard at the SCU pool.

Kinda like this dude:

It’s not as glamorous as Baywatch made it out to be and most of the job involves sitting in a chair, but there are some perks that come with the job such as listening to NPR every morning while I work.

It’s a nice way to wake up and I’ve really come to enjoy it except for the brutal days where it’s rainy and 50 degrees. It’s peaceful and I love being informed on the happenings of the world.

One morning while I was listening, an ad for a movie starring Matt Damon came on. Damon was promoting his charity that brings clean water to towns in Africa. As a whole, the ad was pretty over the top and I nearly , tuned out… yet another celebrity trying to convince me that their charity is the most important. For some reason, though, I listened on.

Damon told a story of a young girl who had to walk miles before and after school to get water for her family. The girl was in school and extremely smart and driven, she wanted to be a nurse. Unfortunately, she had to take care of her house and gather water for her family. Her responsibilities were of the utmost importance, she and her family wouldn’t survive without her completing them – they conversely forbid her of furthering her education.

Damon explained that giving her village access to clean water allowed her to go to school and have a future.

I know this seems cliche, but it really made me think about access to education and how my opportunities educationally are a huge privilege.

I never had to walk miles to gather water for my family all the while trying to get good grades. I barely even had to do menial chores such as taking out the trash or doing the dishes. Even when I did have to do them, I rarely followed through. My life was and is in the grand scheme of things and compared to many others, undemanding, and I often take it for granted.

Sometimes I wish I could go back and yell at my high school self for not making the most of my incredible educational opportunity. I guess I’m writing this post in hopes to encourage readers to be aware and simultaneously appreciative of their privilege to have the opportunity to attend school. I write also to voice my frustration in regards to the fact that our educational system in America is rigged against the underprivileged.

In class recently, for a project on archival research, I scrolled through old editions of the Santa Clara Newspaper

I learned some exciting stuff about my topic while in the archives, and in addition, stumbled across some advertisements that grabbed my attention. I observed how advertisements changed throughout years and years of the newspaper, and it forced me to contemplate advertisements in general and how products, specifically are advertised today.

Towards the beginning of the newspaper years, around 1960, most of the advertisements were cigarette ads and they depicted them as a product for adventurous folks. In order to be “cool”, you had to smoke.

From Healthcare-Administration-Degree

Additionally, advertisements like this portrayed smoking as healthy habit – not at all bad for you!

This didn’t come as a shock, I feel like most people are aware of the decent amount about the rise and fall of the tobacco industry. It was still interesting, though, that the Santa Clara University newspaper would advertise a product now banned from campus.

It makes me wonder what type of products today we are advertising as “completely safe” when in reality they are extremely harmful. A couple more products that came to mind similar to cigarettes are DDT, Lead, Mercury and others.

At the time people thought all of these to be extremely useful, practical and safe solutions to household problems. (Just to remind everyone that people used to spray their cupboards and dishes with DDT because it would keep bugs away! It seems clearly harmful to us today, but hindsight is 20/20) Or, in the case of cigarettes, a safe way to blow off some steam and look like a movie star.

Ultimately, we can’t know for sure what products will be harmful and which are as advertised. Maybe the people who fear cell phones for their radiation will turn out to be the smart ones and the rest of us will look like idiots. My personal opinion is that vape pens, which have been advertised as the “safer” alternative to cigarettes, will turn out to be just as bad, if not worse. Maybe that stems from my general hate for people vaping, but, maybe not.

This thought process brought me to another point, Climate Change. Now I know you may not understand the clear connection, but like these other pollutants and harmful chemicals, oil, methane and CO2 are all destroying our world and the most absurd part to me is that we’re knowingly doing this. It’s not just clever advertising or a lack of information on the topic of global warming, but also the issue that people still don’t believe it matters.

Maybe we should start advertising clean energy as “cool”. Maybe that’ll make more people care.

Research research and you guessed it! More research. The topic of my blog posts may make me out to be some master of research, but in reality I’m flying by the seat of my pants.

From Blogspot

I’m no expert on research by any means, but I’m always open to learning how I can improve.

For class we recently read an article by Michael Klein on his research process. The article explained a specific distinction that can be extremely important in research.

The distinction between Hunters and Gatherers

Now, I know when I think of those words I think of some cavemen smashing rocks together and eating raw meat. In reality, it’s actually an academic term used to describe two distinct methods of research.

