Community Service

Wilshire/The Pond Assisted living
Supervisor: Alice 2245437054

I did 5 hours on may 18 and may 19

My community service experience was very interesting actually. I met many different people who were so happy when i came into the room and also they were very thankful that i helped them with something. I began my community service hours by sorting DVD and VHS movies, their were actually about 500 and i sorted them alphabetically that was rough. After finishing that, i asked them if i could interact with the elderly more, in which i began to do. I played Wii bowling with them, played poker, baked, ran a sing-a-long, and played a game "you be the judge" in which they read court cases and they explain what they would have done. You be the judge was the most interesting for me because it was cool to see how they felt about certain ideal in which i had a totally different view because of the age difference. For one of the cases a boy was expelled from school for wearing an American flag upside down. This boy brought this case all the way to the supreme court. The elderly explained that that was the right thing to do, to expel the boy from school, because some of them being war veterans and all. Then one of the war vets asked me my opinion and i explain that it was our right to wear what we want as long as its not of illegal things or actions, and this is how our school did it. Some agreed and some didn't but during the ten or so cases it was interesting seeing the different views of the elderly and how it differed from my own views. Also when i was leaving The Ponds i saw a man that i knew from poker walking out to his car with a walker with his wife. I asked them if they needed help and at first the wife said no were fine in a firm voice like she didn't want help from me. But then i saw the man and i said "remember me from poker" and he said o yes yes and i explained to the wife that we played poker so then she let me help him into the car and to put the walker into the trunk. Then the wife reached into her pocket and pulled 10 dollars and held it out to me. I respectfully declined. I thought this was very interesting that the wife thought that i needed something from her to help them out. She probably felt like a teen asking to help the elderly was irregular and they needed something in return. This is probably because teens don't always respect the elderly and they feel like they need to repay those teens who are nice enough to help, but that's not the case. Everyone at The Ponds was very nice, respectful, and wanted the help from the community. I will be coming back soon to visit the the great people i met and shared stories with.

yo.....you have a chinaman under you car

today while watching the movie crash, i thought it was intresting how the different races saw each other and how they put them in a socialclass just by the way they looked. The lady who saw the black men got scared and thought they were gangbangers, which they were. But the guy played by ludacris is a sophistocated black man who believes he is in a higher social class. like he said "i dont steal from other black people and i am deffinately not getting on the bus". But he thinks its ok to rob white people. Also both the white woman and the owner of the shop that got robbed both thought that the mexican worker who fixed the locks was a gangbanger just because he was mexican and had tattoos. when the white cop pulled over the two black people in the navigator then harrased his wife and he did nothing because he felt like he was in  lower class than him and just because he was a cop didnt hit him. the wife said he should have hit him and then said something about being a real nigga because he believes hes in a higher social class, and he may be. race and social class always go  hand in hand. Whenever someone relates to their race, most of the time i think they are trying to bring social class into it.

Mariah Carey is black?

For the last couple of days in class we have been talking about race and the distinctions people have about race. One of the days Sal put a lineup of sports balls and told us to class them. I classed them as hard balls and softer balls because even though i knew they looked like they were for a certain sport, i knew each ball couldn't and wouldn't be used for that sport. Our teacher explained that this is how people look at different races. Even thought a basketball looks like a basketball, it may be soft and not be used to play basketball. so people sometimes see a dark skin person next to another dark skin person and think "o they are probably both black" but that may be far from the truth. Their backgrounds could be from totally different parts of the world, but we would never know without "feeling the balls" and talking to the people to understand who they are. Our social construction of race started when they sailed to South Africa then the united states then back to England. They had four classes for people: Black, White, Native American, and Asian. This is how it has been and wont change until people see that people set into many different races and that every person is different. This concept was very hard for me to wrap my head around, but today i started to understand all about race and its pretty interesting how people perceive other races. This country would be totally different if those people were to walk down to Africa because they would have seen the many different people and skin colors, as Sal said. I wish they would have walked, but they didn't so i guess we need to change the world.

When your dad is mr. Moneybags.....your mr. Moneybags jr.

Being a child living in a certain social class may be difficult because their parents may strive to push them into a higher social class or they may be happy with them staying the same social class. This depends on what social class the child's parents came from and how they were raised. In the movie we watched in class, the very wealthy WASP's who's parents began making money in the 13th colonies has stayed in the same social class because their parents are content with where they were-and they should be, looking at the houses they live in. The children are proud that they are labeled as a WASP. But their are negative aspects of being in a social class like this, you look down upon people who are in a lower class than you even if you don't know the person. This relates to the way that they were raised and the morals and values taught by their parents. The WASP's were raised to think that they were better looking, smarter, wealthier, and dressed better. This kept them in a very tight circle of people because they looked down upon everyone else. One example of someone they would look down upon is the people who lived in the trailer in the movie.This family is at one of the lowest social levels. They live in a small trailer and the mother work's at Burger King full time. The young man that we met was looking to go to college and wanted to be a lawyer. His mother was content with the life they lived because she knew that it was very hard to get out of her social class and didn't want to. The boy said he was embarrassed with where he lived, because he hung out with people in a higher social class than him. His mother said that he thinks hes in a higher social class and he needs to know where he came from because this is his home. It is very hard to move around in social class because most parents teach them what they know and have learned from their past Which keeps them close to their social class. When we played monopoly i noticed that at the end of the game, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer or if you were in the middle class you stayed the same. Nobody at my table moved up or down in their social class. This is just the same as real life, because it is very hard to move into or out of a different social class. This is because the people from other social classes look down on people from lower social classes. This makes people from lower classes feel uncomfortable to move up in class thus restricting them to fulfill their dreams.

I have two neighbors... one is a doctor and one is a truck driver..... wait... they would never live next to each other

These societal status's that come with job description are all related to the wealth of the family and how it relates to others. A truck drivers status in society is low because it is a blue collar job. Also being a truck driver doesn't require any education so the people that drive trucks have maybe dropped out of high school or college so they have a lower social status then other jobs that require education. On the total opposite side of the spectrum, a doctor requires many years of education which is a tough thing to do and also cost alot of money. So the cost and length of a persons education also effects a persons social status greatly. In class we talked about income relating to social status and the difference in income for blue collar jobs and white collar jobs. I thought this was intresting to think of how different the social status of a person can be depending  just on their job and income.