Seraphie's Room: Back On the Grind

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I came back from fall break yesterday (Monday) and immediately was reentered into the flurry of LC life! I had many things on my schedule today including two outside of class lecture events: Literary Agency (all about the publishing world) and A Civil Conversation: Oregon's School-to-Prison Pipeline. Both were extremely informative and thought provoking. As an English Major, I am now highly considering a career in publishing and want to look for an internship this summer to learn more about it.

#englishmajorforlife
 Since I was just discussing my English Major,  in my English 300 class, we have started Ulysses by James Joyce (we will be reading this for 5 weeks and it feels like an initiation into a frat), one of the numerous short stories I've read for Short Story 200, but my favorite thus far, Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin and in Gender in Relationships 300, The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do men and women really speak different languages? Outside of class, I am just starting Fight Club and a new Scifi book that I can't recall the title of at the moment.


ACLU Event, 2013
The second event I attended today was The School-to-Prison Pipeline event was a panel held at the Waypost Coffeehouse & Tavern in NE Portland about 15 minutes driving from campus. The panelists had some extremely good things to say and I hope that the Ray Warren Symposium, I am helping to put together, will be as educational and activist minded as this panel. An overarching theme all three panelists discussed was the clear racial inequities in disciplinary processes within k-12 schools. These disproportionate numbers expose the result that when students who get suspended are many times more likely to drop out of school and or get into trouble with the law. So when students of color (especially high among black kids) are disciplined on average so many times higher than white kids that is a problem--a pipeline so to speak. If you are interested in more here is a really cool article about the local Portland Public School system. 




My favorite quote  from tonight's lecture, "A rising tide lifts all boats."


Stay tuned,

Seraphie