SA #2

1.       In my essay I would like to answer the question: Why do most adults feel it is necessary for children to take medication to treat their ADHD and what are the ramifications of this?

2.       The reason most adults feel the drive to “fix” children with ADHD is based from their need to control their lives, which includes those around them. The way they achieve this is through medicating their children so that they are easier to take care of. Having to deal with different situations or people makes a lot of individuals nervous, so when an opportunity presents itself, people will take advantage of the ability to get rid of that feeling. The effect this has on children is that they end up being less individualistic, in addition to having an unauthentic experience with those surrounding them.

3.       I will be using Pratt’s “Art of the Contact Zone” and her ideas of the safe house and contact zone.  Paulo Freire’s  “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, the part where he talks about adults using any method necessary to control their children.  And finally, John Taylor Gatto’s essay “Against Schools” where he talks about conformity and how adults attempt to make children conform to their will.

4.       The texts I’m using are Pratt and Freire. I believe that these texts will expand my ideas because they both deal with the way that people interact with each other. My hypothesis and conversation are about how children with ADHD act and react around peers and other adults. It also addresses the opposite of that, how adults react to children that aren’t acting “normally” in accordance to the norms established by society.

5.       I actually chose this article because of a documentary I watched a while back on ADHD on how parents are overmedicating their children to the point they’re taking dozens of pills a day. I want to explore because I’ve seen so many people my age diagnosed with it, which really didn’t have a problem in the first place. Personally I don’t believe ADD/HD is a disease as much as it is a bored child in class or a kid who’s parents don’t make that little extra effort necessary.

6.       In my portfolio project I want to think more about WHY parents do this and what it means to the children. I want to narrow down my focus to just Pratt, Gatto and Freire because I think they’re the ones that really support my ideas the most. I don’t feel as though my essay 3 really got into depth about the importance of this issue and why it’s so important to people of my generation as they’re starting to have children of their own.

Essay Project #3

The Newest Way to Dominate

            Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is an illness that affects many children around the world. Its symptoms include hyperactivity, low attention span and heightened emotions which can often lead to temper tantrums. Medicines such as Ritalin and Adderall are prescribed by doctors to help the child feel and act more “normal”.  “Normal” in this sense of the word is meant to mean more like everyone else, a lack of individuality that prevents the child with ADHD from being a disturbance in everyday society. These medicines are often times very effective and sometimes too effective to the point that it causes the children to have an inauthentic experience in social situations. In addition it can cause the child to be even more separate and different from the other “normal” children of their own age. Finally the children with ADHD have a different way of thinking and reacting to the things around them, so by there very nature they are a potential threat to the established norms of society. This causes different ideas and thoughts to clash with each other, ultimately causing a disturbance to the delicate balance within society.

            In general, most people would agree with the statement that children are active and have a higher energy level than most adults. Children with ADHD have an even higher level of energy that causes them to have a harder time concentrating in the classroom and other social situations. That is when Ritalin and Adderall come in. These medicines change the energy and hormone levels in an ADHD child to a more normal and stable level, making them easier to control. From this perspective medicine acts as a dominating force used by those in charge, such as teachers and parents, to keep control of their environment and to retain their own power over those underneath them. Paulo Freire is an important theorist and intellectual in the area of education and literacy.  In his essay “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” he addresses the idea of those in charge needing to dominate those underneath them. In the essay he says “The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites)” (6).  This can be related to children with ADHD, especially in a classroom setting, because the dominant elites, the teacher, use medications to assert their own dominance over the children that threaten their power the most, the children with ADHD. The medication acts to ensure that the order and peace of the classroom, through the eyes of the teacher, is maintained. This is significant because it makes the child acts in a completely different way than they would normally, making their experience with other children in the classroom impersonal. Thus the relationships that these children create and maintain with their peers are not as authentic as it could or should be because there isn’t a real presence of self for the child that is taking these medications.

