Chapter 8: Gender Roles

Chapter 8: Gender Roles

In this chapter, I learned a lot about the difference between being a male and female and what that means in the aspect of the physical sex you were born, and what you may identify with even though you were born a certain way. For myself, I was born a girl and I never questioned for a moment that I was a female. I loved playing with baby dolls and barbies. I wanted to be mother when I grew up and never thought twice about what it would be like to be a boy instead. As far as my children go, I have two sons. My oldest is very much a boy, never was interested in anything that girls liked and is analytical and masculine. For my second son, he is more compassionate, emotional and likes to watch shows that are typically geared towards girls. He has never questioned whether or not he wanted to be a boy, he has just always been comfortable in his skin and liked what he liked, he never mattered to him that it was a "girly" thing to do. He equally likes sports, guns, and rough play. For a lot of people, it bothers them when a boy plays with girls toys, even more so than when a girl plays with boy toys. I feel like this double standard really hurts the generations before them, but the up and coming generations could care less. 

When I become a teacher, I will definitely apply this knowledge to my classrooms and make sure that I am a gender neutral planner for class activities and events. There is nothing more confusing for a child than to have an adult tell them what they should or should not like when it comes so naturally to them. I would want to make sure that I was always available to talk to my students who had questions, and never put them in a spot where they felt they could not be who they wanted to be, or what comes naturally to them as a person. 

What I learned in this chapter is that it is very important to be compassionate and sensitive to the feelings of others. It is confusing enough to go against what society has always told you what you should or should not like or do or be as a male or female. That girls should not play sports or cannot play as well as boys, or that men can never be as good of a parent to a child a woman simply because they are a man. These things are just not true. Of course there are many aspects to being a man or a woman that come more naturally, but the general rule should be that all people are created different but equal and you should never try and put somebody in a box they do not belong in when their heart tells them differently. One theorists I agree with to an extent is Bem. The Gender Schema theory is something that tells how a child learns how to identify with gender through their surroundings. Bem believed we recognized gender roles and identification much earlier than other theorists and I agree. At very young ages, little girls put on their mother's lipstick and pearls, walk around in their heels. They are learning through watching us. 

Chapter 7: Identity

Chapter 7: Identity

In Chapter seven, we read about Identity. A person’s identity is something very important and personal to each self. There are people who can go through whole lives and not really know who they are, and then there are people who start life with that sense of self and just always know exactly what they are about. For me, it took me well into my 20’s to figure out my identity and what kind of person I was and wanted to be. As a child I was abused by a member of our church, and I think that caused my mind to close in, and being raised in an Authoritarian type household, I wasn’t given much opportunity to discover myself. At a teenager, I was very introverted and solitary, I sought friendships online, and there I met my fist husband. I was married and had my first baby before I was out of high school for a full year. In this, my identity was lost. I became a wife and a mother. It took until I was 20 to realize I was being wrongfully abused and I did not deserve it, and neither did my son to grow up in that type of household. My first step to gaining my own identity was made the day I left my husband with my son in my arms. It still took a few more years to actually get past the pain and disillusionment and realize the core of who I am and what I want to be in this life. Development of the Identity happens for everybody differently, that is what I have learned just by being a human.

The way I could use this information, as well as my own experiences to help guide me in my own classroom would be to realize everyone has different tendencies. Not everybody knows themselves that well at any age. My job as a teacher is to observe and learn what I can about my students, so that I may be able to teach them the way they need to learn, or understand them and their circumstances, or identify when something in their personality has changed, and question why, whereas somebody else may not notice, it is my job to notice.  

What I learned in this chapter is that identity is a personal thing to every individual.How you grow as a person and develop into a human, a friend, a significant other, a son or daughter. These are all aspects to a person's identity. For myself, I realize that I can be a different person to the different people in my life. To my sons, my identity is to be their mother. To teach them, to guide them and secure a place in their life that they can always come to me for anything. To my parents, I am their daughter. I will seek them for guidance and knowledge for things I have yet to experience or understand. For my boyfriend, I am his best friend, his lover and his confidant. Each one of these pieces make up my identity as a person. I can be all of them at once, or I can break it down to be more of one thing to a certain person, given what they need of me.  Erikson's eight stages of Identity are spot on in my opinion. He breaks it down into detailed and identifiable stages that are easy to follow and gives great examples of what to expect all the way from birth to death. My favorite example would have to be Stage 6: Intimacy vs. Isolation. As a woman who is 31 years old, I fit right into this catagory and I feel like I can completely relate to this stage of development. Although I have never really felt like I fit into a perfect definition, nobody ever really does, this is definitely a stage of life that I can see and agree that I am right there in it. It is fascinating that it was written decades ago and yet here we are in all the cultural and societal changes and we can still relate to these theories.

