we are the 99 percent

After reading several stories about the 1%, it makes it look almost like 1% isn't even close to the actual number. Most of those people have high school diplomas, college education, and working skills.. but still cant seem to find a job. Not only does this make me worried about what its going to be like for me to find a job after college in 4 years, maybe more, but worried that if anyone in my family loses a job, our living situation will do a complete 360 in no time. These stories are very sad, and it shows not only is our country suffering from this but people in other countries are too. And people who left their families in other countries to try and find Jobs here and also having a hard time. Eventually minimum wages must go up for people to be able to survive.

30 days on minimum wage

After watching 30 days on minimum wage, it really opened my eyes to the people around me. For all that i know the person sitting right next to me could have gone to bed hungry last night while i went to bed on a full stomach. I never thought that living on minimum wage could be so hard on a family of not even four but two people. On a daily basis i never really stopped and thought about what kind of expenses my parents spend day to day or month to month. In the end, it ends up adding to a lot of money. I now realize how fortunate i am to be able to have a roof over my head and have a house to go home to every day and a bed with clean sheets to sleep in. I could never imagine having to eat rice and beans everyday because that was all i could afford. Ive had the experience of going to a store and not having enough money to buy everything i wanted, but they weren't necessities, they were extras. Looking at society in a big picture now, i now realize that poor do get poorer and the rich do get richer.

Positive Deviance

As an act of positive deviance, i offered to take one of my neighbors home from school that i normally don't drive. I have known her since i was little, and she is a Junior, so she doesn't get the privilege to drive to school.
At first i felt a little nervous to ask her because we don't very much anymore, but i knew it was the right thing to do. She was a little in shock that i asked her but she still said yes. It was a little weird at first but then we started talking, we ended up talking the whole way home. We got to her house and she offered me gas money but i refused it. I could tell she really appreciated the ride home and she thanked me a bunch. It made me feel good to know that i did something that i normally wouldn't do.

Gender Boxes

When kids are growing up, they have certain toys they play with and usually boys play with masculine toys such as cars, trains, and action figures and girls usually play with girly toys such as barbies, dolls, and makeup. When she showed us the video of the little boy who loved to wear dresses and the adult who was "making fun" of the little boy, it made me pretty mad because who is he to tell the mom what she should dress her son in? Kids are taught to express themselves and then they do and they get made fun of. If i were a parent and my son wanted to dress up in a dress i would let him, but to a certain extent. If he asked me to wear a dress everyday i w9ould say no, but every once in awhile, that's acceptable.  I think its acceptable for kids to explore the other genders toys but there is a certain age where the kids should be aware of their decisions.

Your surroundings

This week in class we talked about how people grow up differently depending on where they live, who they are around, their family, and friends.  I have lived in the same place my whole life and i love it. its a safe neighborhood and the people around are nice and say hi to everyone you pass whether you know them or not. it is a friendly place to grow up and Ive made many close friends growing up who lived on my street or the street behind me. Growing up in an are like this definitely effected the way i interact with people. but one thing that i feel effected me was my middle school. it wasn't in the best area and the people there weren't the best. it was a little middle school and didn't have much money. When i ended up coming to high school my middle school got split up and most of it went to Mundelein and about 20% went to Stevenson. i think this made it hard for me to transfer into high school because i was going into a huge school barely knowing everyone is a freshman year was hard trying to make new Friends but once i did it was easy.

The Keirsey Tremperament Sorter

Taking this "quiz" was somewhat difficult because some questions were harder than others and we only had two choices we could choose from. After taking the quiz we added up our answers and figured out which category we would fit into. The different categories were based on extraversion, introversion, sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling, perceiving, and judging. The category i fit into was ISFJ which stands for Introvert, Sensing, Feeling, Judging. I would agree with this because i am a very introverted person, i keep to myself when im not used to my surroundings and when im with the people im comfortable with im outgoing. I am also a very organized person and i make lists for everything.
I would say that this "quiz" is very accurate and this is a good device to use if you want to figure out the type of person you and and find some ideas for jobs that you may be interested in.

Card Game

During class we were put into groups and given a deck of cards to play with. We were all given directions on how to play the game, but little did we know that we were all given different directions. Playing with our original group was easy because we were all playing by the same rules, but once we started switching around and we were not aloud to talk it got difficult. I remember one specific game when i thought that i won but the girl next to me also thought that she won and we were trying to tell each other why we thought we won but it was so difficult not being able to talk so i just let her win. This game is a good way of expressing the way we look at different cultures because we all have different "rules" we go by and when we are in different places we aren't used to, most of us still stick to our "rules" and don't know the norms of where we are. A good example of this is the lady from Denmark who was at a restaurant in Manhattan with her husband who was from New York and left their kid outside in the stroller while they went inside to have a bite to eat. To her this was normal because in Denmark everyone leaves their babies outside when they go into a restaurant but to us its crazy because we know leaving a baby outside a restaurant in the city of Manhattan isn't a good idea. Not saying either one is right or wrong, but this shows how cultures vary from country to country and even city to city.

Theory of Love

Today in class we talked about love and did a packet where we figured out whether we were "Romantic Orientation" or "Realistic Orientation" and after adding all my numbers up i came out to be Realistic Orientation. The way they would explain someone who is realistic is, you believe that love makes a great deal of sense since its presence and absences, as well as the conditions under which it exists, can be identified. It also said that you believe that love grows best in a soil of similarity and partners who have known each other for a longer period of time will end up in a successful marriage. I would agree with this because I feel those are the way i look at love. I think my parents have a big impact on the way i look at love and relationships and they have been good role models for me to look up too. I also feel that my friends relationships have an impact on the type of relationship i want.

20 years ago..

Our society today compared to 20 years ago is so different. We have advanced in technology so much. 20 years ago we didn't have cell phones, let alone cell phones that we could go on the internet with, facetime other people, even people across the world and etc. Because of the advance in technology we have become extremely lazy people. Everything we would normally go out of our way to do can now be done for us. Some of us don't even have to leave our house to get groceries, we have companies bring them to our houses. Yeah having advanced technology is very helpful, but it has also hindered us making us lazy and not having to do things ourselves, having machines or other people do them for us.

Getting to know the class

Last week in class we played a get to know you game and we all stood in a circle and the person in the middle had to say there name and one thing about themselves and everyone else who could relate to that would move and try to get to a a spot first and the last person who couldn't find a spot would be the person in the middle and so on. I Thought this was a really good way to get to know someone because not only do you get to know the person in the middle but also the people who were switching spots because they all had that in common. One specific thing I remember was when i was in the middle and i said I had two sisters and Nikki was the only one who moved and that's something I never knew about her. During that game I learned a lot about my classmates and my teacher.

First Day of Class

The first day of class, i walked in and there were some desks with chairs and some without. I happened to choose a desk without a chair so i took a chair from the stack. When the bell rang, Ms. Breuer came into the class and she sat down at her desk, she didn't say a word to anyone. I noticed she was looking around and writing stuff down and i thought to myself, "Is this a game?", but i didn't say anything. A couple people were having conversations but they were whispering and a couple girls were laughing. It was really awkward because it was the first day of class and not everyone knew everyone in the class so nobody broke the silence. During that time i just sat at my desk and looked around and kept looking at Ms. Breuer waiting for her to talk. We sat in silence for about 6 minutes and finally she stood up and started talking.