            A child with ADHD has a different way of thinking and creating than a person without ADHD, this is due to hormone imbalances in the brain. When a child is different is scares a lot of people and a lot of them don’t know how to react when a child does something that is out of the ordinary. Children with ADHD do things differently on a very regular basis, making it hard for parents and teachers to accept and manage the child. The result again is more dominance and more pills. Paulo Freire says “to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed” (2). In other words, to prevent the children from having the power to think creatively adults will use medicine because it protects their interests in having the world around them stay the same. Medicine makes a threatening situation manageable because it makes the child less likely to push the boundaries, as well as making them less likely to question the dominance of those in charge of them. The power of the teachers and parents is les threatened when the children are medicated so the adults feel like they are in a safer environment, if not for their children but for themselves.

            The use of medication to kill the creative capabilities of children with ADHD also correlates with Sir Ken Robinson’s speech on how schools kill creativity. In this speech Sir Ken Robinson talks about how children don’t grow up to be more creative, but instead they grow out of their creativeness. Children diagnosed with ADHD often “grow out” of their ADHD and grow up to become fully functional and “normal” adults. Is it possible that these medications contribute to that? Yes it is very likely that over time medication makes it possible for children to grow up normally. Is it possible that these medications contribute to these children growing out of their creativity? Possibly, if the intention of these medications is to make the children more complacent by killing their “abnormal” creative skills it logically follows that these medications also causes people to grow up to have a lack of creative skills. Adult cases of ADHD are few and far between. Childhood diagnoses of ADHD are on the rise and more and more children are being medicated to solve their hyperactive and overly creative tendencies. In the future this could have some bad ramifications. As the children of today grow into adulthood they will be “cured” of their ADHD resulting in a noncreative, average citizen. This could mean a very bleak future for the arts and other creative outlets as less and less people have the creative ingenuity needed to excel in these areas.

            When different ways of thinking, ideas or cultures clash the result can either be incredibly good, or incredibly bad. Since children with ADHD have a different way of processing information from those around them it is very often that the clash with each other. Mary Louise Pratt calls the point where two opposing forces clash a contact zone. In her essay “Arts of the Contact Zone” she says “Many of those who govern us display, openly, their interest in quiescent, ignorant, manipulable electorate.  Even as an ideal, the concept of an enlightened citizenry seems to have disappeared from the national imagination” (5).  On a small scale, this idea of those in charge wishing to make the masses ignorant can be applied to doctors and parents who prescribe and give these medications to the ADHD children. The adults try very hard to make these medicines seem like they are important, even essential, to these children have any semblance of a “normal” childhood. They wish to keep the masses, in this case the children, ignorant of their true intention to have complete control of their children and the children and all situations around them. If the children, especially those old enough to really understand the situation, were to find out just how much the adults in their life are trying to control the way they think and act there would be a sort of revolt. Children would refuse to take their medicines, causing those in charge to panic because they would no longer have the control that they desire in this situation.

            The ultimate hope and goal of medicating these children is to ensure a community where everyone is the same. In a community where everyone is the same there is little room for clashing and a smaller chance of things ever changing for the better or worse. Pratt calls this sort of  “ideal” community “safe houses”, which means “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogenous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection for legacies of oppression” (6).  The idea of a safe house can be extended to understand why adults rely on medication so much to treat ADHD. Medications do have their positive affects, the medications help create a place where everyone has the same chances at learning. It makes a normally hyperactive, distracted child more able to concentrate. The use of medication is rooted in the natural desire to be part of a safe house where everyone included is relieved of oppression and threats.

 The concept of a safe house includes the idea that individuals should be free from domination and oppression. So, by the using medication in an attempt to create a safe house, adults are making it impossible for a safe house to exist. Medicine is used to dominate and control the children with ADHD by those in charge. The use of domination to create a safe house violates the very definition of a safe house, therefore a safe house cannot exist until medicines are not used anymore in an attempt to control situations.

