Blog#6

I wasn’t able to make it to class last Friday because of a knee surgery I had two days prior to that class. My surgery went better than expected, as I did not have to have the major ligament   reconstruction as the doctor had expected to do.  I still had a major meniscus repair and something about a bone chip. I’ll know more at my appointment with him next week. From reading the other blogs, it sounds like I missed some interesting classroom activities. Maybe I can get Julian’s outline tips  during his office hours, as he has already offered to look at some of my essays I have been writing, and struggling with, for another class. I’m really missing my stem courses! Although this class is pretty cool. The activities I missed regarding some of the obstacles disabled people have to overcome would have been given me some additional appreciation for our disabled brothers and sisters. I already have the utmost respect for disabled and handicapped people. I have no idea what it is like to navigate through life without something such as eyesight, hearing, use of legs, or mental issues such as dyslexia, and the hundreds of other physical and mental disabilities that we are all susceptible to. I think I can speak for a lot of people that we often take our health for granted. It was nice to read about the disability act of 1990 and that the department of education in Washington D.C. is implementing programs to make it easier for the disabled population to feel welcome in our schools.

Lipstick and labcoats was an interesting read for me. As I mentioned in the first part of my blog, I prefer science and math classes over most other types. I have taken many STEM type of classes over the years and now that I look back and think about it, there was an equal amount of women as men in my STEM classes the last few years at Ventura College. However in the early 1980’s at Moorpark College there was definitely a much higher percentage of men than women in the LET (laser electro-optics technology) program I was in. I think things have changed as far as women entering the STEM fields, but just as we have learned in the other weekly readings, there is work to be done to make it just as equal for a women to feel welcome and to be encouraged to enter these STEM fields as men do today. I think stereotypes have gone down somewhat as far as what sex a person should be to do any particular job, but as author Goldman points out, that as of 2006, only 26% of our nations engineers were women. She also found research that pointed to a lack of role models for women as a significant reason for the gender gap.

I know very little about the LGBT community, and apparently I am not alone, as the authors on this reading point out that “The vast majority of college students, classroom faculty, student affairs educators , and administrators have a tremendous amount to learn about gender diversity. I have learned in a few different courses that all populations in this world have a certain percentage of androgynous people in their society. That is a person who was born neither a male or female. How a society accepts these people have varied. I learned that many American Indian cultures accepted these people as a third gender and treated them with equal respect. I agree with the authors suggestions that colleges and universities expand the “gender” category on the application forms to enable gender-nonconforming students to self-identify, and also to implement a gender identity harassment policy similar to the sexual harassment policies that are in effect.

As far as Chick-fil-A vs. Ventura High School, I will say I like them both a lot. The owner has a right to his religious beliefs and his franchised stores have come out publicly to say that they do not necessarily share the owners beliefs and they have no public stand on same sex marriages. The principal of Ventura High is an awesome lady who I have met a few times. Ventura High has a very diverse population, rich, poor, and representing most cultures. It has a very friendly, peaceful and tolerant culture, and it starts from the top. There was a front page article in the paper, comparing Ventura with other similar schools and Ventura had an extremely low number of problems and incidents compared to the other schools. Principal Wyatt didn’t like the way Chick-fil-A went about getting into the stadium, as an outside vendor, behind her back.