Hunters, according to Klein, go into their research with a strong purpose. They know what they want to find and if a source doesn’t fit their purpose then they ignore it.

on the other hand…

Gatherers, according to Klein, go into the research process with a broad idea of what they want to find. If something doesn’t fit,then they question why that is and look at the broader research picture.

A good example of this would be vacationing. When a Hunter goes on vacation they know exactly what they plan to find on the trip. Let’s say they’re going to Paris, Hunter’s would immediately head to the Eiffel Tower and if they stumbled upon something else really cool on the way then they would ignore it because it wasn’t in the itinerary. Gatherer’s are more of wanderers who may go to Paris with a vague idea of what they want to do, but their goal is to wander and find all the cool things they can find.

We all would like to think we are a good mix of Hunters and Gatherers but, as I think about myself in the context of this argument, I’m definitely a Hunter. I pick out sources that fit and disregard the rest. This is something I need to improve on because often I end up missing the bigger picture.

By being aware of these two perspectives, and going into the research process knowing I end to be more of a Hunter, I can intentionally fight my instincts in an attempt to become more of a mix of both. I can broaden my sources and take into account many perspectives on my research topic, while, at the same time, using sources that complement my purpose.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to talk about the cost of a college education. Specifically, how taking a writing class on education has made me view my own educational experience differently.

I know, I know, I’m sorry… but I promise I’ll try to keep it as interesting as possible!

From Tenor

The course I’m currently taking explores different types of education and the accompanying views that different scholars and people share regarding the way in which our world should be educated today. In addition, the course investigates what methods should and shouldn’t be employed when attempting to educate our society today.

People have been discussing this since the beginning of time and I could drone on for hours about which educational techniques I find to be the most successful and what type of schooling I believe to be most effective, but, I won’t. Instead, I want to discuss how this course has changed my perception of a college education and how I feel that I should be making it worthwhile.

I grew up in private schools. Elementary school in Bethesda Maryland at a prestigious school and then a college prep school in Minnesota for middle school and high school. Everyone who surrounded me at school expected to go to college and beyond. My high school graduating classes average GPA was 3.5 and the average ACT score was 30.

From SuperheroHype

Daunting… I know.

This environment made me feel average because I constantly felt that everyone was doing more than me. In a sense, they were, because I consistently found ways to cut corners and take the path of least resistance. I realize now, looking back, that I did not squeeze every last drop of knowledge out of school. I barely made a dent in the opportunities available to me. Hindsight 20/20.

I told myself college would be different. I promised that I would make it worthwhile to pay 60 grand for a private liberal arts education. I looked up after first quarter freshmen year and I realized that I was falling back into my habits of taking for granted the opportunities I had.

The course I took second quarter required me to read and write on different types of education and to consider the different paths people can take to success. I realized through my work and reflection that I am not special. If so many people can find success through community college, technical school or other options, why was I struggling to keep up even with every opportunity possible available to me?

I’ve come to realize it all comes down to work ethic. I’ve learned the hard way that on any level of education in any school or type of school across the world,the most important thing you can do to set yourself apart is nose to the grindstone hard work.

My research process is typically somewhat of a mess, but, to be fair, it used to be much worse…

I used to find and ultimately choose certain quotes or examples that were short and sounded like they summed up the source completely. Often times, though, the quotes didn’t really represent the greater reading because I often didn’t read the source completely.

From Giphy

Terrible strategy, trust me, I know.

However, after so many mediocre grades on research based essays and projects, I decided to switch up my strategy once and for all. It’s not perfect now, I’m fully aware of that and the fact that there’s always a lot of progress to be made, but, this is what I’ve learned so far, what I know for certain:

1. Read through the sources available or read through summaries of the sources to find out which ones would be relevant.
   • These sources are often very surface level and won’t be the ones you will use in the actual essay
2. Compile all sources and start reading through them. Begin to pull quotes and write summaries for each of the sources.
   • I typically look for primary sources, but as the BEAM article states, this term encompasses something much broader than I previously knew.
3. Find an order to place my sources in and then use them to write the essay.
   • This isn’t a genius strategy, but more of a lazy one where I often don’t know what order things should be in so I make one up.

This is my basic research strategy, and after learning about BEAM, I’ve come to realize different types of research/articles flesh out different types of arguments.

I never had really put much time or effort into how the different articles and pieces of research I discovered would fit into different categories. I think that it’s something that could really deepen my research and arguments that I make in research essays.

Cohesiveness and how an essay flows is extremely important and I think my lack of attention to this tool has hurt my writing in the past. Often I throw things down on the page and that’s never a good strategy for crafting a good essay.