            In today’s society, being the same as everyone else is encouraged. Being individualistic will make you an outcast because being different or doing something that isn’t already an established “normal” thing to do is viewed as being an inappropriate and wrong thing to do. John Taylor Gatto was a teacher for about 30 years when he wrote his article “Against Schools” about the way schools are not doing their intended job. In this article he says “This might as well be call ‘the conformity function,’ because it’s intention is to make the children as alike as possible” (36). While Gatto is talking about schools, this concept can be extended to society as a whole. Society in general conforms, often without question as to the motives. When one doesn’t conform they are criticizes to the point that they give up and conform because it’s the easy thing to do. This is why medicine is necessary. When a child with ADHD doesn’t or can’t conform to standards thrust upon them, they are forced to conform through medications. ADHD medicines fundamentally change a person hormonally, essentially making them a completely different person.

            Children with ADHD who are medicated do benefit from taking these medicines. However, the ultimate benefit goes to those in charge. Those in charge benefit the most because they have more control over their situation and can therefore assert their own dominance.  The intentions of the dominates is most likely good, a community where everyone is equal with equal opportunities for learning is a noble idea. However, in this case the means do not justify the ends. By medicating these children they lose themselves in the process because the medications change the way they think and act. In addition, the future of these children is devastated because they lose their capacity for creativity. In a future where a majority of the population does not have the ability to think creatively and problem solve areas of society that are essential suffer, such as the arts. Also by the very act of dominating the idea of a safe and equal community is shattered. Domination makes room for rebellion and a sort of class system where those being dominated are inferior to those in charge.

            The natural instinct to dominate those different from the majority is the reason that medicating children with ADHD is viewed as a necessary and even normal thing to do. Medicating children with ADHD is an act of domination, used to help create a community of individuals created equally. When in reality it creates a place where everyone can’t ever be the same, where children suffer the inability to simply be children. ADHD medicine has its benefits, but it is possible that the negative aspects of medicines like Adderall and Ritalin outweigh the positives.

           

Journal Entry #5

1.          In this essay McIntosh is talking abou how white men generally have more of an aadvantgage in life than females or people of a different culture (Black, mexican etc.). She also addresses that this is likely to never change, that established gender and cultural roles will remain the same because those men in power are unlikely to either relinquish their power or to try to make a difference. The reader has to take into account that the writer is writing from the perspective of a women's studies student, which means that she will be writing in a sort of biased way or a feminist way. McIntosh lists 46 everyday activites where white men can feel superior to their non-white and female counterparts. Thesse activites seem so normal to us because that is the established norm. This could contribute to why there isn't really an effort to change things, people feel it is normal so they don't realize it needs to be changed.
2.
          What does it mean to be advantaged or disadvantaged?
           Why is it so hard to gender standards to be changed? What would be necessary to change them?
          Is there an equal and opposite reaction from women of color? Meaning, do women and men of  color feel equally opressed by white people, as white women feel opressed by white men?
         

Journal Entry #4

1. "Learning how to not-learn is an intellectual and social challenge; sometimes you have to work very hard at it"(1).
           Kohl is saying here that it takes a lot of effort to not learn something. People are forced to learn things everyday, whether they're in school or not. Learning not to learn can sometimes take more effort that the learning would just because teacher, parents and peers push us so hard to learn things. This is significant because so many students make this effort to not learn, when it would be so much easier to give in and learn what they're being taught.

"Not learning played a positive role and enabled them to take control of their lives and get through difficult times"(3).
          Here, Kohl is saying that these student's ability and effort put into not-learning has ultimatley cause good things, not the bad things that one would expect. By not-learning these students have been able to keep their cultural and personal identity. This is so important because it's necessary for a reason. This conclusion can be made because there is something wrong in the way that school are taught, in that they're teaching children to be and act like someone different.

