Silfee+Reading+Repsonse+2

I found it very interesting that in //My Freshman Year,// Rebekkah Nathan discusses ethnicity and how most of the minority students in her university hung out and ate with people of other ethnicities, while white kids seemed to try to keep their social circles to people of just their ethnicity. I found this interesting because this novel was only written in 2005, and the information was observed only in 2002. It seems to me that this demographic has changed quite a lot since then. Now, if you were to go into a dining hall on campus you would see groups of many different ethnicities and genders sitting together to eat. I feel like this novel was written such a short time ago, but that this particular study would provide a whole new range of results if it were to be done today. I also thought that the story she told at the end of the chapter about the colored girl who went back to her room to eat, as many other minorities did, was very sad to me. I believe that people are people no matter what color they are. It saddens me to think that people felt that they had to eat in their rooms in order to get away from people who did judge them based on that, and what saddens me even more is the fact that this type of thing still does go on today, even though it has gotten seemingly better since the time that this novel was written. Another thing that I found interesting from this section of the novel was that in the beginning she talked about the summer reading assignment and the class that was required for freshman as a way to follow-up on what they read but also give students a sense of community. Last year, my sister was a freshman in college while I was a senior in high school. At her school, they have a similar program to the one that is mentioned in this novel. As I was reading it I was wondering why Bloomsburg doesn't have one of these programs, not that I'm complaining. Then I got to the part where she talks about how they decided the program didn't work because it didn't interest the students and no one really read the book. It made me wonder if something like that happened here at Bloom and if that's why we don't have a freshman seminar program. As for the new reading assignment, I found it to be much more interesting that //On Ethnography//. However, I noticed a pattern between the two readings. In //On Ethnography,// the author wrote about how it's important to know certain words in order to really understand what's going on in the novel and proceeded to give us these words and their definitions. In //The Mind at Work// I noticed that the author did the same thing. However, I felt as though the author of //The Mind at Work// did a better job of keeping my attention while giving me these definitions because they used the words while telling stories about certain professions in their family. I also feel as though the style in which //The Mind at Work// is written makes it easier to compare it with //My Freshman Year//. //The Mind at Work// is already talking about how people are judged based on their ethnographic background such as their race and even their job. The third chapter of //My Freshman Year// was all about the way that people are judged at AnyU by what color their skin is, mostly. I feel that this is something that we all do, judging people, but that doesn't necessarily make it the right or even a necessary thing to do. Being judged by who you are, whether it be a black person or a plumber, is not something that anyone wants to go through, however, we all do. I don't really understand why these things take place and it honestly saddens me to say that I've been judged, but I've also been the judger and I still couldn't tell you why it happens. That's something that I'd personally like to find out a little more about with the help of my classmates.