Blog #4 by Scott

I thought last week’s class was another good, thought provoking experience for me. The questions Julian prepared for us were interesting in the different ways we can handle a particular problem or situation. I liked his Wright brothers analogy of how despite the brothers lack of education and funding, they still overcame adversity, and built the first plane to fly. I also liked what Shahdad had to say about how to deal with adversity. He said life can be 10% of what happens to us and 90% is how we handle it. The debate we had was a little stressful, mostly in the preparing part of it.  It turned out my team was well prepared with and we also took Dr. Jaimie’s advice of providing statistics with reliable sources to help back our argument up. I think that made the difference in a close debate. Although I argued against affirmative action, I think it did help produce some great minority professionals in many fields, which helped in the minority communities by giving the community someone they may be able to relate with better and also to give the children inspiration. The group discussions on the continuing struggles of African Americans was interesting, as well. Although we barely scraped the surface of this serious issue, I do feel more enlightened about the reasons why this problem exists. Reading the perspectives of African Americans really helped me understand more. I would like to learn more about what is being done to improve the educational success of African Americans.

I liked the way that the readings this week about Latin American and Asian American students distinguished the different countries that these two groups are from. It seems many Americans tend to think all Latin Americans are from the same place and even more so many people I know think of Asian Americans as all coming from the same country. The readings pointed out that in 1990 only 9%, and in 2000 only 11%, of Latin Americans over 25 years old completed a four year college and that today many Latin American students are first generation college students. I think that is awesome that so many of this group are making it in education and are probably making their families very proud. I know my parents worked hard to give my brothers and my sister every opportunity to go to college. I noticed in the readings that in Texas they have a program that gives more Latin Americans an opportunity to get to college by admitting the top 10% students from every high school in the state. They also have college programs in place to help retain these students and improve their chances to graduate.  Choosing a culture must be difficult and complex for many Latin Americans as the second reading pointed out. This reading also shows the diversity amongst Latin Americans as well. The article about Asian Americans provided some statistics that helped prove that the stereotype that all Asian Americans are top notch students at the best universities. 32% of Asian Americans had bachelors degrees in Boston, compared to 38% who had less than a 12th grade education. Among Asian American students there was huge disparity between the different countries they were from and whether they made it to college. For example Chinese, Japan and Indian students had a 66.5% chance to make to college compared to a 26.3% chance for the immigrants from such countries as Laos or Cambodia. This weeks readings broke some stereotypes by showing that Latin Americans and Asian Americans are very diverse groups.