I became a member of the Big Brother/Big Sisters of America program my senior year of high school. It was introduced to the junior and senior classes, and I was definitely intrigued. I was given an interview and then I was admitted into the program. The chosen Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and I were given a meet and greet with our Little Brothers and Little Sisters. Our schools are across the street from one another, which made visiting them even better. We all had to sign a contract, stating that we were satisfied with each other. My Little Brother, Kevin Case, was a second grader. He was very quiet and shy for our first couple of meetings, but then he started to warm up to me. I would bring toys and games for us to play. One of my classmates and I decided to visit our Little Brothers together, but then he stopped coming. The reason that these little boys were given Big Brothers and Big Sisters is the give them a role model to look up to, someone that they anticipate seeing. Therefore, I took it upon myself to adopt his Little Brother, Tylen. Tylen was such an energetic child that I do not understand how my friend could neglect him. I found being a Big Sister so rewarding that I did not want to say good-bye to them. I already knew that I would be leaving to attend college in the fall, so I gave them each a present to remember me.
Since my project revolves around the behaviors of our adolescent generation, I have decided to adopt my own “little brothers” and “little sisters.” As an employee of a local tutoring center, I have decided to adopt some of those kids. My aunt-in-law has two nieces that are eight-years-old and eleven-years-old. They both attend the tutoring center and they seem a little too sheltered for me. I want to take them out to the movies and just hang out with them. As typical Vietnamese children, they are taught to understand the need to achieve academically. They attend a private school that has two classes for each grade; A for the more accelerated students and B for the average students.
Another child that I am adopting from the tutoring center is Tommy. I am assigned to him to make sure that he completes his homework. He loves to talk and is easily distracted. I try to be stern with him, but he knows that I will not go through with my threats. The other children at the tutoring center all know my name and they come up to me and ask me to check their homework. I feel as though they know what to expect from me and they have learned to respect me. Though they are young, they know when to be respectful. I just want to children to know that they can talk to me about anything.
Children need role models to show them the correct way to behave. Parents are usually held accountable for their child’s behavior, even though it may seem as though they have done nothing wrong. Our young generation is extremely cunning and they are able to manipulate their parents. This is terribly disturbing, but completely true. Kind parents can be taken advantage of by their “sweet, innocent” children. The stereotype of Asian children is quickly changing. Some young children are not worried about their schoolwork anymore, and academics are usually the top priority of Asian parents. As an Asian with completely stereotyped Asian parents, I can confirm the need to achieve academically. Asian children are supposed to leave the nest and acquire a lucrative career to support their parents in the future. It seems as though this young generation does not understand this tradition or they just do not want to acknowledge it. It is not only the young children but my own peers are disregarding this tradition. They already want to put their parents in nursing homes in the near future.
The alphabet democratized culture by allowing ordinary people to become literate. Before the alphabet, reading and writing was limited to people of wealth and intelligence. It was reserved for scholars and royalty, who believed that they were superior because of their literacy. Ordinary people only had to learn twenty-two characters and their sounds. This allowed literacy to permeate rapidly, and it allowed people of different cultures to communicate. By democratizing culture, the alphabet broke a barrier between the ordinary people and the wealthy, “superior” people. Another thing that the alphabet did was give us something concrete to better understand its origin and to continue with the future. Writing preserves the past, giving us answers to many of our questions. If stories were passed down orally, then they could have been forgotten and easily altered.
Archaeology helps Bible scholars by giving them something tangible to identify an area that was inhabited by our ancestors, the people that were in the Bible. It helps because it gives us concrete proof of what the Bible states. Finding artifacts permits us to pinpoint certain areas, in the Bible, to their specific times. Archaeologists can revisit sites and find things that they have missed earlier by changing the way they dig. Dame Kathleen Kenyon developed digging horizontally in sections. The two ways to dig are vertically or horizontally.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Week 03: Your Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.