Gender Discussions

Amber:  I have completed the second day of the Global Leadership Academy and I have already learned a tremendous amount of things.  Today we began with a workshop to help us figure out what project we want to carry out in order to better serve our community.  It was interesting hearing about everyone's different conflicts in their towns and how they compared to mine.  I learned here in the east cost many students are extremely competitive when it comes to academies and they do anything to bring up their class rank.  Unfortunately, this results in extreme stress and even suicide. Apart from this workshop we learned about the differences between gender and sex.  While it may seem easy to define, our workshop leader  went more in depth. She told us to write down the characteristics of boys and girls and determine whether they are both with it or learned.  There was many disagreements and conversations, but we ended up with the conclusion that sex is the physical characteristics that you are born with but gender is the characteristics that society implements on each sex.  For example, nurturing is a trait that society encourages females to possess.  Being here, I am making myself vulnerable to learning and continuously asking myself what is it that I can do to make this world sustainable.  My roommate and I have gotten pretty close and she's from Bosnia, which is awesome!

Jace:  The day was really long, but it was good.  I got up and did a workout with the guys (there are 7 guys and 19 girls at the camp) and then after breakfast we went to a session on gender equality.  We went to lunch and had a break and then a session on gender identity.   The topic was good, but the lady...well, she didn't present it very well.  We broke into our home groups, which was really good, and then went to dinner.  Our activity after dinner was learning a South African dance.  It was pretty hard but it was fun and I was pretty good at one part of it.  Tomorrow we are going on our DC tour and I voted to go to the Air and Space Museum.

Angelina:  We had a woman come in and talk about gender equality, and the overall message and ending of her presentation was amazing!  But the beginning was boring, and when we brought up a different point of view she dismissed it.  I think for my year long community project I am going to be adding a club or presentations about modern racism.  Because in our school and community we don't respect each other as much as we should.  And people often say small racist things (such as "wow, you're dumb for a white person" or "omg, you're smart for a black person") and don't realize that it's racist.  So I think we need some kind of program to teach people about it.  My roommate is cool, but we haven't really connected yet.

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