Chapter 6: Moral Development

Chapter 6: Moral Development

In Chapter six and in reading about the moral development, I thought about my own childhood and how this might relate to me. As far as moral development occurs, it is basically an individual skill that is acquired through a natural occurance of growth and maturity. Morals for some people start very young and it is an automatic thing to know what right from wrong is, for others it takes a learning curve and many mistakes to fully comprehend the right and wrong thing to do. For myself, I would have to say that I always had a intuitive gear that told me when something was right or wrong and how to decipher between the two. I also have two sons and since my oldest was very young, it is harder for him to tell the difference and make the right choices. My younger son, on the other hand, has always had an innate ability to understand the difference and how to make the right choice. He is compassionate by nature and exceeds my expectations on what a six year old boy should be able to understand about life and choices.  

The way I could use the information of this chapter in the future for my own career as a teacher would be to not only teach about morals and right and wrong, but also give examples and share stories of when I didn’t make the choice I should have made. I believe that as an adult, we have a lot more influence on a child’s behavior and moral development than we give ourselves credit for. In that, I believe I could teach some good life lessons on simple things that a child might use or even take home. Any positive impact I could make on a child is a good day in my book.



Things I have learned from this chapter would be that all children have a sense or morality and an ability to make the right or wrong choices in everyday life. It is a lot of environment that helps teach them the differences between doing the right thing or the wrong thing and their parents and caregivers play a large role in helping them decide. Adults need to comprehend their role in every childs life that they are apart of and be careful in what decisions they make in front of them. As much as a moral compass is inside of you, if you are learning vicariously their the adults in your life on how to make smart choices, it will definitely play a large role in how you look at situations and decide for yourself what the right thing to do is. Although Piaget was an original theorists on moral development, I would have to say that I agree more with Kohlberg's stages of moral development. His ideas on how we develop a moral compass are something I can really relate to in my own life and watching my son's growth in people with a conscience. 

Chapter 5: Cognitive Development

Chapter 5: Cognitive Development

This section was very interesting, because looking at my won children, you see how differently they grew and developed, but generally and physically stayed on the same patterns. And then as they grew, the spaces between when they learned to crawl, when they chose to walk or run or talk.. These are a cogitative development that is different than just the basic physical development that can be compared to any healthy child. Both my boys were vastly different in personality, and when they chose to do certain things. I feel a lot of this is genetics, having different fathers, and that plays a big role in their cognitive development. Cognitive development is important because it can measure the apptitude of the child's growth and development. When you can understand the aspects of a child's learning capacity, then you can increase their levels of learning and growing as a person.

Using this chapter in my own classroom, I would ask for the records of the child that go back to the primitive development of crawling, walking and talking, and see how that can play a role in the child. I think the more you know, the more you can help, and the more you can be honest with the child on their development, the better the outcome of the child and how they can work on their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Understanding a children's development levels and capacities, you can help them understand themselves and how to create an environment that is geared towards grasping concepts and increasing their knowledge. 

What I learned in this chapter is that every child is different and learns and grows at a different rate than a child of their same age and sex. Children develop at a rate all their own and sometimes a child is far ahead of their peers and others a child has fallen greatly behind. I believe that the environment plays key roles in how a child reacts and learns in school, but their development is all their own and they will grow independently of their peers. Piaget seems to be the foremost in the stages of cognitive development. His four stages lay out a definitive pathway that can be followed by most of the general population. Although everyone does develop at a different pace, the general ideas that Piaget points out are a great guideline to follow for the cognitive worldview. 

Chapter 4: Intelligence

Chapter 4: Intelligence

While I was reading about intelligence research and the testing done on many groups of people through the centuries, I feel like they should be administered to everyone. Growing up as a child, I was never given a test to measure my intelligence or how advanced or behind I was. I feel like if everyone takes an intelligence test, it can show the room for improvement in all areas. It can measure our strengths and weaknesses, show a teacher which areas that need to be improved, and it gives you a sense of self that you can take with you as you go through school and college, knowing where you struggle the most and how you can gain knowledge by knowing how you learn and what needs to be improved.

