Winters-Reading+Response

Stephanie Winters
===="My Freshmen Year" was an interesting look at how a former professor adapted her previous lifestyle to study the life of the kids attending the college where she worked. I enjoyed reading about how she enrolled herself as a student and kept her former ways of life a secret. This is a very difficult task especially for a woman who worked at the school in which she would be attending. Rebekah Nathan did a good job in preparing for the journey she was about to embark on. She knew that people would have questions and that she would have some explaining to do. She understood that she was in her 50's and would be living among people who were in their early 20's. Nathan thought of all the different question she would be asked and thought of ways around telling them what she was actually doing. Exposing her identity would ruin the experiment she was performing. She was trying to get an insight view on the campus she worked for and wanted to understand the way the students thought. In order to do this is had to become a student and fully commit to student life. This meant attending Welcome Weekend and regular hall meetings. Nathan also took it a step farther and would actively participate in different activities. She devoted herself to being a true student and often played ping pong and touch football with the other students. I like how she did all that she could to make it seem as if she was a freshmen in college. The ways that she describes the different people she encounter is very interesting. Nathan gives you a look at how to interpret people ==== ====The book //Ethnography// talks about culture and the symbols involved with it. This book was confusing in the beginning but got easier as you went. I learned about ethnography first semester when I had Anthropology. This made this book easier to follow and understand. It talked about how symbols are there to represent different things but these symbols may mean different things in different contexts and places. It talks about culture and how it must not only be looked at like a set group of people. Culture is made up of many different things and is always changing. You can also look at different aspects of culture to get a better idea of how different people live. I lived how this book related culture to juggling. It gives the reader an everyday task to compare it to. It helps show how something abstract can be looked at like a concrete idea. It helped ease some of the confusion in the book. ====