2. "Not learning played a positive role and enabled them to take control of their lives and get through the difficult times" (3).
          Ignorance is bliss. That is why children are so happy and can go around thinking that anything is possible. They haven't learned any differently and no one has really tried to teach them otherwise. In this context not learning has played a great role in the way that we grow up because it enables children to simply be children. Children have control over their lives because there isn't anyone saying "no, you can't be a princess because they don't exist." or "You're a woman, so you won't ever be the president". Not learning has played a positive role in nearly every person's life, because every person starts out with that innocence as a child. Not learning has been detrimental to the way that every person grows up, and until the time that children are school age most will be as happy as can be. But why do parents and teachers force their children to learn the realities, while it is necessary for young children to get a sense of reality, it is also necessary for them to mantain that feeling of being unstoppable.

Self Assesment #1

1.      So I definitely learned that the 5 paragraph essay isn't going to work here in college, which kind of sucks because that's all I've been taught for the last 12 years of my life but oh well. Overall I've learned to be a better academic writer, as in I know how to support the ideas I have in a way that will actually be useful to both me and the reader. I’ve what the difference between a claim and evidence is, which I never even knew there was a difference.

2.      I would love to learn more about theses, because my mind was BLOWN today. My prior thoughts about theses were kind of shattered, but then again I really haven’t had to do a lot of academic writing of the caliber expected of me here at Western. Also I’m kind of still having trouble with claims and how to pick them out of a sentence or paragraph. This might just because I was absent from class the day that claims were gone over.

3.      I think my current problem with my writing is connecting my ideas with each other. I can do it in my head but when I try to write them they just don’t come out right.  I would also like to learn how to wrap everything up at the end. In a 5 paragraph essay you just restate your thesis, but are professors expecting something a little different than that.  Finally I would like to learn how to pick a quote, if there is a certain method to it or if you just go “oh this sounds smart so I’m going to use it”. Are some quotes better than others?

IWA #2

The fact that no one was safe made all of us involved in the course appreciate the importance of what we came to call “safe houses.” We used the term to refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression. This is why, as we realized, multicultural curricula should not seek to replace ethnic or women’s studies, for example. Where there are legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recognition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowledges, claims on the world that they can then bring into the contact zone.

Meanwhile, our job in the Americas course remains to figure out how to make that crossroads the best site for learning that it can be. We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history (including their own histories), ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity; ground rules for communication across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all-important concept of cultural mediation. These arts were in play in every room at the extraordinary Pittsburgh conference on literacy. I learned a lot about them there, and I am thankful.

(Claims are underlined)

            Pratt articulates that learning is the best thing to do in the contact zone, and that learning is the ultimate goal in a contact zone. But I believe that in order for learning to happen, the two different groups within this contact zone must first understand each other, and come to appreciate the role that they each have within a society. For example, in a classroom the pupils must first understand the teacher and the role that the teacher plays within that environment. Likewise, the teacher has to understand the pupils and what role they have in relation to both the teacher and the classroom. In addition, understanding could potentially lead a contact zone to become a safe house, because when different groups come to understand each other there will be less need for clashing and the groups start to see each other on the same level as each other, thus eliminating the dominant-subordinate relationship found in each contact zone that we have seen throughout history.

            As a side note, understanding could be incorporated as a way of learning. This meaning that in order to understand a culture or group different from your own you must first learn about that culture.

            The outcomes of the contact zones around the world often create great learning opportunities for those that are uninvolved. Contact zones can teach people how to cooperate with each other and how much it can damage a society when groups clash.

Essay Project #1

So I feel like my problem statement doesn't really explain where I want to go with this essay, help would be much appreciated.

_________________________________________________
                                                                                                                                           Victoria Dillard

January 18^th, 2012

English 101, Ms. Lauren Feller

What are the Consequences of our Family Teachings?

Problem Statement

            From the time we are old enough to walk, most of us are taught that education and school are the most important things in our lives. Our family and teachers all tell us that if we want to be successful in life, we have to be educated. We work hard in elementary school so that we can make it to middle school. We strive to succeed in middle school so that we can continue on to high school. Once there we struggle and take difficult classes so we can get into the college of our parents dreams. If we get into college we’re a success, if we don’t we’re doomed to a mediocre life as a fast food worker. Throughout this educational process we subjected to different standardized tests (ex. SAT, WASL) that test our abilities in subject areas that are needed for us to move on in the educational ladder. Macrorie states that “Naturally, the student thinks that the textbook is the model of the language that the teacher wants, so she give that language to him.”, but it is important to point out that not only is it the teacher that implies that engfish is the desired mode of writing, but that the parents and family of that student make it necessary for that student to use engfish on these standardized tests. For most students college is the only option presented by their parents.

