Junior Theme

Just warning you that this post is extremely random.
So we started talking about Junior Theme on Thursday, and since then I have been struck with the difficulty of thinking of what exactly the outcome will be. We have not gotten an exact outline of the paper or all that it entails yet, but isn't it just another research paper? My sister just turned hers in after countless hours of editing and re-editing. Talk about stressful I plan to just go into it thinking of it as another paper, but on something that I am actually interested in, and I feel like that will not put as much stress on myself.
The theme that I am choosing to do is on education. More specifically, my favorite topic that I have chosen is on students with disabilities, and how they are viewed in society, or even by regular ed students. This is a topic that is very important to me, and I can't wait to start learning more about it, which seems weird that I am really excited to start writing a paper.
The words "Junior Theme" to me have a very negative connotation. It is something that we have been hearing about from older siblings or have been daunted by since freshman year. Should it really be viewed as something so stressful and unnecessary? Yes, I am supporting writing a paper right now because I for one am a person who likes to research a topic that I am interested in, and I think that I will have a really good outcome of this paper. Anyone else?

Barbie Turns 49

I was looking on the NPR site today and I came across the latest talk, which was how Barbie, the doll that every girl grew up with, turned 49 on Sunday. It came as quite a shock to me, because I thought these dolls were much more recent than that. As I kept listening to the talk show, I was astonished to hear all of the political aspects and issues that surrounded a piece of plastic since their worldwide fame does not show any of this.
One of the issues was the tilt in her head. Don't remember that? That is because the shape of Barbie's face became upright because the head tilt connoted something towards the feminist movement. Also, initially, Sears, the first place to sell Barbie, would not sell the doll because if she would be a real person, her body would not be "proportional" if you know what I mean.
An interesting fact that I learned though, was the background of the doll. She had an entire history that got shafted to the background out of her fame. The original face was taken from that of a 40 year old to look like a 17 year old, which I find both weird and confusing.
I am relating this back to our women and children theme from before because, through this doll that seemed to change every 3 year olds life, the more important issues seem to parallel those of the ones we discussed in class. The picture above is of the first ever Barbie. Who knew Barbie had so many issues?

Child Study Center

After last week's discussion on Child Development: then and now, I was very interested in different ways Self Regulation has inevitably changed in the past years. After searching online, I came across the Child Study Center, a center whose work revolves around the developmental growth of infants in Virginia. I found it very interesting to see what interests children more than anything, which is animals, and how reading books either has huge or not so huge effects on their learning environment. It might just be me who finds this interesting, because I take such a liking to psychology and understanding what is going on in the minds of those who can not communicate to such an ability. It really surprises me, though, to read from this website that the picture books that we clung to so much in our childhood could possibly have no effect on us the first one hundred times that we read it. So how has Self Regulation changed? I believe that in the past two or three decades, children have been spoiled so much as children, that in the study we learned about in class, it disables their ability to pay attention for more than five minutes at a time. Through this, I think that we are really teaching our parents more than our parents are teaching us at these young ages because no one wants to make the same error twice. So are we really teaching our parents what to do, and will we make these same mistakes as parents?

What has our youth really come to?