Length: Whatever fits is about right.
Due: the last day of Final Exams, Wednesday, May 20, Midnight (By Blackboard)
Preview: Through Sunday, May 17.
One of the issues we’ve discussed from time to time this semester, is diversity–broadening the usual considerations to include issues of social class as well. Both of these question are designed to provoke your thinking about this issue. Choose the one which interests you the most, or the one which you feel more comfortable answering.
Do Either Question:
Question 1. Diversity in my “neighborhood”
Neighborhoods are elusive things. Our sense of a neighborhood varies with our age and with our access to mobility. If you do this exercise, I’d like to have you choose the “neighborhood” of your Senior High years.
1Return to American Fact Finder and enter the zip code of your high school years. If by any chance you resided in one zip code and went to high school in another, enter them both. Once you’ve located your area, zoom in to consider just those parts of the area which you considered your “turf”.
2.Use the mapping function (2000 census) to explore issues of diversity: educational, economic, ethnic, social, whatever you can find.
3.How heterogeneous or homogeneous was your “neighborhood”.
4.Regardless of how diverse, in what ways, if any, did you capitalize on the diversity (through friendships, visits to households different from your own, etc.)
5.Remembering People like Us and discussions from class. Reflect on your neighborhood and its influence on you as a teenager, with special emphasis on the issues raised by Shipler and the discussions we’ve been having about Terkel.
Question 2.My imaginary circle of Kin.
From the “real” characters in Shipler and Terkel and the fictional ones in Samaritan, choose ten to construct a kinship circle. For each, explain what they would add to enrich your life and make it more satisfying, and what you could add to their life to accomplish the same end. Kinship involves reciprocity–it doesn’t just go one way. I’ll be looking for breadth of choices...don’t make them all from one source.
