Structuration Theory

Safety Rest Areas and Welcome Centers in Virginia (VDOT)

My daily routine involves getting up at 5:30 in the morning, taking my partner to his job (school bus driver) at 6:30, and then driving down I-81 and I-64 from Harrisonburg to  my job as a first grade teacher in Waynesboro. At 7:30, the kids start rolling in, and at 2:35 they go home; I typically stay after for about an hour, and at 3:30 I drive back to Harrisonburg, pick up my partner from work, then go home. 

After working several really horrible jobs, I consider teaching to be very freeing and enjoyable. However, this is just psychological, an effect of being surrounded by really great people and having two wonderful principals as my bosses - because in reality, my job is actually very closely regulated. While I do get some choice in what I do - what books to read to the kids, what movies to show them, what worksheets and activities to do - the content and amount of time I spend on that content is very rigid. Regulations and standards regarding content and allocated time are set forth by the Virginia Department of Education and by the Waynesboro School Board. 

Many norms also constrain how I conduct myself at school. For instance, there are many things I do not talk about in my capacity as a teacher, or that I only discuss with certain students. Many of my students are fascinated by science and biology, but I only discuss evolution beyond a surface level with select students because of the high degree of religiosity in this community. For example, one student - I will call him Jack - is very interested in every aspect of science, and has a very big imagination. He once asked me if mermaids might be real, and since I knew his family had a deep respect for science, I talked to him about evolution and a fringe theory called Aquatic Ape Theory, and I encouraged him to research the theory with his father at home. He was fascinated, as was his father (he thought Aquatic Ape Theory was hysterical), and Jack came in the next day begging to know more. However, he wanted me to share my knowledge with the rest of the class, since he is a very shy boy; not wanting to squash his interest, I decided to share with them his discoveries. But since I have several students for whom their parents would not be appreciative of such topics, I approached it from an angle of, "some people believe in creation, other people such as scientists, believe in evolution. Evolution is..." 

There are two norms regulating discussion of this topic; community attitudes towards science, in addition to the norm among educators of avoiding flak form overbearing parents. It might seem silly, but a lot of us do indeed feel this way - I feel this way more than a lot of my colleagues as an LGBT man in this community. Teachers from the LGBT community are very heavily scrutinized, regardless of if the topic at hand even has to do with gender or sexuality!

Aquatic Ape Theory (The Aquatic Ape)


References

Aquatic Ape Theory Diagram. (n.d.). The Aquatic Ape. Retrieved from https://theaquaticape.org/human-evolution/aat/.

Safety Rest Areas and Welcome Centers in Virginia. (n.d.). Virginia Department of Transportation. Retrieved from https://www.virginiadot.org/travel/map-rest-area.asp.

Standards of Learning. Virginia Department of Education. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/index.shtml

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Shrinking Borders of Palestine

Image
Ramadan lanterns in Gaza (Arab News, 2021) Palestine is probably the most drastic example in contemporary times of changing borders. Palestine was an administrative region linked to Syria in the Ottoman Empire from 1517 until the end of World War I in 1918 (Britannica). After that, it became a mandatory region of Great Britain, and after World War II, in 1947, Great Britain ceded the Palestine to the burgeoning zionist movement there, which would come to form the state of Israel, which was officially founded in 1948. Initially, Palestine and Israel were partitioned by the United Nations, with each nation getting approximately half of the territory of the mandatory region. However, over the years, Israel has encroached on Palestine's borders, creating settlements and waging wars with the Arabs to gain more land for Israel (ie. Six Day War) (Britannica).  As of 2022, Palestine is only in control of 6,220 square kilometers of land, compared to Israel's 22,072 square kilometers (CI
Read more

Guantánamo Bay Naval Base

Image
Cuba with the location of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base highlighted in red (Lindsay, 2017) The US Naval base of Guantánamo Bay was first established in 1903; Spain ceded Cuba to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War in the Treaty of Paris. Cuba never became a formal territory of the United States , unlike Puerto Rico, however there remained a strong military presence on the island after the war (Britannica). In the subsequent years, the US government passed several pieces of legislation such as the Platt Amendment which asserted the US’s right to intervene in Cuban politics and establish bases there (National Archives, 1903). This right of the US was incorporated into the constitution of the new Cuban Republic , thus leading to the construction of Guantánamo Bay. The establishment of Guantánamo Bay as a naval base, along with the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901, was indicative of the US’s increasing power internationally. The United States is not considered to h
Read more

Women's Role in the Military

Image
For this blog post, I examined recent reports by the US Department of Defense on the current administration's goal to further integrate women into the armed forces. These two articles largely focused on ways the DoD hopes to increase female participation in the military, in addition to reasons why women belong there; they contend that diversity is necessary for the future of the US military , saying: "She said supervisors — including males and females — should look to find the best talent available and they need to embrace diversity, including age, experience, race and gender as absolutely key to developing the workforce we need to face the challenges of tomorrow." (Vergun, 2022) These articles encapsulate the things that frustrates me the most about feminism: how vague and malleable the term is. The word "feminist" represents a myriad of different, and completely disparate schools of philosophy; for instance, materialist feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir pri
Read more