On July 24, 1991 I was born into the generation of millennials. Not only was I an African American female who would experiences living in different social classes, but I was also a member a technologically privileged and progressive bunch. I have grown up with a unique socialization background, experiencing working class, middle class, and upper middle class social status throughout life. Each of these stages of my life along with society's progressive attitude towards my ascribed characteristics helped shape my sociological perspective and contributed to my achieved status as a college student training to be a professional.
While the barriers of my ascribed characteristics may have limited my educational and social opportunities 50 years ago, the millennial era provided my with a more equal chance to grab a hold of these opportunities. As a woman and an African American, I have not been held back by outdated views on education like previous generations. This access to educational opportunities that improved with my age helped socialize me to embrace the preferred culture of our society that values higher education, appreciates the arts, and wants to influence society beyond their household. Living in America where there are many readily available education opportunities, public and private, also contributed to getting me to the point I am at now. This environmental factor is key in an individual's life as Max Gladwell points out in the Outliers. I would not have the same educational resources had I been born in a third world country. In saying that, I was born in Savannah, GA which is not particularly known as the best place for public school education. Obtaining the ability to go to the best schools there became a factor of class.
Throughout a majority of my life, my parents have been divorced and I have lived in a single-parent household. In the earlier stages of my life, my mom was a part of the working class and towards the middle of my life landed in the lower middle class. But because she worked in the school system, she valued and got more involved in our education than most working class families are able to. This also meant that my at home socialization experience matched the middle class ones that Annette Lareau talks about in Unequal Childhoods Class, Race, and Family Life. After work, she often came home and read to and with my sister and I before bed, emphasizing that recreational and educational reading in our lives can go beyond the class room. She also got us involved in structured activities like ballet, art classes, theater classes, and sports for my athletic sister. This differs a lot from the child-led playtime of the working class in Lareau's book. She also bought us huge workbooks for different subject matters that we had the summer to complete. While she provided us with the educational values of the classes above us, my dad provided the social one.
My dad's class status was already middle class and transitioned to upper middle class by the time I was in middle school. He took us on vacations and cultured us with the experience of the elite. These trips included visiting like Miami, Flordia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland, Charleston, South Carolina; Las Vegas, Nevada; St. Louis, Missouri; and many others. Sometimes we went on tours and to see baseball games, but most of the time it was to shop and eat with the elite. While I am not a fan of what I call reckless spending, I can say that I have been in (because I refused to shop in them unlike my sister) stores like Sacs Fifth Avenue, Nordstorm, Brooks Brothers, Brighton, and Tiffany's. I have also gotten to enjoy food of more expense chain restaurants like Ruth's Chris and local one's that is the choice of the city's doctors and lawyers. As a result of these interactions that I experienced with the other side on vacation, I have become a versatile individual that can communicate with the range of social classes. This became key in my school experience where as I moved from better ones to the best, and where I slowly became the minority.
I started my schooling experience out in a Montessori school where we were allowed to learn at our own pace in pre-K, where I recall being able to write my name in print and cursive at that time. From kindergarten to second grade I experienced regular public schools until my mom sought to place me in a magnet school from 3rd to 5th grade, where I went to the best elementary school in the county. After that I tried a year at a magnet middle school that geared towards the arts. I was in the visual arts program before mom decided that the environment that the school was in was not what she wanted for me. That's when I made the transition to private school for middle school, where I got a firm foundation in grammar, math, and history. I also got exposed to the thoughts and beliefs of the white, upper-middle class. While my high experience school was more diverse, in most of my classes at this magnet art school I was still the minority. Our high school is the best in Savannah and constantly receives recognition at the academic level and the art level with our graduating class having the school's first Harvard student. This is an exceptional accomplishment considering the school was first chartered in the late 1990's and slowly transitioned into public magnet. While I enjoyed being a visual art major here, I also got better educational opportunities like having honors only options for most of the classes and having a variety of AP classes and after school sports, clubs, and activities (excluding basketball, football, and baseball which the school did not have) . Going here meant that you were going to college, and these educational factors along with the social class ones have given e the opportunity to reach the achieved status of a college student with hard work.
My experience in college will prepare me for a slightly higher paying career as a teacher, but it will also given me opportunities to engage in the educational world or research which could lead to other options when I am not in the classroom. I will also have the intellectual ability to converse with others of different academic areas because the liberal arts experience enforces well roundedness, forcing students to take classes beyond their subject matters. I will also experience the privilege of society valuing my views and diversified culture. I will carry into my sociological awareness and perspective along with my unique culture and hard work ethic to become the best educator I know how to be. Like Jay McLeod mentions in Ain't No Making It, the school plays a key factor in sorting children in different tracks of the social world and social class in the attitudes presented towards different individuals in their educational experience. I want to see school, instead, be made into a place tracking students in a social sense is put to an end, and all are given the equal playing grounds regardless of whether their culture is preferred in society. I think that school is a powerful place socialization that can take its power to the limit for the better. With more effort it could even counteract the family socialization experience in those classes where education is not upheld as highly. Most of a child's time is spend in school, which is more than enough hours to make an incredibly impact on how they feel about education and view themselves in society. I like to examine the conflict approach to viewing education and use it as the starting point of improving the system. Improving education means a more educated society, which means less social prejudice and a smaller gap between social classes. Regardless of social class and financial background, school played a key role in my life and he lives of my parent who continued elevating their education in adult life. It gave us the opportunity move up the social and economic ladder, which some people like the young Hallway hangers see as impossible. Education is not a social problem it is a social issue that has huge affects society and should be treat that way. These ideas are products of my socialization experience and this is my sociological perspective.
