First Assignment

Dear students,

I hope you are getting along well in your internships. Please check out your community forum page. There you can read about former CUNY Fatherhood Academy college prep members' experiences as interns and as current students at LaGuardia.

This entry will be your first assignment. A colleague of mine teaches ENGL 102, which is a first year composition course. When you pass the CUNY entrance writing exam (CUNY Writing Assessment Test, or CATW), you will have to take this course. My colleague has agreed to let us look at some of the work that she does in this first year seminar. Right now her students are reading an article entitled "Paper Tigers" by Wesley Yang. This article is part of her unit on cultural stereotypes. She and her class have been talking about the following issues after reading this article:

• How "marginalized" people often "internalize" the stereotypes being spread by the mainstream culture
• How cultural misunderstandings lead to stereotypes
• How people learn to cope with these stereotypes, either by rejecting their "home" culture and assimilating or resisting (where is the spectrum of potential responses to cultural stereotyping?)

The article focuses on how cultural stereotypes affect the lives of some specific people that the author interviews, which can also reflect the ways other groups of folks also deal with the social and cultural pressures from mainstream society. Another article that you might want to check out is "Black Men and Public Space" by Brent Staples, and this video: "Barack and Curtis." When we meet next, please bring in a summary of "Paper Tigers" as well as at least one full paged essay comparing and contrasting "Paper Tigers" with the other article (Brent Staples article), and the video.

Daryl