Idea Chunk #1

            Gatto says in his article “Against Schools” that “We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think that ‘success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, ‘schooling’”. While school is important to a child as they grow up, a child’s number one role model is their parents. Children strive to grow up to be like their parents in every way possible. Most of these children’s parents have a college education themselves, so naturally students grow up wanting and expecting to have a college education. In addition, parents teach their children that education is the only way to be successful, so for most students, their parents only ever let them consider college as a valid option.

It is the parents of these students that make it necessary for them to use engfish. Students know that the only way to get into the college that their parents want them to get into is to score high enough on the SAT or ACT to get in. In order to pass these tests, one has to make it sound like they are intelligent and have a higher capacity for learning than they do in reality.

Idea Chunk #2

            Our grandparents went to school, our parents went to school and now we are expected to go to school. The idea that college is the only way to get a “real” job has transcended from generation to generation. And maybe when our parents were growing up, college was the only way to get a decent job. However, the times have changed and now a college degree doesn’t guarantee a job anymore. Sometimes people end up being more successful without going to college, it certainly makes sense, because they don’t have those nasty student loans to deal with at the end of their education. Unfortunately this teaching that the only way to be successful is to be educated will continue because our children will be taught the same thing by us, by the generation before us and by their school teachers.

Idea Chunk #3

            It takes a certain degree of creativity to think “outside the box”, in fact it takes amazing powers of imagination for people to think that anything other than the norm is possible. In today’s society, college is the norm, people go to school so they can get to college, and that’s the simple fact of things. Freire points out in her article “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,  “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the opressors, who care not to have to world revealed nor to see it transformed.”  The public education system in the United States is causing students to loss their sense of creativity, so that by the time the students become the age to start college that is the only thing they know. Whether this is a master plot to keep citizens from rebelling against the government or other oppressors, or whether this is a tragic side effect is unknown. However, we do know that students are suffering, and one of the ways that this can be prevented is for the parents of these students to demonstrate that there are other options available to the students besides college. But, parents are unlikely to do that because they themselves have gone through the public education school system and have been taught that college is the only option.

Idea Chunk #4

            Freire suggests a solution to this problem of students not having the creativity to think outside of college. Freire suggests that “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the –students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers.” When a teacher learns from her students and the students teach their teacher something new, creativity can then be harnessed and those individuals in turn become better people. Through this process people grow so that they might one day become important members to society through various ways, either with or without that college degree. Albert Einstein is quoted to have said “Most teachers waste their time by asking questions which are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning has for its purpose to discover what the pupil knows or is capable of knowing.” Even one of the most intelligent people that ever lived knew that in order to education to be successful, the students and teacher must both ask questions of each other.

Idea Chunk #5

            We must take into account those students that don’t decide to go to college. Have they beaten the man by refusing to go to college, or can they just not afford it? Unfortunately, the latter is often the answer, but there are still those that can see through the lie that college is the only way you will make any money or be happy in your life. Some of the most famous people we know never went to college, or dropped out soon after starting. Bill Gates, one of the richest men alive and the creator of Microsoft dropped out of Harvard after 2 years. Bill Gates was only 10 points away from a perfect score on his SAT. This goes to show you that education definitely isn’t the only way to be successful in life. Other people that join the ranks of successful people without college degrees include Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motors, Steven Spielberg, a world famous director and producer, and Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook and a billionaire. Obviously college is not going to guarantee success, and not attending college isn’t going to guarantee failure. There is an unknown factor that contributes to a person’s success that has nothing to do with school at all. Maybe this is drive, or maybe it’s a matter of intelligence, but one thing we do know is that the notion the school is all important is wrong.