While the barriers of my ascribed characteristics may have limited my educational and social opportunities 50 years ago, the millennial era provided my with a more equal chance to grab a hold of these opportunities. As a woman and an African American, I have not been held back by outdated views on education like previous generations. This access to educational opportunities that improved with my age helped socialize me to embrace the preferred culture of our society that values higher education, appreciates the arts, and wants to influence society beyond their household. Living in America where there are many readily available education opportunities, public and private, also contributed to getting me to the point I am at now. This environmental factor is key in an individual's life as Max Gladwell points out in the Outliers. I would not have the same educational resources had I been born in a third world country. In saying that, I was born in Savannah, GA which is not particularly known as the best place for public school education. Obtaining the ability to go to the best schools there became a factor of class.
Throughout a majority of my life, my parents have been divorced and I have lived in a single-parent household. In the earlier stages of my life, my mom was a part of the working class and towards the middle of my life landed in the lower middle class. But because she worked in the school system, she valued and got more involved in our education than most working class families are able to. This also meant that my at home socialization experience matched the middle class ones that Annette Lareau talks about in Unequal Childhoods Class, Race, and Family Life. After work, she often came home and read to and with my sister and I before bed, emphasizing that recreational and educational reading in our lives can go beyond the class room. She also got us involved in structured activities like ballet, art classes, theater classes, and sports for my athletic sister. This differs a lot from the child-led playtime of the working class in Lareau's book. She also bought us huge workbooks for different subject matters that we had the summer to complete. While she provided us with the educational values of the classes above us, my dad provided the social one.
My dad's class status was already middle class and transitioned to upper middle class by the time I was in middle school. He took us on vacations and cultured us with the experience of the elite. These trips included visiting like Miami, Flordia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland, Charleston, South Carolina; Las Vegas, Nevada; St. Louis, Missouri; and many others. Sometimes we went on tours and to see baseball games, but most of the time it was to shop and eat with the elite. While I am not a fan of what I call reckless spending, I can say that I have been in (because I refused to shop in them unlike my sister) stores like Sacs Fifth Avenue, Nordstorm, Brooks Brothers, Brighton, and Tiffany's. I have also gotten to enjoy food of more expense chain restaurants like Ruth's Chris and local one's that is the choice of the city's doctors and lawyers. As a result of these interactions that I experienced with the other side on vacation, I have become a versatile individual that can communicate with the range of social classes. This became key in my school experience where as I moved from better ones to the best, and where I slowly became the minority.
I started my schooling experience out in a Montessori school where we were allowed to learn at our own pace in pre-K, where I recall being able to write my name in print and cursive at that time. From kindergarten to second grade I experienced regular public schools until my mom sought to place me in a magnet school from 3rd to 5th grade, where I went to the best elementary school in the county. After that I tried a year at a magnet middle school that geared towards the arts. I was in the visual arts program before mom decided that the environment that the school was in was not what she wanted for me. That's when I made the transition to private school for middle school, where I got a firm foundation in grammar, math, and history. I also got exposed to the thoughts and beliefs of the white, upper-middle class. While my high experience school was more diverse, in most of my classes at this magnet art school I was still the minority. Our high school is the best in Savannah and constantly receives recognition at the academic level and the art level with our graduating class having the school's first Harvard student. This is an exceptional accomplishment considering the school was first chartered in the late 1990's and slowly transitioned into public magnet. While I enjoyed being a visual art major here, I also got better educational opportunities like having honors only options for most of the classes and having a variety of AP classes and after school sports, clubs, and activities (excluding basketball, football, and baseball which the school did not have) . Going here meant that you were going to college, and these educational factors along with the social class ones have given e the opportunity to reach the achieved status of a college student with hard work.
My experience in college will prepare me for a slightly higher paying career as a teacher, but it will also given me opportunities to engage in the educational world or research which could lead to other options when I am not in the classroom. I will also have the intellectual ability to converse with others of different academic areas because the liberal arts experience enforces well roundedness, forcing students to take classes beyond their subject matters. I will also experience the privilege of society valuing my views and diversified culture. I will carry into my sociological awareness and perspective along with my unique culture and hard work ethic to become the best educator I know how to be. Like Jay McLeod mentions in Ain't No Making It, the school plays a key factor in sorting children in different tracks of the social world and social class in the attitudes presented towards different individuals in their educational experience. I want to see school, instead, be made into a place tracking students in a social sense is put to an end, and all are given the equal playing grounds regardless of whether their culture is preferred in society. I think that school is a powerful place socialization that can take its power to the limit for the better. With more effort it could even counteract the family socialization experience in those classes where education is not upheld as highly. Most of a child's time is spend in school, which is more than enough hours to make an incredibly impact on how they feel about education and view themselves in society. I like to examine the conflict approach to viewing education and use it as the starting point of improving the system. Improving education means a more educated society, which means less social prejudice and a smaller gap between social classes. Regardless of social class and financial background, school played a key role in my life and he lives of my parent who continued elevating their education in adult life. It gave us the opportunity move up the social and economic ladder, which some people like the young Hallway hangers see as impossible. Education is not a social problem it is a social issue that has huge affects society and should be treat that way. These ideas are products of my socialization experience and this is my sociological perspective.
