Kyle's Academy Blog

Talking about gender roles during our Jane Eyre discussion really got me thinking. Gender roles has changed dramatically over time, and will probably continue to do so.

This lends to the question of why do we have gender roles? Many of them seem antiquated, and are continuously getting replaced. They also cause discrimination towards people who don’t follow specific gender roles.

In the beginning of the species, gender roles would have made practical sense. The physically stronger male could hunt for food, while the woman who was better equipped to take care of babies. But in today’s society, both woman and men can “bring home the bacon” as making money is not dependent on strength in most facets of modern society. We also have baby formula, etc. So are gender roles just left-overs from our start as a species? Or are they engrained within our genetic code?

In the future, gender roles will probably shift even more, but will they ever really disappear?

These are two topics that have been debated for a long time. After 9/11 and the Patriot act these ideas have been pushed into the spotlight. They both have strong arguments making it hard to find a winner.

When the Patriot act passed, every body lost a little bit of individual freedom. But at the same time, it was supposed to make everybody a little bit safer, and it probably did, but does that make a loss of individual freedom and privacy worth it? Is it fair that the government can listen in to our personal phone calls? Read our emails? Even though most people haven’t done anything illegal, they still have a basic right to privacy and probably wouldn’t appreciate losing that. But if there’s one person, who’s phone calls or emails talk about blowing up a building, or planting a bomb somewhere, it could be worth it to save that loss of life. But if we keep losing more and more of our personal privacy, for the good of the community, where will it end? It would be potentially safer if we had video cameras in all our homes, watching us to see if we were making bombs, etc, but that would be an even larger invasion of privacy. There has to be a place where it ends.

First, I went to Kate Kadleck’s blog. She wrote about how she frequently writes things, but also leaves the half-finished. Because of this, she’s really excited for the short story project because it’ll force her to create something that she’ll be proud of.

I said:

I feel like this happens to me too, except for me it's more like I get an idea and I never write anything down. In our eighth grade class we had to write a "vocab" story and that was one of my favorite things just because it gave me an excuse to write something. I'm really enjoying this assignment.

Then I went to visit Marika’s blog. One of her posts was about if she had a sudden moment of JK Rowling-esque “insight” and what it would be about.

I said:

I really enjoyed reading this post, your writing style is really happy and exciting, especially the emoticons. Regarding the theoretical "insight" that you're talking about, I have to wonder if it really exists, or if you just find it by writing and creating and occasionally a bit of luck. I guess there's no sure way to tell for sure.