I think IQ testing and mental age testing are important in the school setting. Low scores do not change who you are as a person, and I think if they were administered and understood better, then it could be an open discussion with your students, and then everyone would be better equipped to know how to help that child learn his own way.  I would put that into effect in my classroom, if I could, and use it as a teaching moment to help kids understand their strengths, and not point out their weaknesses. As a teacher, I believe it is very important to administer tests that can gadge a child's means of learning. How you can help them and what you can do to improve their capacity to acquire skills.



What I learned in this chapter was that intelligence can be measured, but capacity to learn is endless. Your fluid and crystallized knowledge may decline or improve, but the important thing is that you never give up on yourself and you are always striving to learn and grow as a person and gain knowledge in what you do not already know.Binet Simon was the first to develop intelligence testing and that has what has led to out IQ testing today. Although the testing now is much more advanced than it was back when it was developed.

Chapter 3: Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory

Chapter 3: Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory

In reading through Chapter 3 on behaviorism, it is easy to see how certain things that can happen in one person life can cause a classical or operant conditioning. For myself I would have to say that the classical conditioning probably played more into my development than the operant. As a child, I was raised to be punished for the bad things and the good things were not really noticed. It was never that my parents didn't care that I did well, it just was not rewarded. The reward system in my house was self-appreciation. There were no trophies for trying your best or pats on the back, you just had to acknowledge your own success. I never really noticed that this was how I was raised until I was a parent myself. In today's world, the smallest accomplishments are celebrated, and that just is not how I was taught to behave. You have to be proud of yourself, not seek the approval of others.

As an educator, I hope to apply an operant conditioning to my classroom. I want to base hard work on a reward system. Not so high that they feel they will always be rewarded for small things, but enough that they will work towards a goal that reaches a reward they can be proud of. In case my student may not get praise at home, I hope that they will feel appreciated and like a “job well done” in my classroom. In my own classroom, I would definitely show appreciation for hard work and for success, but I don't believe in rewarding for everything. If you do then the scale of what is important and what can be done better with effort, it gets tipped in the wrong direction and the effort put forth into success is diminished. 

 
What I learned in this chapter is that everything you do with a child effects not only their self esteem in their work and behavior, but also the effort put forth into their achievements. If a child is rewarded for every small thing they do, they the expectation for success is lowered and the effort put forth is going to decline. You should reward a child in stages, let them know they are doing well, but do not over reward a child. Children need structure and discipline and they also need to be pushed to keep trying harder. Building relationships are important to the social and behavioral aspects of growing and learning how to become a person and these relationships start with the family.

Chapter 2: Physical Development

Chapter 2: Physical Development 

During this chapter and reading of all the physical attributes that happen from conception until death, it amazes me what all our bodies have to go through. Looking at heredity, I can see where I get my looks from and the build of my body. Many of my taste buds and interests in sights and smells come from my parents, except I love sushi and red wine, and neither of my parents drink or tolerate sushi.. Some of this does have to do the environment I grew up in, but also they are traits I inherited from my parents. My skeletal frame is very similar to my paternal grandmother. My eyes are my own. I also have 3 sisters, and although we share similar facial feature, the dominant and recessive genes are very different. One of my sisters has blue eyes, one has blue/green/hazel, and one has dark chocolate, whereas I have chestnut brown. Heredity and Environment play separate but mostly equal roles in who we are and what we become.

As a teacher and a parent, I also can see how heredity can affect the child. I have seen that low IQ can be passed down between two parents with similarly low IQs. I have seen how alcoholism can also be hereditary. But I have also seen how a child can surpass their parents goals and successes simply being blessed with talents and an inherent ability to understand academics with amazing tenaciousness. My own son was diagnosed with mood disorders, things that came possibly from grandparents or some recessive traits that neither I or his father suffered from. Both of my sons have a talent in drawing and creativeness, something that has been passed from my father to me, and then from myself to my sons. Physical development and heredity play a role, but as a teacher I would never judge a child by who their parents are. It is about figuring out your students and learning their strengths and weaknesses, and how to make them succeed for who they are.

What I learned from this chapter is that the physical development of a child happens differently for each child. There is a course you can guide yourself with, but mostly the physiology is what begins the changes within the child and how hormones affect the growth and maturation. Physical Development is important because when you do not have the emotional answers to why a child is acting differently, you can look at the physical aspect and gain answers that way as well.