Class Entry

Jay Barden
This week in class we had a couple of readings on sexism. One of the articles that we read was I want a wife. This article represents the man’s typical viewpoint on how a wife should be. In the article, it talks about how he wants a wife to have a job, take care of the kids, and pay for him to go to school. This is the epitome of how a man views his wife is described in this essay. A man wants a wife to do all of the “dirty” work for him. This includes cleaning the house, washing the dishes, and other different types of chores. We also read an article about the Barbie doll which was amusing in my opinion. The Barbie was created by a male so all of the female activists were very shocked when this doll came out. The body parts that are on the Barbie such as her large breasts are not proportional to her body at all. This is why many female activists have a problem with the Barbie. It is a doll that somehow represents women in general, in not a good way. Most people view the Barbie doll as a girl that looks like she wants to audition for a playboy magazine.
The activity that we did in class in creating our own personal Barbie dolls was very interesting. My doll was called Farmer Joe Barbie. It was not the typical Barbie of having large breasts or a perfect hairstyle like Ken does, however, it was a Barbie doll of a typical farmer. His biography states that he grew up in a small town and married a local farmer girl named Suzanne. Other dolls created in my group were Suzanne, Average Joe and Patty. These dolls did not represent beauty like the normal Barbie doll does; however, they showed normal people as a doll. The dolls that we created were realistic in representing the average American person.
This week in class we also had daily allusions. These are very different from words of the day. I think the daily allusion is a more complicated way of starting out the day instead of a word of the day word. I would much rather have a word to choose from when studying for a quiz or a test than have to worry about all of the different assets of daily allusions. The journals were made shorter which is a positive however the warm up exercises were made ten times harder. I am just going to have to take the good with the bad in this case. The allusions are just random words clumped together that nobody understands at first but when students finally find out what they mean, they kind of make sense. I hope the allusions do not get more complicated as the year goes on or I feel like I will struggle with AP Language Arts. I still have to do the reading that was assigned for the weekend called Kingston “No name Women” and I am very interested to find out what this article is about. I hope it is short and to the point because I have other homework to do tonight.