Summaries

Tannen's article was very interesting and a pretty easy read. The first part was most interesting to me since it talked about basically gender roles in a conversation. Tannen talked about how women are more likely to care about relationships and men are more likely to care about power and control, and she related this to gender roles in society. The connection made a lot of sense. Later, she talked more about how someone's power can effect how they influence a conversation. I can relate to this with a personal experience. My senior year, I was the drum major of my marching band, meaning I conducted the band while they performed. Being that I was used to having the most powerful position among other students I was used to giving my input for ideas of how the performance should go when talking about it with other students. But when I had a conversation with my band director one day after rehearsal I forgot my "place" and offended him by putting forth too much of my opinion. I told him it would be better if we did one idea and he responded by saying, "The band will do whatever I want the band to do." From then on I always made sure to recognize my "place" within a conversation.

Giroux’s article was also very interesting in that I had had an idea about the fallacies in Disney movies all along. Coming from a Native American background, I always knew that Pocahontas had many fallacies in it. I agree with the author that the Disney empire has outstretched too far into the everyday lives of Americans. While I agree that Disney has many incorrect moments, I don’t think Disney was created to teach children history or teach children how gender roles work in society. Although Disney is what the majority of kids are watching nowadays, it is still a form of entertainment, not research.